Science: Is it progressive?
Loose Ends July 15th, 2007“[scientists] are seemingly no nearer to a grand theory of everything than we were when we first embarked upon this quest.”
Your comment is echoed in the last words of Isaac Newton, who was perhaps the most significant “proto” scientist: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world. But as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
But the difference between Science and non-science schools of knowledge is that Science is progressive. For example, astrology gets no closer to truth because it cannot find and correct mistakes by comparing itself with reality. “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” Newton.
I can’t see how you can think we are no closer to the theory of everything (TOE) than before. Newton did not know about relativity or quantum mechanics. We know more than he did. This is progress to the TOE. I am not sure if we can reach the TOE but it might happen in my lifetime. I am not sure if you are distinguishing between the TOE (which might be indiscoverable or not) and the possibility of science can understand everything (which also may be impossible).
There is much more to be said on this topic, in light of Wittgenstein etc, etc but that is for another time.
(In the same thread on religion, you commented: “…Dawkins and Hitchens have more pressing purposes at hand, surely having demonstrated the unlikelihood of God they must now demonstrate how science is a more reliable answer to all of our uncertainties.”
This is yet another example of turning the discussion away from religion and on to irrelevant issues.)
Anti Citizen One
July 15th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
I concur it was unhelpful of me to make references to the TOE and to the possibility that science may one day know everything. They are different things entirely.
I shall pass over a detailed comment on TOE as your knowledge of it is better than mine. I would in my defence though point out that I was quoting and paraphrasing the arguments of others.
“This is yet another example of turning the discussion away from religion and on to irrelevant issues”
How so?
There are a variety of concerns posited about deconstructive atheist polemic (not all voiced by religious persons). Does it leave a void? What should replace religion? Can atheism provide a moral framework or it outside of its remit?
These are just some vague top of the head propositions, and I think I know some of what your answers may be. The point I was paraphrasing, and a point which also arose in our discussions on Nietzsche was that having proposed to have demonstrated the falsehood of God and religion no attempt appears to have been made to ‘fill the void’.
This void may not be of any importance to RD and CH for whom there is no void to fill, but what of others for whom an atheism or scepticism has been foisted upon them? Jung and other Transpersonal psychologists talk of a phenomena known as the ‘spiritual crisis’ or ‘spiritual emergency’ some of these events are near psychoid in character (some are resolved by a religious experience, some are resolved by a break from religion) of this RD and CH say nothing. That is what I was enquiring of and I think it is extremely relevant.
Religion and spirituality are not rational phenomena, but are often experiential, intuitional, preturnatural, pre-rational in there manifestation.
It may be that Nietzsche’s prescription that art can fill the void is correct, but RD and CH make no attempt to embrace this aspect of the conversation.
July 15th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
I would just clarify my term ‘deconstructive atheist polemic’. By this I mean an argument from atheism that (as you suggest in another post) forwards the proposition that ‘religion is harmful and should therefore be abolished’ this is distinguishable from a an experience of atheism that can be argued for without reference to abolishing the experience of religion for other people.