On Science, God, and their Illusory Distinction.

On Science, God, and their Illusory Distinction.

I am reminded of the joke – I think it is a Mexican joke – about the Mosquito and the Elephant. This mosquito lands on an elephant’s raw hide and thinks: I’m going to give this elephant a good time.

The elephant feels the mosquito on its back, stands up, and begins to rub its back against a tree, emitting moans and groans. The mosquito, hearing these sounds and feeling the vibration beneath its legs, considers himself successful.

What I find to be the significance of the story is that the male mosquito implements a method, gets the results that he was looking for, but was fundamentally confused about the nature of what was going on. His method ‘worked’, but it said nothing of the Truth; he was none the wiser.

Our Western conception of God is that He is traditionally omni-potent and omni-scient. In fact, it would come as no surprise if the word ‘Science’ emerged from the word ‘Omniscience’. In the absence of a firm belief in such a God in the nineteenth century, people turned to Science to fill His place. In the words of Nietzsche: We did not tear down the old idols just so that we may erect new ones.

Yet despite his plaints, the Dead God to this day haunts the Western Psyche in the guise of Science with a capital ‘S’.

At the root of this fallacy that has slept through more than a hundred years of development in Every Other Field of Study lie several presumptions. The first is that Power is Good.

An omni-potent God was a Just and a Good God, so any method that brings us closer to this ideal is all so Good. The reason that this is easy to deny is that it goes without saying; the a priori value of Power appears incontrovertible to some members of our culture. So Technology becomes an end and an ethic in and of its self. Yet technology by its self, like Art, is not a menace. All so, like Art, its roots are in the primordial Dawn of Man, long before the twi-light of Modern Science. Is it not possible that, like Art, its origin is ultimately unknown and unknowable to us? In one’s Dreams, one can see many inventions and many works of Art one had never seen in the Waking World. So what does one require to make these Platonic forms manifest in Reality? They have to work first in theory, because otherwise not only would we not take risks with them; we would not even find the Funds to facilitate their production!

Yet theoretically we Knew the secret ingredients all along, just like we knew the Possibility of this creation, for in the absence of the ingredients there would have been an absent Possibility.

The reasoning seems less alien once one considers Heidegger’s reversals of Common Sense in both Technology and Art. Art does not come from the Artist. Rather, an artwork creates the Artist whilst the Artist creates the artwork, and Art creates them both.

This is of course of indispensable value to many Artists who would otherwise suffer the burdens of being a Creator, subjecting the Work to too much criticism on the part of the Artist (which they would mistake for self-criticism), rather than respecting it as something that belongs ultimately to Art.

Technology in Heidegger’s view follows a similar pattern. It uses us as much as we use it, a;; most as though it had been there all along long before we encountered it. (which is at least incontrovertibly the case in any Individual Life, so it is primordially easy to imagine.)

The United States’ military strategy for Nuclear War corroborates Heidegger’s point. A man I knew in high repute visited a facility housing missiles. The facility operator explained that, in the event of a foreign attack, the policy was to fire back.

The out-come would be mutually assured destruction, with the exception of the facility, which would be protected by virtue of the retaliation. The aim was not to preserve people, but to preserve Technology.

So the second fallacy is that Science and technology are interchangeable. Yet as I have pointed out they are entirely different entities. Science could be described as a conscious process whereas Technology can be seen to be largely unconscious. This was why Jung attributed the former to his egoic personality. The fallacy is that simply because we are able to produce results that we understand how we do so.

Watts pointed out that the Eastern God performed the entire Universe without knowing How It was Done. The motive was self-evident: To surprise and baffle one’s self by separating off into isolated and imperfect parts.

I have pointed out that to step from Personal Subjectivity to a Universal, one must meet one central requirement.

It is not sufficient to say: You can see a trend, because only by force could you compel others to make a similar observation, only by insult could you elevate your self above those who do not see it, and only by a leap of faith into absurdity could you pretend that others who use the same words to describe the experience are in fact having the same experience. Yet a Universal claim could be possibly sound if one provides an explanation for Why it would be so for multiple and maybe all people.

Due to the relative novelty of the proposition (relative because I do not immediately recall having heard it before), I can understand that considering the idea may feel at first akin to walking off into thin air, as in a cartoon, and looking down to find one has no prior ground to stand on. Yet in philosophy the ground materializes under one’s feet for those who can create new ideas and handle the Vertigo.

Watts meets my criterion by explaining Shiva’s motives – The Why – for being at once omni-present and imperfect and ignorant by the same token. Why a God – or a man in His image (or in man’s self-image, which is nonetheless inferred from conception of God) would desire total Control and Knowledge, pathologically, when the possibilities of eternity and infinity lie available to Him, remains unanswered.

Dm.A.A.