I very strongly suspect that if human beings survive much into the future in a state in which both science but, especially, philosophy continue, that our time will be seen as one in which atheism led science into some seriously scandalous misdirections.
Everything from the present state of cosmology to biology to the so-called social sciences presently have serious aspects of decadence which are motivated by the desire to use science to refute the possibility of the existence of God. Multiverse theory*, abiogenesis, neo-eugenics, various neo-determinisms .... everything up and to the inclusion of people alleged to be scientists and philosophers impeaching the existence of consciousness is an expression of the most extravagant state of decadence that western thought has ever been led to seriously consider serious. Personally, I think it is possible only through the widespread belief that science is a species of magic by people who don't have the mathematical or logical equipment to understand it.
At the bottom of all of those is ideological atheist hijacking of science, turning it into a tool of atheist polemic instead of a search for accurate or even logically plausible information or hypotheses.
That isn't something that all atheists have responsibility for or which even enjoys the universal support of atheists but those who have brought us into this state of affairs have made their atheist-materialist ideology the dominant, practically required framing of, literally, everything. It isn't sustainable, the need for atheist-materialist monism to impeach the validity and existence of consciousness, alone, renders it an unsustainable intellectual framing. When your ideology needs to impeach the very means through which it could attain validity or the status of being the truth, it can't be sustained and it must lose credibility over time. To point it out one more time, atheist-materialism is the only influential ideology which has to be false in order for it to be true.
* The physicists and others who take seriously such notions that every one of our actions brings entire universes in which the opposite or even every possible variation of that action happen are certainly among the more decadent. If we, unintentionally, have such creative power (and why not when we fail to do something, does that create the universe in which we do do it?) it is certainly far more parsimonious to believe that God had the power to create this universe that we know. I wonder where the power to power such cosmology is supposed to come from or the power to enforce those schemes in which every possible probabilistic universe must exist. What is the origin of that law, how would you ever, possibly, confirm that? I think what they've actually done is, in their scientific naivete, is mistake motivated imagination for reality. And those imagined schemes of multiverses seem to come into being in a remarkable number of variations, which their inventors don't seem to want to believe could all be true in their infinity of universes.
ReplyDelete"Everything from the present state of
cosmology to biology to the so-called social sciences presently have
serious aspects of decadence which are motivated by the desire to use
science to refute the possibility of the existence of God."
Oh, it's worse than that. Some of us actually believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It's a form of magical thinking, isn't it? Especially where "multi-verses" are concerned.
ReplyDeleteI haven't done the study, either in the literature or anthropologically, but with regard to the former, "magic" became a popular subject of literature during the Romantic era, where they were concerned with recovering or preserving that which was soon to be lost ("Folk" culture as the machine turned out the agricultural way of life, essentially). You really don't find any stories with magicians or witches at their center, at least in Europe, before that, and the ones you do find, like Grimm's, mostly have witches who are bad characters, but nothing like a character in, say, Harry Potter.
As technology gave us power to reshape the world (not without serious consequence, as it turns out), so magic, in literature, reflected the claiming of that power (and, usually, the perils of that claim). I even remember a story in one of my SF anthologies where magic is an energy of a certain region, and that energy can be "used" up, and that's what happened to magic in the world (it was, as it turned out, a limited resource. Gee, why would they think of that?).
Not coincidentally, it was in the 19th century that Europeans began to think of themselves as superior to other "Nations" (the KJV word, in English) and to anthropologist about "magic" in very different terms than in literature, and to decide that "our" technology would seem "Magical" to "primitive cultures". Of course, that was our definition of magic we were attributing to them, but, you know, they are benighted, we are enlightened.
And that beat goes on.....