The following is the abstraction of a topic currently featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman
“The shore hath
vanished, now hath fallen from me the last chain - The boundless roareth around
me, far away sparkle for me space and time...!”
Nietzsche
The Nobel
laureate Steven Weinberg once said that “One of the great achievements of
science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be
religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious.”
Which tells us very little about religion, but a great deal about the scope and
latitude of science.
Science, it has been said, is a
humble and, in its way, a very narrow vocation. Prompted by nonhuman emotions
and perceptions, it is certainly unaffected by any trace of religious empathy.
You do not have to believe in anything but yourself. It has no creed but
reason. Devoid of rites and sacraments, but robust on miracles, the scientist
is a truly free being. What’s more, there is no dogma to this freedom. His
language may be inflexible, incisive, inventive, compelling, poetic, and
indelibly rational, but - to tell the whole truth - the basic assumption of
science is not determinism. Quite the reverse, it is a modern mistake to
imagine that science provides certainty. It’s fair to say in fact, that science
holds the key to the greatest age of faith in the history of the world, even if
we cannot define it. The callous among us may propose that those common
principles and aspiration add up to nothing more than a tendency to turn our
conscience into an instrument of analysis and enquiry. But don’t be mislead.
Profound affinities are revealed between the religious and scientific
conceptions of the same culture. Indeed, my own view is that the mutual
dependence of most modern epistemological and physical theories has never
previously emerged with the same prominence. Perceived with a deep wordless
understanding, science is, in the final analysis, a numen of the highest order,
the primary element from which all future motivation proceeds. It is the
fulcrum of causal necessity. Like the Riddle of Creation, it comprises the
incontrovertible formulation of an idea. Wherever you kill it, its roots just
regrow, more vigorous and energetic.
Sceptical, then, scientists may be,
and their thinking clear, concise and unambiguous, but ultimately their great
calling is that of truly pious men, recognizably the story of religious
Puritanism in another setting, impelling everywhere to great efforts of
creation. Their methods may seem incompatible with the ancient
theology offered by the scriptures and a hierarchy of priests, but knowledge is only an educated form of belief. And like all beliefs, if it
claims to be based on the observable and quantifiable, it is in truth the
effective religion of our time, an expression, indeed, of something eternal and universally valid, and
its dogma the systematic exposition of the riddle of creation. Scientific scepticism, accordingly, is not an assault upon, but rather the
corroboration of all that which at its most sublime secured the answers by way
of vision, not abstraction. For even if the preferred terms are the ‘Big Bang’
and the ‘Theory of Everything’, these merely reaffirm the already sanctioned
principles of Genesis and the Story of Creation. Indeed, there can be no
question of a separate discipline. Physics carries a whole mythology of
concepts into causal-allegorical continuation and repositions them without amending
any of the facts. As a matter of fact, if the Theory of Everything were an open
book, one could comfortably place it alongside the Hebrew Bible or
Bhagavad-Gita, the New Testament and the Koran,
adding a dimension of depth without sacrificing the essential nature of
its messianic promise: La Ilaha Ila Allah
- there is no mathematic but mathematics! For “only so can we understand,
as something necessary, the fact that the greatest mathematical thinkers, the
creative artists of the realm of numbers, have been brought to the decisive
mathematical discoveries of their several cultures by a deep religious
intuition.”[1]
Thus, it is only by the logic of
numbers as the principle of a world-order of comprehensible things, that the
human understanding gains power over the universe. Science is the Return
Triumphant, the Second Coming of Prometheus, the last construction of Faustian
religiousness. It is theology for atheists, the breath of Zeus for logicians.
Indeed, it may sound reactionary or even heretical, depending on your point of
view, but for me, even in the twenty-first century, the prophetic conception of
science as a search for salvation is still a form of Gnosis, and the knowledge
and mastery of time and space at the centre of its mysteries.
Religious piety, humility,
subjection, and meekness are a liability. In fact, to encourage the process
whereby the ego blindly hands itself over to some pathetic effigy of itself, is
not to honour God, frankly, but to offend His genius. Man and God being mutually
dependent require the element of transcendence, not by way of an allegory to be
idolized, but as an engine to serve a purpose. Melancholy, inward looking and
austere, orthodox Christianity is, by contradistinction, little more than an
accretion of cultural norms. It simply cannot exist in an ideological vacuum.
It has nothing to offer but history. It is no longer a religion. It is an
institutional ailment. And this constitutes the tragic greatness and, at the
same time, the greatest weakness of Western culture. There is no future to its
credo. I advocate hubris - which is no mere conceit,
but an articulation of the ethical judgment of the world conceived as an
anthropic system. Indeed, I may well be prejudiced, but to me the most
prophetic, evocative statement of the nineteenth century is Friedrich
Nietzsche’s “Dead are all the Gods: now do we desire the Superman to live.
Let this be our final will at the great noontide!”
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