I had a dream recently in which I was sitting at a patio table with a group of undergraduate physics students. They were discussing some astronomical phenomenon or other, and growing increasingly excited, when at the height of their frenzy, I leaned over toward my best friend, who happened to be there beside me, and whispered in his ear, “You know, I don’t really believe in outer space.” Unfortunately, I whispered a little too loud, and the conversation happened to hit a lull right as I spoke, such that all present overheard my confession. The mood immediately soured, and all eyes turned on me in anger. I saw no choice but to run, but the situation being what it was, my feet became stuck in the grass as soon as I attempted my escape, and the spectre of these enthusiastic science-bros converging on me proved such a fright that I woke up in a panic.
A Freudian analysis of this dream may centre around authority, and my hatred and fear toward it. But such an analysis is somewhat boring, so we will discard it for the time being.
Instead, I am reminded of Giordano Bruno’s philosophical dialogue, Ash Wednesday Supper. In the dialogue, a man named Theophilus narrates a debate held between the Nolan himself (Bruno) and a pair of English gentlemen, with occasional interruptions from a pedant named Prudentius, among others. The debate (which actually happened, more or less as the dialogue presents it) was about Copernicus and his new conception of the solar system, in which the Earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. Bruno appreciates Copernicus’ contributions to astronomy, but wishes to push his ideas even further. It is not enough to say that the Earth revolves around the sun; Bruno wants further to prove that there are many other Earth-like planets in the universe circling many other suns — in fact, that there are an infinite amount of these, occupying an infinite space. His proofs are not discovered via observation and experiment; no, Bruno reaches his conclusions in a philosophical way, using only his God-given powers of logic and deduction. He is so confident of the Truth of what he says, that he is willing to debate anyone, anywhere, at any time, and in any mode, whether mechanical, logical, or theological.
It is somewhat baffling to the modern reader that Bruno turned out to be right on almost all fronts, and this despite the fact that many of his proofs are in fact incorrect. Remember that this man precedes even Galileo. Even Copernicus, revolutionary as he was, was relatively conservative when it came to confessing the consequences of his ideas. Bruno has no such scruples, and is willing to face all manner of scrutiny and humiliation from his opponents, armed with the knowledge that they, in their ignorance, are more to be pitied than feared. His opponents confront him with theological dogma, common-sense astronomy, and when all else fails, laughter and public shaming. This latter is only further proof to him of their debasedness, and their utter lack of respect or care for the Truth. They are, in Plato’s sense of the term, sophists through and through, and one can see clearly why Bruno chooses to emulate Plato’s dialogue form when he presents himself as the Renaissance’s own Socrates.
The similarities are, in fact, striking, the only difference being that Bruno is playing the role of both Socrates and Plato at the same time. This somewhat restricts the amount of playful irony he is capable of employing, but at the same time it makes his books all the more prescient. Plato knew what was going to happen to Socrates, it having already happened, and he uses this knowledge to great effect. Bruno, unless divinely inspired, could have had no definite knowledge of the fact that he would one day be burned at the stake (although one could argue he would have had an inkling of it, if he had any capacity of “reading the room” of Medieval Europe, which he certainly did), and yet to a modern-day reader his fate seems just as inevitable as Socrates’.
The question of whether outer space is real feels particularly relevant in our modern times, when the Flat Earth hypothesis reaches the apogee of its popularity as an object of ridicule, and the ongoing question of conspiracy theories and disinformation dominates the political sphere. The image of the conspiracy theorist as delusional and ignorant is well-suited for these purposes, as it keenly distracts from the question that they do, in fact, raise — that being, “Where do we find the grounds for our knowledge?” By which I mean, why do we believe what we are told by other people? How do we decide whom to trust? There is much in this world that we must take purely on trust, for no one is capable of individually validating all the facts presented to them. This is complicated by the fact that everyone lies, and everyone knows for a fact that everyone else lies. And those most likely to lie are those who gain the most by lying, and this category also happens to overlap with politicians, government officials, experts and “authorities” of all sorts. It is considered anti-social to ignore politics for the stated reason of “politicians are a bunch of liars and crooks,” and yet it is also considered naïve to ignore the fact that most politicians are liars and crooks.
(It seems that the Freudian interpretation of my dream is rearing its ugly head.)
So it becomes a game of figuring out not only whom to trust, but when exactly to trust them. Like Plato in his Republic, we hold it to be self-evident that those who govern must occasionally rely on the “noble lie” — for the public’s own good, of course. That’s just good statecraft. The problem is that the lie is only “noble” if you believe in the cause; if you don’t, it’s manipulation. This is why fact-checkers are not politically neutral, and neither are they particularly effective, unless you are already predisposed to agree with the world-view held by whichever organization these fact-checkers belong to.
This game of trust is complex, confusing, and at a certain point, exhausting. It does not seem worth the effort to figure out who to believe in when you can just do the research yourself. The question is what does this mean: “Doing the research yourself?” Research does not often entail going out into the world and discovering all the facts. If one wishes to learn about China, for example, one does not travel to China and try to personally observe all that goes on, because it’s a very big country, and there’s a whole lot going on, and all of it is happening at the same time. Instead, you pick up a book about China, or preferably several, read them, and then check the bibliography in the back to figure out how they know what they purport to know. If the bibliography is well-stocked, you may end your search there, a comprehensive bibliography being its own form of credentials.
But then we are back to where we started, because now we are believing the person who wrote the book, and he bases his beliefs on what he read in other books, which in turn learned what they read from some other book, or, if we wish to end this tortured chain, from a primary source, which was perhaps either there or at least nearby when whatever fact they are reporting was confirmed to be true. It’s really an impossible situation, when you get down to it. We are left in the vast predicament of not knowing anything for sure that we can not see with our very own eyes, which is the position of only the most wretched and ignorant. And can we even trust our eyes, knowing what we do about Kant and the way we interpret the phenomenal world?
We can see now why Plato has absolutely no time for this base, material, ever-changing world. How can we possibly learn anything about it that is not simply hear-say or opinion? Much better to turn our attention to mathematics, where the hypotenuse of a right triangle is always the square root of the sum of the squares of its other two sides, and better yet, you can draw any right triangle, of any size you like, and prove this yourself. This is shown during Menos, when Socrates prompts an uneducated slave to do so, not by giving him a lesson, but by simply asking the right questions.
This is exactly why Socrates is so damn annoying. He is so spoiled by the indisputable truth of mathematical proofs that he will accept nothing less. Thus, no matter what you try to tell him, he can poke a hole in your reasoning, just by asking the right question. He has that perfect knack for always knowing the exact question that will collapse whatever house of cards his interlocutor has so meticulously built. And the worst part is that almost none of his questions have any satisfactory answer, and for that reason stick in your mind like an unwanted guest that can never be evicted. This essay itself is proof that, like many others, my mind has been irretrievably destroyed by Plato, and all I am capable of doing at this point is passing this mind-virus of indomitable skepticism on to others.
We return to the question of whether outer space is real. With all our telescopes, satellites, and probes, we have come to a point where we feel we can prove, scientifically (i.e. inductively), the whimsical fantasies of the sixteenth-century renegade friar, Giordano Bruno. The idea that space is infinite is now, instead of the exclusive property of heretics and the mentally ill, the accepted belief of the general population. The detailed consequences of this belief are generally not investigated with any serious care; the normal-person reaction is to say, “Wow, isn’t the universe crazy?” and move on with one’s day. Bruno was not content to do so, and thus the conclusions he drew from such a belief are just as strange and unsettling today as they were five centuries ago (although the modern way of dealing with such people is no longer to burn them at the stake, but instead to allow them their own little blog or Twitter feed and let them well enough alone.) If one stops and thinks, seriously, about the idea that the universe is supposedly expanding into empty infinite space, one easily comes across unanswerable questions: What exactly is it expanding into? How big can it get? Is it ever going to stop? Also, how can we possibly accurately measure the size of anything, since we can no longer presuppose absolute space? By which I mean that if the size of the universe is in flux, then the size of everything within it is also in flux, relative to the size of the universe. And not only that, does this mean that there is no longer such thing as a fixed point in space? Because such a conception only makes sense when placed on a static three-dimensional grid. This is not only strange but also a little frightening, so strange and so frightening in fact that it’s difficult for me to even explore it much further.
You could perhaps argue that what I just presented reveals a profound ignorance of the nature of astronomy, and you’d probably be right, but in its place I’m sure one could find many other troubling repercussions of today’s astronomy. The field has become just as esoteric and involved as the cosmological and alchemical systems of Bruno’s day, inspired as they were by ancient philosophies and poetical fancies. Confront anyone on the street with anti-matter and dark energy and you will find the same begrudging acceptance the Renaissance layman had for Christian angelology. The “if you say so” attitude is the same; we have simply exchanged ordained priests for credentialed scientists. The priests of that time were as rigorous in their research and contemplation as the scientists of today, if not more so, and the most meaningful doctrines of the day were carefully co-opted from heretics in the same way that scientific breakthroughs today are often the results of scientific outsiders such as Albert Einstein. (It is a joke among scientists that most of Einstein’s papers would never have passed a modern peer review.)
We are expected to take these bizarre unintuitive concepts on faith. We are expected to “believe in science,” as if it is only the rational thing to do. I do not doubt that astronomers have worked hard for many hours developing their proofs and making their observations. I do not doubt that they vet their findings through a rigorous system of criticism and validation. And yet, I understand that one can do all these things and still later be proved indisputably incorrect. The history of science is filled with such examples. What was categorically and scientifically true a few centuries ago, as regards anatomy, biology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, is now considered false, and anyone presenting such findings would be accused of “pseudo-science.” Early in Ash Wednesday Supper, Prudentius the pedant states a belief in the old cosmological system on the basis of it being the belief of the Ancients. Theophilus responds by saying, “Let me remind you, Master Prudentius, that if an opinion which has become commonplace, such as yours, is true because it is old, then it must have been false when it was new.” The same argument can be reversed, and the idea that scientific theories must be true because they are new can be refuted by saying that therefore they must become false when they become old. (Of course, no scientist is actually arguing that these ideas are only true because they are new, but such a belief is often implicit in the arguments of laymen. (The fact that we refer to non-scientists as “laymen” itself justifies the prior ecclesiastical comparison.)) Plato would argue that if something is true — that is, apodictically and metaphysically true — then it must be eternally true, and not just true in a certain time and a certain place.
Of course, no one really believes that nowadays. We are postmodernists now, and with that label comes the belief that all truth is contingent. We each get our own truths, and what is true today can no longer be true tomorrow. This makes the rise of fact-checkers feel somewhat anachronistic — you’re trying to sell Truth, in this economy? The difference between the skepticism presented in this essay and the realm of “alternative truth” can be difficult to perceive. It may seem that skepticism inevitably leads to nihilistic and Machiavellian power games as in the philosophies of Nietzsche and Foucault, but this is not the case. Skepticism is not about tearing down the idea of truth; in fact, it is primarily concerned with finding the essential, absolute, and eternal truth. Anything that is not absolute and eternal is swept aside as the shoddily-built shack that it is, in an attempt to discover the actual foundations of truth that lay underneath. Skepticism is simply the first step; all the greatest skeptic philosophers follow up their tearing down with a subsequent building up based on whatever first principles they have hit upon. Plato constructs his realm of the Forms/Ideas; Descartes his cogito ergo sum; Kant his categories and moral law; Schopenhauer his mystical Universal Will; Nietzsche the Will to Power. Whether or not they turn out to be correct in their delineation of what is the Truth, it is clear enough that they actually believe in these Truths, and are not explicitly or consciously using them simply to further their own agendas, even if later psychologists may be able to argue that these Truths serve their own interests regardless.
I would like to stress this difference — because it makes all the difference — between philosophical skepticism and the postmodern laissez-faire attitude toward truth, even if it may seem belaboured and unintuitive. It is the difference between a scam artist and an honest but unskilled businessman. It is the difference between a sophist and a Socrates. I am presenting this phenomenon in its modern context, which may make it seem new, but really it is quite ancient. One can find it in Thucydides’ Melian dialogue, circa 460 BC, in which the Athenians argue that justice is not an ideal truth, but simply the prerogative of the strong: “Might makes right.” This is today called “political realism,” and while we all consider Machiavelli a scoundrel, this is no less than what he describes. The same principle is the principle behind much of today’s obsession with fact-checking, and it affects both “sides.” The idea that these fact-checkers, in their positions of authority, are arbiters of truth, is based on that very authority. The snake eats its own tail; the grounds are “Because I said so,” and the answer to why you said so is “Because I said so.”
And yet I must contradict myself yet again and say, yes, we are all ourselves arbiters of truth, and the only authority we can truly believe are the metaphysical principles we decide feel right. There are really no grounds further than that, and once you realize this it becomes clear why all but the most modern of philosophers inevitably end up talking about God. I used to think of this as intellectual laziness, but it is hard to believe that anyone capable of all the work and rigour that it takes to construct a metaphysical system could possibly be lazy. The reason they all bring God into it is that there is really no other choice; without an idea of God — whether as a Christian deity, a Supreme Being, a First Mover, or a Meticulous Clock-setter — it’s very difficult to come up with a proper grounding for anything at all. Whether this will always be the case or is a defect of temporary misunderstandings is a matter of debate, but if we choose to predict the future based on past experience — such is the scientific method, after all — then we will incline toward the former.
Some atheists may categorize this as replacing “Because I say so” with “Because God says so,” but this is not the case at all. These philosophers are not putting words in God’s mouth, nor are they espousing theological dogma. They are earnestly searching for first principles, and finding themselves returning ever and ever to this idea. The recurrence of this phenomena may not in itself be adequate proof for such a being’s existence, but it certainly makes you think.
Whether God is real and whether outer space is real are both questions not about material fact, but about worldview. They are both metaphysical questions, and the answers one comes to are matters of faith as much as reason. Reason is what leads to someone like me running in circles in essays such as this; faith is, in comparison, a much more rational and practical means of going about things; by which I mean that faith is what allows you to say “Wow, that’s weird” and move along with your day, while I spend an entire afternoon typing myself into a frenzy each time I happen to overhear the word “anti-matter.” But even I have faith in certain ideas, although I will rarely if ever tell you what they are, for someone explaining what they believe is inherently less stimulating than that same person contemplating that which they are utterly unsure about. I honestly can’t tell you whether the disbelief I expressed in my dream is honest or not; I can only ask you to ponder what evidence you consider adequate to answer these questions, and any others, definitively.