Science Plays God

[alice wellintown]

We need to listen to the grass. To the spring meadow.


On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 7:16 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:

> But the camera, the technologies of science, only allow us to see a part
> of nature's power. The spring in the meadow is not captured on the film. We
> have but an image. The spring in the meadow is infinitely more complex than
> what we can discover from the film, but we are so impressed with the
> complexity of our machine, with the complexity of our image, with the work
> of the camera, with the science, that we forget all that is beyond its
> view, all that it can't capture, reproduce. We dismiss all that nature is,
> all that is  beyond the logic, the method of science. Because science tells
> us it can explain nature, but it fails to remind us how limited its
> explanations are, how inherently flawed its methods are, how much more
> powerful and complex nature is. Science puts the parts together, one into
> the next, puts them into the clockwork and shows us that we can, with time,
> control nature, synchronize her, others, ourselves, take from nature what
> we desire. But nature is not a clock. So what have we got? A computer
> world? And there is something far more insidious in this new science. When
> the Greeks spun the world on a potter's wheel, made a world in the image of
> their tools, they were doing much the same. But that insidiously extended
> science that Pynchon describes in 1984 Foreword, is science with computer.
> And with computers we are enticed to leave the earth behind, to change how
> we think about earth, so we destroy more of it, and work at understanding
> it less and less.  We do this in the hope of making it better for our
> growing population, but we ignore so much that the camera can't capture,
> that science can't explain. Science is not the answer. It's the problem. We
> need to listen to the wind.
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:33 PM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
>
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