Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
Science : Knowledge Religion : Meaning
Click image for enlargement
Post 81.April 22, 2019
Wall of Alienation : Religion v Science
Magic vs Mechanism or Both?
The New Atheism movement was a backlash4 from the aggressive political campaigns of evangelical Christians in the 70s & 80s, which was partly a reaction toward the radical free love liberalism of the 60s. These were not quarrels over religious doctrines, but political clashes between conservative traditional beliefs and reformist unconventional views. There are really only two areas of direct conflict between Scriptural Religion and Empirical Science : Creation vs Evolution, and Magic vs Mechanism. Creation myths are explanations for the existence of the natural world as imagined by people who were not there at the beginning. Evolution is a logical explanation for the emergence of the panoply of species, yet again it doesn’t go back to the beginning. The current scientific myth of origins is the Big Bang theory. But even that mechanical rewind of astronomical history fades into incomprehensibility as it nears the ultimate point-of-origin for space & time.
So, no one really knows how or why our world came into existence. Most religions presume that it was intentionally created by some transcendent creative power. But science prefers a back-story that has no ultimate beginning, just an eternal regression of universes more or less like ours. Since it’s anybody’s guess where the world came from, I have created my own myth. But I don’t claim that it’s true, or that anyone should believe it implicitly. It’s merely a story that sounds reasonable, given the physical and meta-physical evidence available. The Enformationism myth, along with the theory of Intelligent Evolution, crosses the lines between religion and science at certain points. But the story involves no magic, except for the sudden appearance of our universe from nowhere. Every other event is compatible with verifiable scientific data. However, that leaves a lot of mysteries to explore with an open mind – especially those related to the human mind.
I don’t expect many people to give up their romantic belief in magic & miracles, or their hope for ultimate justice in a re-booted future-life. But those of us who are more realistic and pragmatic don’t have to become spoil-sports or killjoys. Instead, we should take a sort of benevolent parental attitude toward the philosophical immaturity of our fellow men. After all, our cave-man brains were wired for basic unhurried hunter-gatherer routines, and are ill-prepared for complex modern fast-paced civilized-technological lifestyles. The toothy things we instinctively fear are no longer such a problem, but the abstract threats that we should now be concerned about often creep-up upon us unnoticed. Religions have a variety of tried & truish methods for dealing with ancient fears & hopes, while Science is still grasping for a handle on human emotions. Until our passion-ate fellow men are transformed into apathetic trans-human cyborgs, we will have to deal with irrational behavior, even in those at the top levels of society. For the time being, the either/or approach to religion & politics should be toned-down, in order to preserve the peace for our our crowded multi-cultural polyglot world. Religious authorities hate to admit that Science (mechanism) has given humanity god-like power over Nature; and scientific professionals try to avoid the mysterious Void5 (quantum) at the foundation of their materialistic cosmo-logy. So both need to back-off their inflammatory rhetoric.
End of Post 81
Sagan’s Hope
Sagan noted that “we are in need of other sorts of myth, myths of encouragement. Many religions, from Hinduism to Gnostic Christianity to Mormon doctrine, teach that — as impious as it may sound — it is the goal of humans to become gods.”
“Or consider a story in the Jewish Talmud left out of the Book of Genesis. (It is in doubtful accord with the account of the apple, the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall, and the expulsion from Eden.) In the Garden, God tells Eve and Adam that He has intentionally left the Universe unfinished. It is the responsibility of humans, over countless generations, to participate with God in a ‘glorious’ experiment — ‘completing the Creation.’”
This shows that Sagan was perfectly aware of the interpretation of religion that I am proposing: The promises of religion are true, because we’ll make them true.
I doubt that Sagan had such a “glorious experiment” in mind when he called for a recon-ciliation with religion. But my own worldview could be interpreted as describing the Big Bang and Evolution as an experiment in world-making. Apparently, the Programmer left the the progressive program open-ended, to allow Freewill and Chance to partly determine the ultimate outcome of the evolutionary process. The Turing Church is a technological futurist society that expects computing power to eventually become god-power. It’s similar to my own view, except that my Programmer is eternal and transcendental.
Pro vs Con
Science is about adapting to change, thus tends to be liberal and progressive. Religion is about holding on to the greatest hits of the past, hence tends to be conservative and traditional. BothAnd is about adapting to change while saving the best solutions from past experience, thus it’s pro-gressive where change is needed, and con-servative where the status quo is working well. Deciding when change is necessary is a political problem, because people differ in their perceived needs. So democratic methods must be followed to find the best win-win compromise
Intelligent Evolution
I developed my own theory of intentional evolution by reasoning backward from the evidence that Information is the fundamental element of our world. Since the term means the “act of informing” I began to look for evidence of an Actor, Enformer or Creator. I recently learned that Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-founder of the Theory of Evolution, had gone beyond Darwin’s Origin of Species to propose his own Theory of Intelligent Evolution that required divine intervention at the beginning. **https://evolutionnews.org/2016/02/misunderstandin_1/ **https://www.forbes.com/2009/02/05/alfred-russel-wallace- intelligent-design-opinions-darwin09_0205_michael_flannery.html#42b086e361bc
4. Backlash : The New Atheists were not counter-attacking the tribal religions of localized pre-civilized people such as Native Americans. The threat they responded to came from empire building evangelical mono-theistic religions. Christianity and Islam believe they are privy to sacred truths, for which they have a mandate to preach to the whole world, by word or by sword. It’s the latter approach that demanded a bold counter-offensive. The underground atheist movement came into public consciousness after the shocking religion-inspired terrorism of 9/11/2001.
5. Void : The ancient Materialistic philosophy of Atomism assumed that there was a solid foundation to reality. But now Quantum theory has concluded that the solidity is an illusion. Quantum fields are indeed discontinuous, but not in the form of Atoms & Void, Instead, the field consists only of creative Potential, which is void of objects. See Chaos in the glossary. As I envision it, the border between statistical field and objective reality is the transitional zone of fuzzy BothAnd, where possibility becomes actuality. Or in mathematical terminology, potential “Ø” (nothing, void) becomes actual “1” (some-thing, atom). Creation of something from nothing is the essence of Magic. In the Enformationism thesis, Divine Creation is not a once & for all act, but an evolutionary process of sequential magic.
NEXT
BACK
Forum
