On light and morality
Aug 18th, 2008 | By Ian Bushfield | Category: FeatureThe argument comes up far too often.
Morality requires an absolute reference point. Without God there can be no morals.
But it occured to me today that this parrots an argument made just over a hundred years ago in physics:
Light is a wave and therefore requires a medium to propagate. Without the aether in interstellar space, there can be no light.
A bit of a background:
Light was postulated by Issac Newton to be particles that flew like tennis balls through the air. This dominated until the single and double slit experiment showed the existence of diffraction, which could only be explained by a wave theory. So after James Clerk Maxwell postulated his famous equations, the world decided upon a wave theory of light.
However, waves require something to move in. Just like waves in the ocean require water, waves of light should require something (be it air or glass) to move in. But there wasn’t anything in space (as far as people could tell). So how did the light from the sun get to Earth?
This led physicists to postulate an everpresent aether which filled the entire void of space. This aether would allow the waves to get from the sun to Earth.
However, this aether should cause the speed of light to be different between a beam propagating with the Earth’s rotation versus a beam propagating perpendicular to the rotation. This should happen because as the Earth goes around the sun it will “drag” some aether with it, this dragged aether will slow light down that’s going into it, but speed it up if it’s going with it (imagine light getting a tail or head wind), but going North-South the light shouldn’t really experience any net difference. So when they performed very precise experiments to detect the aether, they found nothing!
The solution didn’t come until 1905 when Einstein was studying the photoelectric effect - basically a current is created when a light of a minimum energy is incident on a material. Einstein postulated that light existed in photons (discrete particles), which solved the aether crisis and won him the Nobel prize (this was more practical than Special Relativity, which he also discovered in the same year, as well as the cause of Brownian Motion).
So what does this have to do with theological arguments about morality?
Basically, my analogy is that people couldn’t understand how light could propagate the void of space without an aether, in much the same way that people can’t understand how morality can exist independant of an absolute objective standard.
It took arguable one of the most brilliant people of the past century to solve the issue of light in space, negating the need for an aether, however, it is arguablly more accessible to understand how morality can arise naturally.
For more on naturalistic ethics, see some of my older posts:
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Two things:
And I’m not trying to be pedantic…. but you have to be really careful when using phrases like ‘absolute objective’ standard, especially when you are using a science analogy in an argument about ethics/morality.
Generally speaking, philosophers use those words differently than scientists. When science talks about absolute zero, it refers to the limit of cold, or the precise point where there is no heat. Philosophers use ‘absolute’ in a completely different way. They generally mean, something like ‘transcendent’, ideal or in the case of a god being all powerful… infinite or eternal.
Objectivity is also defined differently. Scientists generally refer to things that are measured (or measurable) by a given standard, repeatable…etc… as objective. Philosophers tend to define objective as ’separate from the mind’, as in dualism. Kant even went so far as to imply that objects are by their nature unknowable. Whether one agrees or not doesn’t really matter, but this is why Scientists and Philosophers tend to bicker so much. So your analogy may confuse more than enlighten.
Also, this sounds similar to Kuhn’s paradigm shift idea… which opens up another can of worms, with regards to the nature of objectivity in a strictly scientific sense. People around here probably understand what you mean, but you just walked into a veritable minefield.
Of course, maybe thats what you intended.
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Ian Bushfield Reply:
August 24th, 2008 at 12:08 am
I think what I was intending for was that we should push the devoutly religious to think of ethics in a new direction. That is, consider the possibility of ethics existing outside of a theistic framework. I suppose it is somewhat in the framework of paradigm shifts.
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Btw, the photon-hypothesis did not solve the aether problem, it was special relativity. The solution is that Maxwell’s equations already are “Lorentz-invariant” which basically means that they are true in every inertial system. Now special relativity talks about time dilatation and space contraction, and these contractions exactly cancel the shifts Moore and Michelson predicted for their interference experiment.
Cheers.
[Reply]
Ian Bushfield Reply:
August 24th, 2008 at 12:06 am
Good point, but the aether wind would have had an added effect (I believe, I haven’t done any math here) beyond what the (rotational) acceleration of the Earth did (which is what SR solved).
All cool things to think about for sure though.
[Reply]
The argument comes up far too often.
Morality requires an absolute reference point. Without God there can be no morals.
Well, it gets called an argument, but it isn’t actually anything more than a pair of assertions.
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