Science Plays God

[alice wellintown]

About work and workmanship: the extension of the hammer and the mind

from Locke

18. Of relations between abstracted ideas it is not easy to say how far our
knowledge extends. Thirdly, As to the third sort of our knowledge, viz. the
agreement or disagreement of any of our ideas in any other relation: this,
as it is the largest field of our knowledge, so it is hard to determine how
far it may extend: because the advances that are made in this part of
knowledge, depending on our sagacity in finding intermediate ideas, that
may show the relations and habitudes of ideas whose co-existence is not
considered, it is a hard matter to tell when we are at an end of such
discoveries; and when reason has all the helps it is capable of, for the
finding of proofs or examining the agreement or disagreement of remote
ideas. They that are ignorant of Algebra cannot imagine the wonders in this
kind are to be done by it: and what further improvements and helps
advantageous to other parts of knowledge the sagacious mind of man may yet
find out, it is not easy to determine. This at least I believe, that the
ideas of quantity are not those alone that are capable of demonstration and
knowledge; and that other, and perhaps more useful, parts of contemplation,
would afford us certainty, if vices, passions, and domineering interest did
not oppose or menace such endeavours.

Morality capable of demonstration. The idea of a supreme Being, infinite in
power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are, and on whom we
depend; and the idea of ourselves, as understanding, rational creatures,
being such as are clear in us, would, I suppose, if duly considered and
pursued, afford such foundations of our duty and rules of action as might
place morality amongst the sciences capable of demonstration: wherein I
doubt not but from self-evident propositions, by necessary consequences, as
incontestible as those in mathematics, the measures of right and wrong
might be made out, to any one that will apply himself with the same
indifferency and attention to the one as he does to the other of these
sciences. The relation of other modes may certainly be perceived, as well
as those of number and extension: and I cannot see why they should not also
be capable of demonstration, if due methods were thought on to examine or
pursue their agreement or disagreement. "Where there is no property there
is no injustice," is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in
Euclid: for the idea of property being a right to anything, and the idea to
which the name "injustice" is given being the invasion or violation of that
right, it is evident that these ideas, being thus established, and these
names annexed to them, I can as certainly know this proposition to be true,
as that a triangle has three angles equal to two right ones. Again: "No
government allows absolute liberty." The idea of government being the
establishment of society upon certain rules or laws which require
conformity to them; and the idea of absolute liberty being for any one to
do whatever he pleases; I am as capable of being certain of the truth of
this proposition as of any in the mathematics.
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/locke/understanding/chapter0403.html




On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 7:48 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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