Hello Neocon,
I am afraid that I must preface and constrain the musings offered below as my subjective synthesis of the fractally complex event that makes up One Human Individual's Totality of perception, cognition, memory. I take heavily and without accreditation from many people who have shared with me either speech or text, and I have grown too feeble of intellect to reliably trace the boundaries between my own original thought and the accreted ideas beachcombed from a lifetime ofreading and listening.
I suggest that there is alternative between a "mechanistic universe" as it has been popularly defined in the 20th century (on the one hand) and intelligent design in the sense of there being an Aware, Deliberate Principle creating, possibly even steering, the cosmos.
I like to think of myself as a "natural philosopher", an anachronistic term that imo captures the best of what being a scientist is about. As such, I subscribe to the idea that the scientific method is an all'round good thing, *as long as* a basic limitation of the scientific method, and any system built upon logic, is respected.
That limitation regards the PREMISES that are fed into the machine of logic <or> scientific method. Now here I present an article of [my] faith: A scientist's integrity hinges upon that person clearly delineating which of the premises are fact, which are "reasonable or likely" (but not quite proven) extrapolation (...descending categories...) which are outright fantasy or fabrication. Logical or scientific method needs premises (observations, relationships, perceived order) in order to be engaged, and imo the product of this operation is only as good as its weakest input premise.
It is a basic trait of human nature to assign an attractive premise a higher-than-deserved certainty coefficient, if I may reach for such a quantitative metaphor. ("Certainty coefficient" as a quantitative measurement of a premise's ...robustness? is presented as metaphor at best at this point, since I haven't spent enough cortex-hours to confidently advance it as a full-fledged Theory.) As a result of this observed tendency to become loyal to ideas that one likes, these ideas are assigned inappropriate levels of certainty or verity. (Imo one of the most astounding and egregious examples of this sort of cognitive loop is captured in Romans 1:20.)
What happens is that a person accepts a compelling yet unproven premise as an article of faith. One of the positive aspects of spiritual thought (and its popular manifestation - religion) is that the sages are up-front about saying "These things are true because we believe steadfastly in them." Further account of divine deeds, miracles, attainment of exalted states etc. may safely be reduced to the above keystone premise.
Secular humanists, many of them anyway, have been brought up with two salient lessons: 1) When one's religion, or any other religion one tries out, is subjected to the best available Reality Test, the result is at best inconclusive. (For this "reason" alone I scoff at the aforementioned Pauline proclamation.)
2) The scientific theories that depict a mechanistic universe - Newtonian mechanics, physical chemistry, information theory as applied to transistors and synapses ... by and large they are spectacularly successful at meeting and advancing the Realtiy Test.
I will try to knit these diverse threads of idea together that the susceptibility to "scientism", to an inappropriate extension of accepted scientific (astronomical, geological, paleontological, genetic, subatomic, in approximate rank of "size of examined subject") theories into axiom, "this is how things work; this is how things are", is a basic human trait. I have great sympathy for those who do this, but they are still guilty of a logical fault.
Good scientific and philosophical process is the exclusive province of those who are sufficiently and successfully introspective that they can identify and demarcate their own Faith Traps. Everyone has FTs (I posit) because unless someone convinces me otherwise, the idea that the sun will rise tomorrow and my property tax bill will be another tick closer to arrears is an article of my faith.
So the bottom line is, I feel that it is prudent to suggest (strongly) that religious cosmologies (Weltanschauungen, perhaps) and unforgivingly atheistic "clockwork universe, circuit-board consciousness" cosmologies are not the complete set of possible or even robust ways of relating That-which-I-am to That-which-encloses-me.
And now the Cosmic Copout.
What such an alternative would look like when developed with all due diligence and good faith ... I do not know and am diffident to speculate.
I can only offer my current idea (opinion, statement of belief) that since the observing intellect is always smaller in space, time and complexity that that which is perceived and cognized, I do not believe that we or our descendants (biological, cybernetic, multitronic, totaliter aliter) will ever be able to reduce all objects, events, conditions in the Cosmos of space and time (and maybe even other unidentified dimensions? to a recipe. The territory will always be greater and more feature-flled than any possible map.
Thus spake Lather. |
