Wednesday 11 June 2014

Devolutionary Progress

The Impossibility of Science

The world of science is in a parlous condition.  It is not a recent phenomenon.  However, its rotten fruits seem to appear more frequently.  Who would have thought that we would see "official science" sanctioned by actual governments along with the putative government of the United Nations--which "science" has then moved aggressively to silence criticism and debate.  It has also been caught withholding and fabricating data, and even argued that those who oppose should suffer imprisonment and other legal sanctions.  Yet this has become "normal" in the vast propaganda overreaches of climate science and its spurious hypothesis of man-caused global warming. 

Something is going on beneath the surface.  How could a scientific position cause such alarm that to oppose it or question its veracity would invite civil sanctions?  What kind of society would act in that way?  An increasingly primitive one.  Socrates was condemned to death for the heinous crime of corrupting the youth of Athens.  Was it because of his bi-sexuality?  No.  Was it due to his pederasty?  No.  It was due to his suggestion that the gods may be mythical, not real.  For this "corruption", he was condemned to a big sip of  hemlock.  The question is, Why has modern, official science become so corrupted that it more resembles the primitive ignorance of ancient Athens than a modern, advanced state? 

To answer the question we need to consider the philosophical and religious foundations of science.
  Since the attenuating of Christendom, science has undergone two philosophical developments.  The first was a transition from believing the natural order was created and maintained by the ceaseless personal activity on an Omnipotent God to a view that the material order was simply a vast machine--mechanistic, impersonal, blind, yet perpetually sustaining. 

Christopher Dawson explains the consequences of this first shift:
From the 17th century onwards the modern scientific movement has been based on the mechanistic view of nature which regards the world as a closed material order moved by purely mechanical and mathematical laws.  All the aspects of reality which could not be reduced to mathematical terms and regarded as resulting from the blind operation of material forces were treated as mere subjective impressions of the human mind, and in so far as man himself was viewed as a by-product of this vast mechanical order, they were inevitably deprived of any ultimate reality.  [Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945),  p. 219.]
The initial consequence, then, was a dehumanising of man that implicitly removed any substantial significance to human reason, thought, ideas, beliefs, art, creativity, and all the goals, standards, and motivations of human behaviour.  All was merely subjective, not actually real.
A universe of this kind seems to leave no room for moral values or spiritual forces; indeed, it is hard to see what place the mind of the scientific observer himself has in the blind and endless flux of configurations of atoms which is the substance of reality.  [Ibid.] 
The first philosophical shift to a blind mechanistic world of Nature appeared to liberate man.  In fact it devalued him and made him irrelevant and disconnected to the cosmos.   The second philosophical shift was even more devastating.  If men, including scientists, were mere purveyors of arbitrary and inconsequential opinion, the same must hold for the scientist and to scientific endeavour.  The early-modern scientists believed that there was an epistemological congruence between the observer and the natural world.  The eye and the mind was fit to observe and think about what was actually there.  It could discover and comprehend things as they actually were.  There was an ontological harmony between atoms and the mind.  God had made it so. 

But in the modern world this broke down philosophically
If the laws of mathematics are simply the creation of the human mind, they are no infallible guide to the ultimate nature of things.  They are a conventional technique which is no more based on the eternal laws of the universe than is the number of degrees in a circle or the number of yards in a mile.  Physical science, in fact, is nothing more than measurement.  It does not reveal the intrinsic nature of things, but deals simply with their quantitative relations and variations. . . . Thus scientific laws have the same relation to nature as the printed score of one of Beethoven's sonatas has to the music, or as Professor Eddington has said, they have as much resemblance to the real qualities of nature that a a telephone number has to the individual subscriber whom it represents.  [Ibid., p. 225.]
Under this view, the mathematician and the physicist became little more than literary novelists playing number games, or creators of chess puzzles.  Yet, so many mathematicians work as if it were not so.  As Paul Davis has observed:
It is often said that mathematicians are Platonists on weekdays and formalists at weekends.  While actually working no mathematics, it is hard to resist the impression that one is actually engaged in the process of discovery, much as in an experimental science.  The mathematical objects take on a life of their own, and often display totally unexpected properties.  On the other hand, the idea of a transcendent realm of mathematical Ideas seems too mystical for many mathematicians to admit, and if challenged they will usually claim that when engaging in mathematical research they are only playing games with symbols and rules. [Paul Davis, cited by Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony 1700-1999. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.82.]
Davis suggests that the philosophy underlying mathematical endeavour today is at odds with the reality of experience of mathematicians as they work the discipline.  But the philosophy is the ultimate controlling official narrative.  Officially, maths is only playing games.  It is not reality.  It does not describe the configurations of  reality in the natural order.

This principle of merely playing games has spread progressively through a whole host of scientific disciplines.  Thus it comes as no surprise, then,  that Climate Science is made up of computer models, speculative projections, and compulsion.  That's all there is.  That's all there can be.  The universe, including our world, is essentially unknowable to man, who can only play games with symbols, rules, and numbers.

As science has become more and more metaphysical and speculative in its operations, so dissent and scepticism comes to be viewed more and more as heresy, a disturbing of the youth of Athens.  Hot on its heels come the sanctions of the state.  And so it has come to pass. 

Similar observations can be made about evolutionism.  Evolutionism is only a game, because philosophically and epistemologically that's all it ever can be.  If it were true, it could never be formulated.  Dissent, therefore, must be punished, and swiftly.  Science progressively falls under the heavy hand of the Collective Borg.  Neither it, nor the Borg, will survive. 

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