Is White A Color? Goethe vs. Newton.
Presented by Robert Collins, PhD, President of the Psychological Services Center, University of Michigan ,Kent State, University of Indiana
About the Speaker
Dr. Collins has degrees from the University of Michigan (B.A.-Psychology), Kent State University (M.A.-Psychology), and Indiana University (Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, an American Psychological Association Approved Program). He was on the faculty of Grand Valley State University from 1969-1981 and in this time period was invited to the University of Western Australia in a suburb of Perth, Australia for one academic year as a Distinguished Visiting Professor. He toured Australia in 1976 giving a variety of talks, including one given to the medical staff at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Collins retired as President of the Psychological Services Center, LC on April 30, 2002 with offices in Grand Haven, Muskegon, and Holland, MI on “The Lakeshore” (Lake Michigan) of Western Michigan. He is operating Soiling Solutions from his home.
About the Event
Announcements
The following is a refresher for FAOWM contact information: (616) 892-9300; P.O. Box 9873, Wyoming, MI 49509-0873; ; http://www.cfimichigan.org.
Our 2nd Quarter Financial report showed a healthy increase since the previous one, with the successful Dan Barker presentation that we sponsored taking the largest bite out of our budget. We have plans in the works to bring other widely- known speakers to Grand Rapids but will need to keep the donations in pace with these plans.
To highlight three of the upcoming speakers; we have on August 22nd, Michael Fossel, M.D. and PhD in neurobiology from Stanford U. coming to speak to our group on the concepts in his book “Reversing Human Aging.” Jeff S. had had a chance to meet with him at his home and found him very interesting and engaging.
Please plan on attending our next major presenter meeting on October 10, 7PM with author Robert Pennock speaking on the themes in his highly acclaimed book “The Tower of Babel, The Evidence Against the New Creationism.” Pennock’s book is masterful in thoroughly countering all the various versions of the creationist agenda. He also takes the unique approach of using, by way of analogy, the biblical origin of the diversity of languages (the Tower of Babel myth) to compare and contrast this less-emotionally charged story with that of the transmutation of biological organisms -in particular the controversial evolution of humankind. Finally, he more exhaustively than most authors in the evolution-creationism debate, illuminates fully the wide, diverse and mutually exclusive variety of beliefs within the creationist camp. This talk will be especially important in its timing due to the public interest in so-called Intelligent Design Theory.
On November 28 Rabbi David Krishef, of temple Ahavas Israel will speak to us on the Jewish perspective. Rabbi Krishef was the one who contacted our group to see if we would be interested in attending the G.R.A.C.E. Thanksgiving event. This is to feature the ways and manners of various diverse groups from Wiccans to different Christian, Jewish and even non-theists in giving thanks. Krishef’s presentation should be a unique opportunity for many of us who have come out of the Christian tradition to hear from a thoughtful and intelligent theist representing Judaism.
We had, as of this time tentatively agreed to accept the invitation to the aforementioned G.R.A.C.E. gathering. While there was concern that our participation along with many faith-groups might be a bit confusing or depict us as “just another religion” and so on, it also seemed that this would be good exposure for us and our message of the non-theistic viewpoint. Don H. brought a copy of Dan Barker’s “Friendly Neighborhood Atheist” compact disc to share. Barker, of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, commented that his appearance in Grand Rapids via FAOWM, where he gave his presentation “Losing Faith in Faith,” was the most successful one to date. He was interviewed on Fox 17 News, GRTV filmed his presentation (copies of the tape will be available), WOOD Radio interviewed him and there was a good write up in the G.R. Press on him. The Great Lakes Humanists Society also hosted he and his family in Mount Pleasant where he also did his presentation.
One last D. Barker tie-in that was mentioned at this meeting: He is writing a book on preachers who had left the faith and there is interest in including late FAOWM member Howard Foster in this. We were asked if there were any pertinent papers or tapes that could be offered to supplement what Foster’s surviving son had to contribute to this. Howard was an erstwhile Fundamentalist preacher who became a freethinker and lover of philosophy and good books, some of which are available to lend out to our membership.
Presentation
Our topic for this meeting was “Is White A Color? Goethe vs. Newton.” Group member, Robert Collins, PhD, was our presenter for this discussion on ways of knowing. Dr. Collins compared and contrasted the two men- the great German phenomenalist, author and playwright Herr Johann Goethe and the great English realist-scientist Sir Isaac Newton. Collins talked about how we are a society that enjoys conflict and collisions of views, so he set up his presentation as a debate between these two thinkers.
A pivotal area of dispute between them was on the outcome of Newton’s experiments using prisms to “unweave the rainbow” in the parlance of Richard Dawkins; breaking white light into its component hues along the spectrum of long wavelengths to shorter ones.
Due to this secretary (Charles LaRue) being on vacation for an extended period of time, these minutes are greatly delayed. In the interest of getting them dispersed without further tardiness, I have asked Jeff to include the cut and pasted write- up Dr. Collins did, summarizing his talk that night in his own words. The following is that:
JOHANN W. VON GOETHE-”GOETHE” (1745-1837)
Poet, Playwright, Theater Manager, Lawyer, Scientist (14 volumes-systematic study of plants, independent discovery of the premaxilla in humans, and a compliment from Charles Darwin as a “forerunner”). Goethe is often recognized as the last “Renaissance man.”
Argument of “knowledge of self” to develop with “knowledge of world”.
Assertion: White is a color like any other. Light (white) is one and indivisible.
At this point I had a prism and demonstrated the diffraction of the projector’s white light into the colors of the rainbow. Newton did a similar experiment by passing sunlight passing through a hole in a window shade through a prism. I did not have a color wheel to demo the synthesis of various colors into white (kind of a dirty white because of the saturation of the colors) for us human’s when the Critical Flicker Fusion rate is exceeded.
SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1642-1727):
&Mac183; 23 y/o-Binomial Theorem.
&Mac183; 24 y/o-Calculus.
&Mac183; Nature of Colors >> Royal Society of London.
&Mac183; Gravity.
Central Philosophy: Derivation of knowledge from experiments-NOT deduction from prior statements or doctrine.
(Note Sir Isaac lived and died before Goethe was even born! Goethe picked a fight with a dead man and in many respects “lost”).
Newton: “For the best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and of establishing these properties by experiment, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.”
BUT
As to “certain properties of light, which, now discovered, I think easy to be proved, ...which if I had not considered them as true, I would rather have them rejected as vain and empty speculation, than acknowledged even as an hypothesis.” (Note the emotional element here).
Newton felt persecuted by reactions that were still going on some 8 or 9 years later, “I was so persecuted with discussions arising out of my theory of light that I blamed my own imprudence….” He threatened by some accounts never to write again. And he did delay much of his writing.
Newton was anti-trinitarian (at Trinity College-Cambridge) and refused Holy Orders. He was given a special dispensation to hold his professorship. HisInterest in Alchemy has frustrated many admirers for the waste of time and energy of such a great. He also as a consequence of his studies of Alchemy suffered from Mercury poisoning which was another waste of his productive period.
See the points/definitions below. Goethe was the phenomenalist and Newton the realist/materialist phe·nom·e·nal·ism NOUN: Philosophy—The doctrine, set forth by David Hume and his successors, that percepts and concepts constitute the sole objects of knowledge, with the objects of perception and the nature of the mind itself remaining unknowable.
phe·nom·e·nol·o·gy NOUN: 1. A philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness. 2. A movement based on this, originated about 1905 by Edmund Husserl.
ma·te·ri·al·ism-NOUN: 1. Philosophy The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena. re·alADJECTIVE: Philosophy Existing objectively in the world regardless of subjectivity or conventions of thought or language. em·pir·i·cism-NOUN: 1. The view that experience, especially of the senses, is the only source of knowledge.
And finally: (Presented at the 20th World Congress of Philosophy, Boston/MA, USA, August 10-16, 1998) Epistemology of Material Properties Joachim Schummer “Phenomenalism is an epistemology of common sense, of ordinary experience when we implicitly presuppose our usual standard contexts of daily life. Material science, on the other hand, aims at understanding by questioning our self-evident and implicit assumptions, and it does so by varying contextual conditions to the very extremes. Understanding means first of all: building concepts as precisely as possible to distinguish material objects in an unambiguous way, in order to build a classification of materials. Epistemologists and philosophers of science have stressed too much the role of truth, while neglecting the problems of building and refining empirical concepts. A sentence like “x is red” is, strictly speaking, neither true nor false, because it contains no empirical information about x (s.a.). And there is no serious way at all (pace Quine) to define truth conditions more precisely by referring to stimuli of our nervous system. That is completely the wrong track”. http://wwwrz.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/~ed01/Jslit/epismat.htm
Bob Collins
