Science Plays God

[alice wellintown]

In the West, God is a creator, the perfect expression of Free Will, and He
makes Man in his image, a creator as well, with Free Will. But the Western
God likes order, has a plan for his creation, this plan fixes man in a
subordinate position, placing man's plans for the creation, and thus man's
creations, under God's.  Man, however, is not content in this position and
so he exercises his free will, thus frustrating, disturbing, the plans of
his god. The creative man is given charge of the creation, and with it he
does some good, but he is flawed, and he can't use his free creative power
to do more good than evil, so the order the god has made is disturbed; the
god wipes the slate with a flood, establishes a new order, cleaning the
murder of Abel by his brother Cain, establishing the love of Judah for
Benjamin. And so it goes. God and Man create. The myth of creation, of sin
and re-creation is important because it will serve as the foundation of
science, of modern science, of modernity without restraint. The story is a
long one, but we can look at the chapters that address the period when
Calvin merges with Newton, so the 16th and 17th centuries. Why begin here?
Well, I would like to get to Pynchon and America, to the Puritans, and
their machine, the printing machine and the text (Slothrop's ancestors),
and to the Science of government in the early American states (Mason and
Dixon).  If we start with Locke and Calvin , we can get to Weber and
Blicero, by rocket, of course, and land on the dark side of Darwin and
Dewey and...the theater/theatre...the dark passages, as one critic call
them, of P's history of science gone mad. Gone mad with its powerful envy
of nature's creative chaos.


On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 8:01 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Thoughtful, provocative, insightful and  clear. Not sure if it is that the
> idea has roots in religion or that the urge to understand, rival and
> control natural forces  are the roots of both science as a practical
> expression and religion as the explaining story.
> On Jun 7, 2013, at 6:33 PM, alice wellintown 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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