PROMETHEAN MAN - A Post In Which Superwoman Explains How The Gods Are Robbed Of Their Fire...

"Men have always tried to be better and grander than they are. Their Promethean endeavours to become supermen, ...or to 'be God', ... though laudable in their intentions regarding the desire ...(even to escape mortality), fail, I think, because of a lack of balance and self-awareness of humanity's place in the universe..."

That, my dear Jonathan, is an involved and intricate way of expressing a simple point.

The practical fact is that today we have a turning point in scientific
evolution. A revolution of man’s view of himself and of his function in the universe which is perpetual self-overcoming. Raised to the highest possible level one might elevate this function by using mythic ideas and images, even by stimulating the gloomy optimism of the Son of Man which, as one of the few unbroken threads in the tissue of Christian philosophical thinking over the past two thousand years has borne and shed its finest fruits, to yield fresh fruit with a new dispensation of Man: The Promethean Man in which scientific and ontological understanding are combined to deliver the world from the world.

There is no mysticism in this!

Nor is this to say that science should proceed as much by faith as by
reason, or that it should reject reason for intuition, but from the point of
view of our present state of knowledge it is no longer possible to deny that,
within certain well-understood limits, science itself is subject to the same
uncertainty relations as is its peculiar power to render life into logic and yet
retain its mystery.

At such moments we are apt to solve the riddle of creation.

Then, of course, there is the question of scale. For such evidence as
there is in quantum electrodynamics by no means disposes of the necessity to
believe that - according to Freddy Hoyle - “astronomers will eventually
discover that much of what they currently believe concerning the behaviour and
formation of galaxies, has to be modified to take account of intelligent
control.”

But, that apart, the important thing to remember is that the future
belongs to the scientist and his all-powerful need for knowledge. Science alone
can lead the world out of its difficulty. No other institution can. Science
holds the key to the greatest age of faith in the history of the world, even if
we cannot define it. For the problem is basically a psychological one and
involves a spiritual recrudescence and enhancement of human values.

This consideration lies at the heart of everything.

Indeed, the Promethean assault upon the Riddle of Creation, both
absolutely and relativistically, is not simply a technological feat, but a
psychological revolution. It is an attempt, is it not, to rediscover something
profound and deep-rooted in the human psyche; an expression, I believe, of both
a penetrating utopian recognition and a desperate search for a new identity on
the part of the men and women who are plainly in need of a more transcending and
persuasive experience than the outdated religious mysticism to which they can no
longer relate. For the chief importance of a new psychological dimension lies
precisely in the fact that ultimately it gives redemptive power to that
irrepressible desire for intellectual scope and spiritual activity which has
always been, as it remains today, a fundamental part of human evolution.

Dreamy