radical spirit
Since only the barn mice seem to be listening, I might as well sit in the loft and smell the sweet hay and say my piece. I think I've said that I'm righteously tired of cheap self-righteousness. What do political correctness, the righteous right and suicide bombers all have in common? Cheap self-righteousness. The difference is only a matter of degree. And since cheap self-righteousness of every degree fits on the same scale of compulsive / obsessive, there's really no difference at all. Everybody wants that bomb-button threshold to instant glory, whether its abortion or Allah's will. Nuance is for wusses.
But the cheap self-righteousness is all around. Science, historically, has become the same knee-jerk pseudo-righteous source of arrogant idiocy. I suppose I can say as often as I want that science is a method and not a positive philosophy. I'm still outvoted. And it's the votes, and not the empirical facts or empirical reality itself that matters. No one is concerned with 'science' any more - with the truth as the object of knowledge. 'What is truth', said Pilate, jesting. And now we're all in on the joke.
Science dictates no prior stance. To say that science denies God or Spirit is essentially to deny science. Thus far, what science has said is that science can't go there. But that's not because the method of science limits it to a frame of experience that excludes God or Spirit. The reason science has traditionally excluded God and Spirit is because scientists have always assumed that science denied God and Spirit. And, for the most part, religionists have agreed with them - not only setting up the artificial confrontation between science and religion, but also setting the foundation for scientific fundamentalism, the unscientific religion of science.
But, if there is an historical basis for the anti-religious origins of 'scientific' atheism, it has nevertheless also always fastened on a cheap righteousness of its own. The fact that this cheap self-righteousness is equally compulsive / obsessive becomes increasingly self-evident if one simply views the recent history objectively.
Take evolution. Evolution is undoubtedly a proven fact. Undoubtedly, genetic variation is a known fact. Natural selection seems likely. But, as yet, I have not heard of a rigorous sampling model that combines a reasonable study of genetic variation with a reasonable study of population change, in an actual population under ecological stress - in other words, predisposed to evolutionary change. Only such a study could 'prove' natural selection as the mechanism. Undoubtedly, the model would be complex and the parameters of the study perhaps only now or perhaps not yet in reach. But that's my point. Evolutionary 'scientists' have considered the arguments as having been closed for decades if not for a century. And as a consequence not only any argument, but any evidence to the contrary is excluded as 'unscientific'.
Where is the competition in schools of fish? Where is the competition in flocks of birds? In most animal groupings, we see dominance struggle for 'alpha' males, suggesting some degree of genetic selection. But any aggregating, collective or community behavior on the part of living entities is considered 'anecdotal' with respect to evolution. And why? Because evolution obviously - 'scientifically' - has to be the result of competition and the 'struggle for survival'. And so, 'nature red in tooth and claw' is a 'scientific fact', while all evidence of community behavior and mutual support within the ecological framework is at best irrelevant.
The study of ecology, of course, has modified contemporary evolutionary theory, since the recognition has developed that evolution follows the ecological niches. As ecologies evolve, the niches change. And species apparently change to fill the changing niches. Because this can finally be entered under the old conditions of the absolutes of genetics and selection, the modifications have been more or less integrated in the contemporary versions of evolutionary theory. But what I really want to point to here is the absolutes.
The ultimate absolute of the fundamentalist religion of science is that the universe is essentially absolutely purposeless. Evolution absolutely has to be a function of genetics, because, theoretically, genetics are the absolute determining conditions for the development of the organism and, since genetics can theoretically be presupposed without any inherent purposive process, the evolutionary sequence that devolves from genetic variation can be equally purposeless. Adaptation is not purpose, but simply response. And this has been the characteristic premise of 'science' from its beginning: that everything that happens in the universe is response. There is, in fact, nothing active in the universe.
In other words, from its beginnings, scientific fundamentalism has been so aggressively atheistic and anti-spiritual that it will not allow anything to have legitimate creative volition. The pervasive victory of this fundamentalist religion of science, at least among the intellectuals, is the reason that art and intellect have died. Not only legitimately creative aesthetic endeavor, but legitimately creative scholarship and philosophy are no longer possible.
This is the reason that we cannot allow consciousness to be an independent reality in the universe. If consciousness were an independent reality, then volition would be real. If volition were real, creativity would be a real possibility. If creativity were a real possibility, then there would be real value in the universe. And if there were real value in the universe, then there would be purpose in the universe. If there were real purpose in the universe - who knows? - there might even be spiritual reality and perhaps, in the remotest reaches, something tantamount to the divine.
But the cheap self-righteousness is all around. Science, historically, has become the same knee-jerk pseudo-righteous source of arrogant idiocy. I suppose I can say as often as I want that science is a method and not a positive philosophy. I'm still outvoted. And it's the votes, and not the empirical facts or empirical reality itself that matters. No one is concerned with 'science' any more - with the truth as the object of knowledge. 'What is truth', said Pilate, jesting. And now we're all in on the joke.
Science dictates no prior stance. To say that science denies God or Spirit is essentially to deny science. Thus far, what science has said is that science can't go there. But that's not because the method of science limits it to a frame of experience that excludes God or Spirit. The reason science has traditionally excluded God and Spirit is because scientists have always assumed that science denied God and Spirit. And, for the most part, religionists have agreed with them - not only setting up the artificial confrontation between science and religion, but also setting the foundation for scientific fundamentalism, the unscientific religion of science.
But, if there is an historical basis for the anti-religious origins of 'scientific' atheism, it has nevertheless also always fastened on a cheap righteousness of its own. The fact that this cheap self-righteousness is equally compulsive / obsessive becomes increasingly self-evident if one simply views the recent history objectively.
Take evolution. Evolution is undoubtedly a proven fact. Undoubtedly, genetic variation is a known fact. Natural selection seems likely. But, as yet, I have not heard of a rigorous sampling model that combines a reasonable study of genetic variation with a reasonable study of population change, in an actual population under ecological stress - in other words, predisposed to evolutionary change. Only such a study could 'prove' natural selection as the mechanism. Undoubtedly, the model would be complex and the parameters of the study perhaps only now or perhaps not yet in reach. But that's my point. Evolutionary 'scientists' have considered the arguments as having been closed for decades if not for a century. And as a consequence not only any argument, but any evidence to the contrary is excluded as 'unscientific'.
Where is the competition in schools of fish? Where is the competition in flocks of birds? In most animal groupings, we see dominance struggle for 'alpha' males, suggesting some degree of genetic selection. But any aggregating, collective or community behavior on the part of living entities is considered 'anecdotal' with respect to evolution. And why? Because evolution obviously - 'scientifically' - has to be the result of competition and the 'struggle for survival'. And so, 'nature red in tooth and claw' is a 'scientific fact', while all evidence of community behavior and mutual support within the ecological framework is at best irrelevant.
The study of ecology, of course, has modified contemporary evolutionary theory, since the recognition has developed that evolution follows the ecological niches. As ecologies evolve, the niches change. And species apparently change to fill the changing niches. Because this can finally be entered under the old conditions of the absolutes of genetics and selection, the modifications have been more or less integrated in the contemporary versions of evolutionary theory. But what I really want to point to here is the absolutes.
The ultimate absolute of the fundamentalist religion of science is that the universe is essentially absolutely purposeless. Evolution absolutely has to be a function of genetics, because, theoretically, genetics are the absolute determining conditions for the development of the organism and, since genetics can theoretically be presupposed without any inherent purposive process, the evolutionary sequence that devolves from genetic variation can be equally purposeless. Adaptation is not purpose, but simply response. And this has been the characteristic premise of 'science' from its beginning: that everything that happens in the universe is response. There is, in fact, nothing active in the universe.
In other words, from its beginnings, scientific fundamentalism has been so aggressively atheistic and anti-spiritual that it will not allow anything to have legitimate creative volition. The pervasive victory of this fundamentalist religion of science, at least among the intellectuals, is the reason that art and intellect have died. Not only legitimately creative aesthetic endeavor, but legitimately creative scholarship and philosophy are no longer possible.
This is the reason that we cannot allow consciousness to be an independent reality in the universe. If consciousness were an independent reality, then volition would be real. If volition were real, creativity would be a real possibility. If creativity were a real possibility, then there would be real value in the universe. And if there were real value in the universe, then there would be purpose in the universe. If there were real purpose in the universe - who knows? - there might even be spiritual reality and perhaps, in the remotest reaches, something tantamount to the divine.
This does not premise 'design'. Quite the reverse, it seems obvious that whatever is at work here, if it is a 'purpose', is a purpose of the moment. As I have been suggesting in my recent posts, apart from biology and chemistry, much of the legitimate recent science begins to suggest a universe in which matter and consciousness are - as one would suppose if one were truly 'objective' and not an addictive victim of scientific fundamentalism - evolutionary corollaries. The ambivalence of 'matter' with respect to consciousness in the new physics suggests, precisely, the predisposition of matter to 'produce' formal consciousness and self-awareness through the process of evolution. A predisposition is not a design.
There is, of course, a theological argument for such a process as well. If God is anywhere specifically immanent in the universe, then we are necessarily slaves of that point of immanence. If God wished to create a world of free beings, he, she or it would have to absent itself from any immediacy in 'the creation'. The old deism was simply based on the premise that humanity was on the threshold of a final explication of cosmos in terms of universal scientific principles, with the consequent assumption that this was God's intent, as the ultimate validation of human reason. But rationalism, like modern physics, has led to ambiguity and paradox. That paradox, in terms of physics, throws us specifically back onto the nature of the moment and the moment as the paradigm for experience.
As I have suggested here, science itself is experience and not fact. The old deism actually pivoted around the new experience of validity offered, more or less generally, through the study of science. When we recognize that 'scientific objectivity' is this peculiar moment of experience in which we see the structures of self-awareness, and recognize its implicit requisites in terms of tangible mysteries and their formal corollaries, we will have the empirical basis, individually, for rejoining 'science' with its historical source, 'gnosticism'.
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