Monday, July 15. 2013
The reactionary brigade in any field of science, given its usual intellectual constraints, adheres to fundamentalisms that often coalesce into slogans. It’s not science! they are wont to exclaim concerning any field, hypothesis or concept, which challenges their categories in too radical a manner. One area of enquiry thus dismissed is that of Intelligent Design – briefly, the idea that the highly ordered complexity observed in nature is best explained by an intelligent cause. Here it is mostly the pro-Darwin lobby, with moral support from philosophical materialists in general, which maintains the charge that ... Intelligent Design is not science.
Let us then examine the statement (as a class of assertion of the type described, and with specific reference to Intelligent Design theory) ‘such-and-such is not science’. What can we make of the statement, ‘X is not science’?
Well, it’s firstly not saying anything profound in the sense of engendering insight or fertility of ideas. It’s more like, X is not science – end of story. The implicit meta-statement is of disengagement, of keeping the matter at arm’s length. Thus already we see some dissonance between the overt statement and its implicit purport. Prima facie the claim is of an analytical nature, purporting to say something about its object – Intelligent Design. What it rather discloses, however, is its own inherent stance, saying in effect, I cannot / will not engage with the matter. But even this is all quite immaterial insofar we are dealing with what, on closer scrutiny, turns out to be a non-statement. That’s right – the assertion ‘X is not science’ is quite meaningless. And let us be emphatic here: It is pure gibberish.
For let us consider what its champions would needs be implying, namely that conceptual entities such as fields of enquiry – ideas, conjectures, theoretical constructs – come ready-labelled, as the case may be, with the appropriate designations – such as science, non-science, and of course pseudo-science – and that they (bold, dauntless, and independent thinkers that they are) can detect these labels. But this, of course, is pure nonsense. Nature does not come thus ready-labelled for the convenience of ostensible sceptics, whose intellectual horizons preclude engagement across paradigm boundaries. It is not that ‘science’, as a mystical quality, somehow adheres to fields, to theories and ideas. It is whether the question at hand – whatever it is – is engaged in a scientific manner. This would seem elementary. Yet it continues to elude our self-appointed vigilante guardians of permissible ideas.
Thus, in stating that such-and-such is not science, they are saying in effect that it is they who lack the ability to consider the matter scientifically – whether for want of the requisite intellectual tools or, as is more typically the case, out of philosophical paradigm constraints. The deficiency, as per our example of Intelligent Design, thus does not inhere in the field under consideration, but in its critics.
Sunday, July 14. 2013
The stability of the mind is predicated on faith, where by faith we essentially mean that intuitive synthesis which unifies our myriad thoughts and impressions into a coherent worldview. This is why, in scripture, faith or revelation – the terms are synonymous – is called the rock, the foundation. ‘Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona (Mathew 16:17-18): for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church ... It is the revelation, according to the saviour, which is the rock, the foundation, of the Christian worldview – specifically, the revelation of who he is that is speaking ... namely, the Christ.
The present example, along with New Testament usage in general, thus speaks of a specific faith – that informed by the revelation of Jesus Christ. This is what is meant in scripture when it is spoken of the faith. But, as modern usage also has it, there are many ‘faiths’ – persuasions, worldviews, paradigms of the real – such that the concept should also be understood in the larger sense outlined above – the faculty of intuitive synthesis by which the mind reaches a resultant, a conclusion, concerning the nature of reality.
Religious critics, of course, claim that it is reason – not faith – which rightly occupies this place of chief organising principle in the realm of mind – or that at least it ought, as it does for those sober, right-minded individuals, whose self-defined identity is of a vaunted rationalism. But this is simply not well observed. The reason is undergirded by faith, by the implicit assumption that reality is such-and-such, where that assumption involves a quasi infinitude of constituent beliefs, most of them so properly basic to human sensibility and culture that they rarely come up for scrutiny, let alone any serious questioning. Faith is accordingly the primordial substance of experience – it goes to the root, as indeed it is the root – and it fills the vast expanse of awareness, delivering a universe out of chaos. The reason, by contrast, arrives late on the scene, as a graft implanted into the tree of faith. It proceeds to analyse on the fractal edge of cognition and proclaims, aha, aha, I can explain ... not recognising for the most part that all reasoning is circular, a closed entropic sphere, suspended without support in the illimitable void. Where the reason gains purchase, harnessing electricity, for instance, and conjuring a glittering techno-sphere out of the void, it is only because it is nurtured, sustained, imbued with substance – the substance – which is faith.
When thus understood we see that faith – what we call faith – is not narrowly religious in implication, although it is indeed religious in the broad sense of a binding or covering of the nakedness of the soul. In Genesis 3 it is spoken of that covering – as fashioned by man, and as provided by God. Both are ultimately of faith, although differing in the way they are informed, such that faith is prior, foundational and intrinsic, to any worldview one comes to espouse – whether materialist or mystical.
It is this broader understanding which is basic to an appreciation of the nature of faith, although scriptural usage is typically more specific with implicit reference to the good faith – the faith of God as conveyed in the revelation of Jesus Christ. Faith, in this more specific sense, is thus typically distinguished from wisdom of knowledge, where the latter refers to that relative and partial knowledge – of observation and reason – as it were, an extraneous shoot, grafted into the Tree of Life – that primordial Tree in the Garden of God, which is of the nature of faith – meaning the good faith, unalloyed by knowledge or reason. It is in this specific sense, as per the Pauline asseveration, that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
However, not all faith is thus positive, given the broader use of the term. There is such a thing as faith or intuition gone awry, and here we speak of superstition. Clearly then, the intuition, although primary to the reason, is not infallible. As stated, it is a question of information – of how a mind is informed. It is the quality of information which determines the matter – in the religious as in the scientific domain. And here the reason, to render its due, may serve as a corrective. Indeed, it is here that the essential function of the reason is apparent – that of criticising ideas. It is intuition which generates ideas. Without intuition – or faith – there is are no ideas, and so, no universe. All would be chaos as the reason undermines itself in the conflagration of radical doubt. There would be no world, no sensible cosmos – no self, no other, so subject or object – nothing upon which to base a single proposition, which demonstrates that faith is indeed the rock – the core and foundational principle in the realm of mental organisation. The mind or soul must needs believe something insofar as its very existence is predicated upon, and comprised of that, something. The madman – the insight, I believe is due to the psychiatrist Russell Meares – has not lost his reason; he has all but his reason.
Herein moreover lie the grounds for entrenched pathology of belief – for ideology, superstition or faith in the negative sense – that the soul thus misinformed would rather cling to its dysfunctional beliefs, than face existential annihilation in the exposure of rampant all-consuming doubt. It is called the abyss and the dark night of the soul – this radical dissolution of all certainty – and as a passage if initiation, of individuation, of spiritual transformation, it is universally recognised as central to the formation of a viable soul. As also observed Carl Gustav Jung, psychosis is the most direct, if the most perilous, path to individuation. It is perilous indeed, considering the weight of cultural sanctions that are ranged against it. And yet, the experience, in the nature of things, need not be traumatic. It may be of blissful rapture, as per the example of the spiritual birth which is the true Pentecost. The relative ease of the passage is determined by the soul’s inherent disposition as by the spiritual agencies supervening. And whereas the assignation is primarily for the perfecting of the saints (as on this side of the grave), in the greater cosmic context it is the destiny of souls universally.
The reason for this is that culture is a lie – a contrivance, an accommodation – namely in its formal institutional conventions. In the cosmological and spiritual asymptote which is the singularity – the biblical Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end – the soul confronts the ground from which it arose, and thus its original and authentic nature. All contrivance, all that is of artifice, falls away in the disclosure of that which is intrinsic. There is a faith then which is natural and uncontrived. It is the rock, the foundation, as the Bible states, and it is the faith as once delivered to the saints. As states Deuteronomy, the book of the two laws (33:27): The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.
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