I am a scholar of philosophy of science, so let me begin with a few examples related to science:
First question: Can we experience “force,” or how do we experience it?
The concept of “force” is used extremely widely: we speak of gravity, pressure, magnetic force, tensile force, and so on. But how do we experience or come to know the existence of “force”? In fact, we do not directly feel “force.” When we touch or weigh something with our hands, we may say that we feel pressure or gravity, but in fact all that happens is that our sense of touch is stimulated in certain ways. And at other times, without using touch at all, we may, for example, see two magnets attracting each other, or see a spring stretch and deform, and we also say this is magnetic force, tensile force, and so on. Finally, the connections between planet and planet, atom and atom, and virtually the mutual connections among everything in the material world, we all call “force.” We can see that in ancient times this concept may not have existed at all, or at most it may have meant something like “pressure” or “oppression.”
But in the modern period this concept expanded rapidly, and eventually became something that was almost all-encompassing, existing in almost every kind of experience. We use this single concept of “force” to gather together all sorts of disparate phenomena obtained through different senses. But the question is: what exactly is this all-pervasive “force”? Is it a thing? (If they are different things, why are they all called force?) Does it exist? In what sense is it real? If we probe this deeply, we will find that the question is far less easy to answer than one might imagine. “Force” is an extremely mysterious concept; it is everywhere, and one could even say that the entire world is constituted by it, but what on earth it is, no one can explain. Newton could not explain it either. Newton’s famous remark, “I frame no hypotheses,” was made in discussions related to the nature of force, and in the end Newton still had to appeal to God; Newton’s world still needed God to maintain it from time to time. And later, the mystery of force seems to have been gradually forgotten. People use this concept and feel that it is perfectly natural, nothing strange about it.
What happened? In my view, in a certain sense, “force” replaced the position of “God” — supreme, absolute, eternal, governing all, encompassing all, driving all, omnipresent, beyond question… The modern world changed from God’s creation into a mechanical world. What we often call the mechanistic view of nature is in fact just another way of rendering the mechanical view of nature. But in fact we have never made clear the essence of “force.” The mysteriousness of “force” is no less than that of God; regarding God, we can still say that He is omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good, infinite, eternal, and so on, but regarding “force” we can explain almost nothing at all! (At most, dictionaries can only give definitions suitable for macroscopic objects.)
Second question: We say that the modern world is, on the one hand, a mechanical world and, on the other hand, a materialist world: force is everywhere, and everything is matter. So what exactly is “matter”? How do we experience matter? Does matter truly exist?
This question seems even more absurd than the first — if matter itself does not really exist, then what does? But what exactly is matter? The dictionary defines it as: “anything that has mass and can be perceived and measured; all matter is composed of atoms, and atoms are composed of elementary particles.”[1] There are actually all sorts of problems with this definition. First, the modern definition of matter is in fact completely different from the ancient one, or rather, exactly the opposite! What did Aristotle say? “By matter I mean that which in itself is neither a this nor a quantity nor any of the other things by which being is determined.”[2] It is precisely the complete opposite: modern people say matter has mass; Aristotle says it has neither quantity nor quality; modern people say it can be perceived and measured; Aristotle says it has no properties whatsoever. It is perfectly normal to say that the meaning of a concept changes and develops over the course of historical development, but for it to turn out as a complete reversal is rather rare, isn’t it? How this concept developed is really worth examining; I wrote a short essay on this before, so I will not say much here.
Saying that all matter is composed of atoms, and atoms are composed of elementary particles, of course introduces confusion again, because elementary particles are obviously not composed of atoms—so does that mean they are not matter? Of course, I need not nitpick here. The question I want to raise is: what are atoms (or molecules, or electrons, for that matter)? Do we have experience of atoms? Do atoms truly exist?
Clearly, we cannot directly perceive atoms through our ordinary senses. If we ask a physicist to demonstrate the existence of atoms to us, he may take us into a laboratory, turn on some complicated and precise instrument (perhaps a “Wilson cloud chamber” or a “Geiger counter” or something of the sort), and then perform some profound and hard-to-comprehend operations — very much like a magician’s mysterious ritual — and then, for example, we see a blurry track appear on a display, or we hear the ticking sound of a Geiger counter. The physicist then tells us: there, that is an electron! And then, because of our immense trust in the priest — oh no, the physicist — who is wearing a white coat and looks sacred and solemn, and our deep awe of the priest’s — oh no, of the scientific experiment’s — profound and wondrous ritual, we say: oh, how marvelous, I have seen an electron!
But from beginning to end, all we have done is see a mysterious track, or merely hear a click. When, exactly, did we see the electron? The reason we think we have seen the electron is, to a large extent, the authority of the “priest” and the mystery of the “ritual.” And the reason scientists “can see” electrons is that they have learned a theory, a theory that claims to reveal the mysteries of the world. But to people who have not deeply studied and mastered this “science of mysteries,” and who at the same time have no trust whatsoever in the sanctity of the “priest” and the “ritual,” the tracks in the cloud chamber or the clicking of the Geiger counter have no meaning at all, much less can they serve as a demonstration of the so-called “electron.”
In fact, within the mechanistic worldview, we cannot ask after the “essence” of force or matter, because force and matter are precisely the “essence” of everything; nor can we demand a genuine and clear demonstration of force or matter, because all phenomena are demonstrations of force and matter. Such a position originally belonged to God.
Third question: When we experience a “rainbow,” is the rainbow really real? Or is it merely an illusion?
We feel that a rainbow seems real because when a rainbow appears, everyone present can see it. But what is a rainbow, really? In fact, a rainbow is nothing more than sunlight that has been refracted and reflected. What is even more serious is this: at the same time and in the same place, is the rainbow seen by different people the same one? In fact, the “location” of the rainbow seen by each person is different, because a rainbow is caused only by the refraction and reflection of light; the viewing angle of the rainbow seen by the human eye must be around 40 degrees (for violet light) to 42 degrees (for red light). That is to say, the viewing angle is the same when one watches a rainbow from different positions, and the rainbow seen by each person must face that person in an arc shape; it is by no means possible to say that one sees an elliptical rainbow slightly off to the side. In other words, the “same” rainbow seen by each person is in a different place!
The religious pluralist John Hick has a book called The Rainbow of Faiths. I do not know whether he ever thought of this point. In my case, the rainbow is actually an excellent metaphor for religious pluralism — each person sees a rainbow that is unique and belongs only to him or her. But do they see something in common? — The sun! In fact, the great sun is the ultimate entity and the truly real being behind all these rainbow experiences. Yet because of the sun’s greatness, no one can look at it directly with the naked eye; only through the light it scatters upon the earth, and through such magnificent rainbows, do we “experience” it. Through imagination, thought, and the organization and connection of various experiences, we gradually come to feel the presence of this absolutely real, supreme existence, the true reality behind many superficially diverse, and even for each person unique, experiences.
I think the several metaphors above are already enough to provide a defense of religious experience. After all, I am not a believer, so I will not make any more straightforward arguments.
2:17 a.m., April 27, 2007
[1] Anna-Louise Norton, Hutchinson Dictionary of Thought, trans. Fu Zhiqiang, Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 2006, p. 305
[2] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1029a20: the translation here follows that in The Idea of Nature.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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