The Source of Meaning - By Kevin Solway

The Source of Meaning

The King is dead. Long live the King.

Religion is succeeded by the blind worship of science.  Scientism, the religion of "Science" - ironically distinct and remotely distant from real science - is becoming the source of meaning in our age. We scoundrels must of necessity choose our own values and meaning, but we invariably choose them to be dictated by the authority of fantasy.

Why do we live? "Because that's the purpose of our genes", say the adherents of scientism. Yet genes do not have purpose, says science and reason. Genes are mere bunches of atoms, that either replicate or not. They have no purpose, and Nature cares not what they do. Nature isn't the slightest bit pleased when things replicate, and nor is it at all concerned when they don't. Science, and not scientism, seeks to map this Nature - to reflect its form.

Science is descriptive, rather than prescriptive. It cannot tell us what is good or bad. It cannot provide us with value.  If we value truth, then we take that value with us to science.  We don't get it from science. There's no scientific experiment that can prove the value of truth, just as there's no scientific experiment that can prove the value of life or of death.  Scientism, however, is not science, and it has a proof for everything.

In scientism, truth and value are quite literally in numbers. "Many people believe X." "The consensus is X." "My colleagues agree." "There are a number of books on the subject." "I have received no complaints." "There is much support." Truth is by popular vote. The more Nature does it, the more right it is. It is the authority of DNA - the authority of the tradition of Nature itself. And whereas in ordinary religion the logical fallacy of choice is the appeal to the authority of some holy book, in scientism it is the appeal to the authority of the number (argumentum ad numerum).  For the adherents of scientism, numbers represent the only real value, and these become the very substance of their life.

People become numbers. The numbers become their horizon - their all. They are just copies.

                                                                                    - Kierkegaard

If you explain to these numerous fellows that they are constantly, in every waking moment, appealing to the fallacy of the number, you are wasting your breath, because they don't know anything except the number. They cannot hear you, because existence requires contrast. And for this same reason such people don't exist as individuals. They have no self, and no soul, since the soul is precisely the self, and is the genius in man.

Samuel Butler accurately describes this soulless culture - the culture of the number - in his novel Erewhon, when he visits the hallowed "Colleges of Unreason".

"It is not our business," he said, "to help students to think for themselves. Surely this is the very last thing which one who wishes them well should encourage them to do. . . ." In some respects, however, he was thought to hold somewhat radical opinions, for he was President of the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge, and for the Completer Obliteration of the Past.

                                               

Ours is an age in which the man who thinks for himself is deemed to be a dangerous megalomaniac, and if he should dare to share his thoughts with even one other person then he is also a "cult leader" to be feared and reviled. Ours is a culture that is geared to minimize such unpleasantness by discouraging, and denying the individual thinker, who creates his own values, shines his own light, and follows his own star.

The hate and the fear that the common people have for the individual thinker is the hate and the fear they have for their own true, buried, selves. What they see in the individual thinker is what they fear for themselves.

Can thou give thyself thine evil and thy good, setting up thy will as a law? Canst thou be thine own judge and the avenger of thine own law? Even so is a star cast out into the void, and into the icy breath of solitude. 

                           - Nietzsche, in "Thus Spake Zarathustra"

What people don't want to be reminded of, is that, to the degree that one has a mind at all, and to the degree that one makes conscious choices, then it is impossible to obtain values from anywhere other than oneself. For if a person gets their values from a book, then they are personally choosing to believe that book. And if they get their values from another person, then they are choosing to believe that person. And if they get their values from a dream, they are choosing to believe the dream. Therefore, for the sake of "sanity", and for the sake of "others", conscious choice is denied. Not only is the individual thinker denied, but the mind and the very self are denied. Human becomes machine, and the sleeper is lost in a dream.

Science arose by accident in the brief space when one great orthodoxy was loosening its hold and the new great orthodoxy had not yet reached its full strength. The first orthodoxy was that of religion which dominated the dark ages. The second orthodoxy is that of the belief in society, which is dominating the dark age now beginning.

                                                                           - Celia Green

By Kevin Solway

The Philosophy Takeaway 'The Meaning of Life' Issue 29

Dogma, religion and its sometimes contempt for science - By Philip Overal

Dogma, religion and its sometimes contempt for science

  So, this months topic is religion and science. Alone, you could write volumes. I love both these subjects. Taken together, what you get is a history of reaction and spite.

  The issues are that deeply held beliefs spur the religious side to deny science legitimacy. The most notable moment of this was the Copernican revolution. Copernicus, through his theories, challenged the view of the world held by religion. Copernicus avoided the ire of the church, but it fell instead upon Galileo, whose works supported the view that the earth revolves around the sun. Dogma at the time held that the earth was the centre of the universe, and the evidence Galileo offered caused controversy. For this, he spent the rest of his life under house arrest at the order of the church.

  This shows up the main issue. Dogma. In the film of the same name, the 13^th disciple Rufus, notes “he (Jesus) said man kind got it all wrong by taking a good idea and building a belief structure on it...you can change an idea, changing a belief is trickier. People die for it, people kill for it”. Dogma and belief, at their most extreme, fight against science.

  Islam and Christianity both have big proponents of biblical and koranic literalism - which is a problem. Once, a priest counted back through the bible, and discovered the world was made in 4004 BC. The earth is 6 billion years old. One of these things doesn't mesh

  Yet the bible, claim some Christians is the literal, infallible word of god. It can't be wrong. Science must be. Science, they claim, is conspiracy, put forth by the devil

  Well, now you have an issue. And this ties in for all things. Where creationist's accept the universe, they deny evolution. They tie themselves in knots to explain the moon, and the flood, and so on, as natural occurring events, attempting to co-opt the scientific paradigm, whilst evading its most important strictures

  What are the structures of the scientific paradigm? Observation, test, result, conclusion. You learned it at school. You start with an aim. Personally, I quite like it when the aim is “I want to see what happened when you apply X to Y” but, alas, the age when you could just do this kind of science is long gone (although the ignoble awards, show productive research that often seems to be of this sort).

  Then you predict something. You don't have to do this. I’m sure a lot of scientists went in not knowing. However, with so much theory about, you can often make a prediction. This means there’s theory backing it up.

  Then you need a method, which is rigorous and fair, perform your experiment, or gather your samples, and then, in your results and conclusion, try to work out what it all means. Good science should go through this whole thing. A lot of time should be spent on method. A lot of time should be spent explaining your conclusions. When you’ve done that, you see how it changes your view of the world. That’s the most important key to the scientific method. It self-corrects. It changes to match the world. Nothing is set in stone, so to speak, only that we should push closer to the truth, and be willing to examine and re examine everything

  So, back to religion. Many religious types feel compelled to try and co-opt this. Science like language offers a veneer or “properness” to something. Add some super script numbers, go ahead and use some solid speeds. Suggest scientific principles are at work. But this is all done with the conclusion written. The aim of the paper is to make sure prediction and conclusion match. Evidence is cherry picked. And dogma is saved

  This paradigm is done for a lot of things. Religious types use it to try and deny evolution, and explain the flood. “God did it” is not good enough. It needs to be more 'sciencey'.

  Homeopaths do it. So do drug companies, probably with an increasing amount of competence in hiding the shallowness of their efforts.

  But whilst drug companies do it to turn a profit, the religious types seem to feel compelled to do so, to prove they are right. Its not enough to believe themselves, everyone else must believe. It must be true. Every logical fallacy, and many non-logical fallacies, are met in this effort. Appeals to authority are common (the authority is often the bible).

  Science can't be true. It challenges god.  The church must be in the science class room. Over the past umpteen years, there has been a bitter fight to get first creationism, and then Intelligent Design, into the science class rooms in the conservative American states.

  This is because evolution (over which there was a court battle in the 1920s) is seen as godless, and wrong. If children are taught it, the literal word of the bible will be challenged. Dogma must be defended. Children must learn only the biblical way.

   And the sad thing is, it needn't be this way. Religion is not for everyone. I am an atheist. But religion is not incompatible with science. God can know things, God can exist in a world of science, being the first cause, knowing everything. This doesn't require one to wash ones hand of the bible. Further more, there is the view that it was divinely inspired, but interpreted by men. Fallible and trapped by limits to their knowledge.

  Science does not preclude faith. It never has. But dogmas pull has tugged many people against science. It was not enough to have faith that god set it up. That gods about in the back ground. You have to prove it to others, lest they challenge you. This kind of fight seems insecure. And its sad to watch.

  Did god make the universe? I don't know. We will never know. Some questions will never get a proper answer. What I do know is that if it did make the universe, it just switched the on button. Its existence did not, can not, invalidate science. And when I'm asked to believe otherwise, I just feel saddened by the lack of reason, (in an enlightenment sense) .

By Philip Overal

How many more will desire destroy? - By Selim 'Selim' Talat

How many more will desire destroy?

The swirling vortex of desire forever threatens to suck us into its eye and toss our shattered hulls hurtling through the sky to collapse back into the amoral waves.

If you were asked to summarize the strongest element of human nature in a word, you would be making a wise decision to reply 'desire'. To be human is to desire. Yet before we open up this artery of thought, let me try and define the word desire in philosophical terms.

Desire comes before choice. It has to. We cannot choose to desire something. Desire is a reactive, pulling force to some material object external to us. At the same time, we have inside us machinery that allows us to desire in the first place. So, desire is a longing for something outside of us, that exists in addition to the ability to choose (and is not necessarily stronger than choice), and we have a natural inclination toward this desire. In other words, desire is the product of an emptiness inside, constantly provoked by some external force.

But why does desire destroy some people and not others? What force inside a person makes them more resistant to desire than another? Should we be more resistant to desire? Are the happiest among us not the ones who allow themselves to be carried along by this force?

What does Desire do to us?

Desire does not relate to happiness, but to satiation. The anticipation of desires fulfilment is itself what the body remembers when it nostalgically fantasizes over its past pleasures. In effect, the greater the speed at which desire can be satiated, the less satisfying the satiation of that desire, yet the more seductive the fulfillment of that desire (the easier it is to access a desire, the less pleasure it will bring, yet the very fact that this desire can be easily satiated makes it a more hounding force).

Desire is a habitual force, engrained in us. The desires we have become an essential part of our identities, regardless of how detrimental they are. To try and overcome a desire, therefore, is to shed part of what binds us together. Every morning we slip back into our identities and seek after our goals - often that goal is the satiation of some desire. Quite simply put, desire gives us something to do. Without this busy chase after the tail-of-want, we would forever question how it would have felt to have caught it, and this feeling cannot be extinguished.

Many religions are littered with examples of asceticism (denying oneself the fulfilment of material desire). These romantic religions are damned to self-pity: By recognising fulfilment of desire as pleasure and then denying it, the religious figure is asking to be looked upon as a sacrificer. Yet this ascetic is just as empty as someone forever trying fill the 'leaky vessel' of want with the 'clichéd metaphorical water of satiation'. Denial of something is nothing to build ones personality upon. Polarizing oneself with the greater mass, and thinking oneself good for not participating in something is a negative means of defining oneself. The faith in God/nirvana that monks/nuns supposedly seek in the place of material fulfilment is just as much a whimsical dream. Asceticism - it's a load of bollocks!

The religious drives away from the material world will never succeed anyhow - the power of something shiny and plastic will win over "higher spiritual goals" every-time. The only way to overcome the endless tugging, clutching at things beyond us is not to play holier-than-thou, but to argue that those desires would never lead to happiness in the first place - thus we are not denying ourselves by turning away from mass consumption, we are actually approving of ourselves (for what should replace endless outward desire, but a philosophic introspection and the cultivation of ones own creativity; yet this is the seed of another article).

If each mastered their own desires, what would happen?

It is foolish to be arrogant. We all have desires we succumb to, be it sex, lust for power, food, gadgets, war-gaming miniatures and so on. The question is not whether humanity can escape its desiring doom, the question is to what extent humanity will limit the damage it does to itself and its surroundings.

Desire overrides a persons moral codes; it overwhelms the barricades a person has prepared against the impending flood. It drives people to act in an irrational way. It cuts off understanding of cause and effect, it blinds us to consequences.

If everyone we lived with was able to understand and to some extent control their desires, then our world as we knew it would cease to function. The foolish neo-peasantry, forever running upon the treadmill of work would have nothing driving them to perform tedious, machinate and/or physically demanding tasks if they did not have some trivial reward to pursue. We live in a society where being wise with power would lead to its collapse - thrift would clog the engines of civilization and the walls will crumble. Desire, on a wider scale, is the only thing maintaining the alienating, miserable (yet sadly necessary) experience individuals have of consumerism. Only as an individual can one duck out of this seductive (but ultimately fruitless) game, and live ones selfish life free from shopping malls, pointless purchases, and fast foods.

For the greater masses to wake up and realize they are living a lie is too terrifying a change for one to comprehend, far less wish for.

By Selim 'Selim' Talat