Science Plays God

[alice wellintown]

When did humans first think about nature as a machine? Long before Newton,
but hard to say for sure. But we can say that the meaning of this concept
(nature as machine) has changed over time. We can also say that science has
influenced what we claim to know about nature, about powers in nature that
are greater than any power we have, and about what in nature is very
powerful and why, and what is  beyond our immediate control, but not beyond
our control in the future.

Does science redesign nature to make it fit scientific expectations and
needs? Nature certainly does not remain constant, does not retain its
meaning as theories evolve, as theories are abandoned, replaced with new
ones. As science evolves and changes, nature’s features change.

Put a camera in the meadow for a season. Make a film. A reflection of
nature’s secrets, once hidden, is now exposed. Nature is somehow more real.
We see so much that nature does, its power, but what we see is not nature,
but a film, an imitation. How powerful is the meadow! But science has power
too. The more power science has, the more powerful and persuasive its ideas
about nature. The camera is quite a powerful technology. Like the hammer,
and extension, the camera too extends. In this case, it is not the hand,
nor even the eye so much that is extended, but the mind. Thinking with the
machine changes how we think about nature. Does thinking with the machine
make us think of nature as a machine? And if so, does the thinking with a
clock make nature a clock, thinking with a text…a computer…thinking with
…and is it in our nature to formulate our scientific explanations of how
nature works with what works for us, what can be reproduced, reliably,
without ambiguity, again and again. Use a machine not an idea because ideas
are not as easy to control. Science must control, therefore, it controls
nature by making it a machine. And, we do the same to others who inhabit
the earth, and we do so to ourselves. The machine is powerful method for
taking hold of complexities in nature, like the meadow in spring, which we
cannot make. That we can’t make Spring, is a challenge to science,
especially in the West, because science making, creating, bringing to
nature something that was not there before, is an expression of free
will.  This
idea, of course, has its roots, not in science, but in religion, in
Genesis. God makes us in his image and we therefore make things in ours.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130607/2facd555/attachment.html>