End Of Summer Fun - A Brit I Really Can Love

Every once in a while I like to totally outrage the high sense of propriety held absolutely by those bold, iconoclasts, the manly (though many of them are women) atheist materialist free-thinkers (who to a person reject the possibility of free thought), a sense of propriety they hold more closely and absolutely and with minds not only shut but locked and hermetically sealed than those of the imaginary, dime-novel, 2nd rate play-movie script stock figure bluestocking prudes the literary wing of that clique invent as foils for their equally imaginary bold, iconoclastic manly . . . . heroes.  

I know of nothing that is more useful for that than posting a talk by that gentle, highly credentialed scientist Rupert Sheldrake in which he calmly, rationally, generously, open-mindedly advocates such things as freeing science from antique materialist dogmas, advocating science as a method instead of an ideological creed.  I believe this is a recent talk he gave, though I have to say he looks a lot younger in it than some of those I've seen from recent years.  Perhaps he's discovered something about rejuvenation in his investigation of unorthodox phenomena.  I wish I looked as well. 

I have found that there were things in his book, called in the United States "Science Set Free" that I found a bit hard to take, especially around the topic so much in vogue among materialist philosophers just now, panpsychism.  He discusses that vogue among atheists in his talk as he doesn't reject the idea, he just thinks its worth thinking about, no doubt, he being an accomplished and very creative experimental designer, he'd like to figure out ways to test it with the methods of science.  

I do wonder as a result of reading a few of his books (I loved the Dog book and the one about amateurs designing experiments) what effect science has had on religion.  That has made me question how much the Catholic dogma of my youth was disfigured by the orthodoxy of Descartes and the early generation of the inventors of science.  I remember it was dogma we were taught that animals don't have souls, something which apparently was not much held before it became the widespread dogma of natural philosophy (science) which, no doubt, was as much studied and taken to heart in later generations of theologians as later science is.   Hans Kung is certainly influenced very much by the science of our time, as are virtually all of the contemporary theologians I've been reading in the last decade.  I have pointed out that St. Gregory of Nyssa and, by his account, his highly educated sister St. Macrina the Younger were well versed in the science of their time - her use of Ptolemaic cosmology in her deathbed conversation with him was quite sophisticated. 

Being a full believer in not only the consciousness of animals, even of bacteria which exhibit volition as well as a neophyte student of the Bible, it seems to me that animals are not presented in it as mindless or even soulless.  I've pointed out before that it was among the more important of recent events when I read Walter Brueggeman pointing to, as early in the Bible as Genesis, God talks of making covenant with all flesh, including animals.  That passage after the flood narrative opened my eyes to the views of animals and the natural world in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that the Cartesianism of my Baltimore Catechism era Catholic formation blinded me to. In one of his talks or interviews Brueggemann also pointed out that the slam against the Jewish-Christian tradition in regard to environmental exploitation and despoliation was, as well, introduced, not by Genesis but by Descartes and Bacon and the other inventors of scientific method under that dualism that, now, the Christian, Rupert Sheldrake wants to correct.  That, alone, would make encouraging listening to him worthwhile.  

Sheldrake points to the rage that conventional materialist-atheist devotees of conventional scientism express when someone violates their list of prohibited ideas and, worst of all, wants to subject hypotheses about them to the methods of science.  No doubt this post will be subject to the derisive evocation of that automatic reaction among the college credentialed folk of Eschaton and elsewhere.  Which, in itself, is worth the effort of posting it.  It's fun to get them to react like the most extreme of their bluestocking stock characters, there are no more hilariously self-righteous and totally self-unaware upholders of an orthodoxy today.   And there is nothing, nothing more transgressive, as you can see all over the place, they aren't nearly as bothered by neo-Nazism and its causes than they are that someone might do something that could, possibly, imply that God is real. 

Update:  Yeah, I know by the calendar we have a month of summer to go.  It's that my last school-teacher sibling just went for the first day of his last year of teaching and one of my nieces whose diapers I changed and who I babysat starts her first day teaching at a university today - she is the only person I know who got that kind of a job right out of college, I'm proud of her.  The passage of time is heavy on my mind.