Science Plays God

[alice wellintown]

Legalists sought to devalue the importance of the charismatic ruler.

Juxtapose with Max Weber.


On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 1:05 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:

> Joseph, on perspective, we can, as you suggest, find profound differences
> when we look East, or to Africa, and so on...but even when we look at the
> West we discover profound differences as well. Even in America we find
> profound differences.
>
> We can treat neither East nor West as monolith. Consider Locke and Hobbes.
> These two, often studied with Newton and others, stressed the scientific
> approach, the logical approach to creation, to the free will. Locke
> stressed the placing of morality among the sciences because he looked at
> the world and at man through the lens of science, objectively--he stressed
> the free exercise of reason.  Hobbes did not. In the free will
> Hobbes identified a danger that must be tempered by a ruler or assembly of
> men.   That free will, that creative power, that image of god, of making
> from nothing but what a man might conceive in his mind through his tools or
> his machines must be thwarted, not by ethics in science, but by a powerful
> government. And this is not unknown to the East. Consider the Legalist
> School.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_(Chinese_philosophy)
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 12:51 PM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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