Science Plays God

[alice wellintown]

On this East and West, we do well to recall that P looks to Watts, to
Africa and to African Americans, and again, I suggest Clontz, chapter 2,
Ellison and Pynchon.

Clontz, Ted L. "*Chapter 2. Ellison and Pynchon: The Chaotic and Fabulous
Cities*." *Wilderness City: The Post World War II American Urban Novel from
Algren to Wideman* . Routledge, New York, New York, United States (2005):
39-62.


On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> As a pattern of thought, the creation story you are describing works as a
> powerfully influential paradigm  for  western science. But taken literally
> it presupposes great age for the biblical story, which story requires that
> the symbolic science of language and the practical science of agriculture
> be in place without a trial and error scientific process evident. What
> emerges in most  western and several eastern cultures are stories where a
> great deal of technology exists as a given - swords,  agriculture and food
> storage, clothing, language  - or is wrested from the gods as part of the
> emergence of fully human societies.
>
> One thing you become aware of as an artist at an early stage is the
> impossibility of "creating anything that adequately rivals, represents or
> imitates what is seen in nature. What humans add more than anything to
> compensate is drama and abstraction( the manipulation of patterns both
> geometric and organic).  In this sense the artist priest author shaman is a
> kind of scientist naturalist observer interpreter of the dramatic cycles of
> nature and of the perceived ideals and boundaries of human behavior. The
> question of where this leads may hinge on whether the story teller,
> scientist, chieftain seeks to rival nature and direct the perception of
> divine truth,   or channel nature and allow a free and open-ended
> experience of divinity. It seems to depend on whether they see themselves
> as high priests of a greater order or as servants of a shared medicine,
> facilitators of survival, healthy boundaries, healing.
>
> One of the great divergences that one can see between east(including
> shamanic tribalism) and west(including all agonistic beliefs)  is between a
> cosmology that is fundamentally self stabilizing and whose dynamics are
> coming from an inherent balance, and a cosmology of  dramatic
> directionality where beginning middle and end are all radically different
>  and particularly grim in the current scientific cosmology.   In the first
> the ideals tend to be harmonies, balance with nature. In the second the
> ideals are expansive, invasive, heirarchical, a product of struggle and
> competition.  Both have science. Is there a difference?
>
> > 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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