Isn't it amusing how 'science' is always so unscientific.
Now that this new knowledge has had time to percolate through the scientific community, we see that non-dogmatists like Commoner are the first to find their voices. And the story they tell can be of little comfort to Dawkins and the gang. Complexity, once again, confounds and upsets the "just so" stories of our ever humble, grudgingly mortal Masters of the Universe.
What I’m most reminded of, by the Human Genome Project’s results thus far, is the persistent failure of the “science” of alchemy to transmute dross metal into gold. In the Mediaeval ages and later (and maybe sooner), some of the most brilliant and penetrating minds were devoted to facilitating this object. But nobody ever got anywhere. After centuries of trying, the answer always came up: “No, you can’t do that. It is in the nature of things that that should be so.”
So gambling is all you’ve got left to satisfy such cravings….
Some passages from Voegelin on the general context in which the present hush may be whispered:
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We must remind the reader that at the end of the sixteenth century Giordano Bruno had formulated clearly the issue between speculation on the infinite substance of the cosmos and a mathematized science of the “accidences of accidences.” Bruno’s speculation, on the one hand, found no immediate succession.
The “accidences of accidences,” on the other hand, had become the absorbing interest of scholars as well as of a wider public in the centuries of the rising natural sciences. The impressive spectacle of the advancement of science and of the Newtonian system created attitudes and sentiments that have become a decisive ingredient in modern man and modern civilization.
One element in this new complex of sentiments … [is] scientism: the belief in mathematized science as the model science to the methods of which all other sciences should conform.
We must now deal with the complex as a whole, and we shall call it phenomenalism in order to indicate the preoccupation of man with the phenomenal aspects of the world, as they appear in science, and the atrophy of awareness of the substantiality of man and the universe.
Phenomenalism has nothing to do with the method of the advancement of science itself; the term is supposed to designate sentiments, imaginations, and speculations, as well as patterns of conduct determined by them, which originate on occasion of the advancement of mathematized science.
Furthermore, we must beware of the assumption that the advancement of science is the one and only cause of the rise of phenomenalism. The new sentiments and attitudes, while hardly conceivable without the prodigious advancement of science, are not necessitated by it. That phenomenalism could gain the importance that it actually has is primarily due to the atrophy of Christian spirituality and the growth of intramundane sentiments.
The advancement of science is a contributing factor in the process, insofar as its success is apt to fortify intramundane sentiments; and insofar as phenomenalism, grafted on science, has become an important instrument for their expression.
[Eric Voegelin, The History of Political Ideas, Volume VII: The New Order and Last Orientation. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. ]
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EV is daunting. (Personally, I almost had a heart attack the first time I encountered his term, “hypostasization of reality.”) Maybe some notes on the above text might be helpful. (Please beware, this according to my interpretation.)
First, Giordano Bruno was an “Italian philosopher, b. at Nola in Campania, in the Kingdom of Naples, in 1548; d. at Rome, 1600. At the age of eleven he went to Naples, to study "humanity, logic, and dialectic", and, four years later, he entered the Order of St. Dominic, giving up his worldly name of Filippo and taking that of Giordano. He made his novitiate at Naples and continued to study there. In 1572 he was ordained priest.” [Catholic Encyclopaedia on-line] In 1600, however, he was burned at the stake as a heretic of pantheist and Unitarian persuasions.
“The infinite substance of the cosmos” refers ultimately to the life of God and its manifestation in man and nature. It grapples with the questions, “why does anything exist? And why is a given thing the way it is, and not some other way?”
A student of culture and history knows that such ultimate questions have resonated with intelligent human beings for millennia by now. They constitute the formal philosophical discipline called ontology: the study of Being. I conclude that “being” and “substance” are virtually synonymous terms in the contexts of Bruno – and EV.
With the Greeks and the Christians, the result of such questions has been the development of a “science of man,” an anthropology, that is premised on man being a “natural creature,” but also a “spiritual creature.” That is to say, man lives in the space-time dimension that conditions empirical reality; but he is not completely contained, constrained, or determined by empirical conditions. (This is why man is said to have Free Will. But again, this development deduces from classical/Christian premises.)
The “intramundane man” has extension into the infinite; that is, there is a native capacity for transcendence in the nature of man. He lives in at least two time orders, the “natural,” spatio-temporal order in which we all “naturally” live; and also an order that is “outside” or “beyond” time. The mystery is that both orders interleave, or “play” more or less simultaneously, whether we are specifically conscious of this or not.
(But this would be the subject of a whole ‘nother thread. I’d love to get back to it some time; but right now, we’re out of time and bandwidth.)
“Accidences of accidences” is Bruno’s quaint way of signifying a chain of causation that never reaches out beyond the intramundane dimension. That is, it confines itself to the study of causal relations among observable phenomena – the way science must.
But that supposition suggests to me that a very great deal of the human picture must be deliberately erased in order to make this “understanding” turn out “right.”
If you properly understand the point of the phenomenalist exercise, you know it seeks to account for man and the universe without reference to anything lying beyond time and space such that sensory perception can register. Its basic definition (it doesn’t even have an anthropology) is that man is abstract individual, with no ties to the past, the most tenuous ties to the present (living in TV land and admiring hard-core sophistry as much as he seems to do) no expectations of the future, and no interest in understanding his own existence as having extension and expression beyond a world which itself is condemned to intramundane existence.
I figure you get “accidences of accidences” problems anytime you get your fundamental premise wrong. As arguably, the Human Genome Project has done exactly this.
But then, the point and purpose of the Human Genome Project from the beginning was to factually establish the theory of “accidences of accidences,” not to refute it.
It’s late. Must be time to stop. Anyone wants to continue with anything above, please just give me a yell. Thank you for a wonderful discussion, Phaedrus. Peace and love, bb.