The Science of Redemption.

Interesting post. You seem to place the blame for current human problems on religions, idealisms, economies, etc. I personally would probably place the blame first on selfish human nature (or instinct), and say that through history that selfish nature has missused all of the above (religions etc.) to get us to the place we are today. (I might add science to the list of missuesed ideas as well, as we can see that people have at times twisted it and used it to control other people) Do you see a mass recognition of science as truth as changing human nature? Wouldn't people be still be selfish no matter what the ruling idea is?

Just a few thoughts, but thanks for that well written post.

Adopting science or whatever group of ideas is not biological evolution, it's just cultural evolution. Scientific inquiry, however intuitive it is, partakes of culture, and I don't think there's any basis behind adhering to science as if there is some evolutionary inevitability behind it. In fact, our improved survival that science potentiates may be a negative evolutionary selector, because it creates pollutants that may affect our fertility and it creates population sizes that may not be ultimately sustainable.

That aside, you're talking about change on a 35,000 year time scale, and yet our current state of scientific knowledge is basically 400 years old. Many of our current technologies are less than a generation old. Industrialization is less than 200 years old. So what do you expect when the world changes so quickly as compared with previous evolution?

I have a problem with using the idea of "moral redemption" in concert with adopting science. First, it implies that we actually know what we're doing -- whereas time and again we've seen that our ability to invent far outpaces our ability to understand. This hearkens back to the hubris of 100 years ago, where we dug canals and rerouted rivers to conquer nature, we built unsinkable ships, and we launched cannisters of mustard gas for a war in which 4 empires collapsed amidst the shock that national pride when too heavily flexed quickly leads to a crisis of existence. Second, redemption requires a look backwards, not a look at the present -- our job shouldn't be to make up for past evils -- it should be to solve current evils and prevent future evils. And in 2008 we're not in the same circumstances as we were even in 2001, let alone 1914, 1945, etc. Finally, moral redemption is not about science. You can use modern physics to give a country power or to blow up a city. You can use modern medicine to cure the ill or to execute prisoners. The morality has to do with how science is employed, not whether it is employed.

As for why we're in the position of even talking about redemption, think again about how young science is compared with our civilization (by this I mean a cultural continuity that goes back thousands of years). Certainly at least three factors played a role in our scientific discoveries being delayed (and therefore their incorporation into a more scientific view of the world).

1. The decline and disintegration of Rome (itself over several hundred years) left in its wake a lot of cultural discontinuity. Widespread literacy did not become a priority again on the European continent until Charlamagne. The economic spoils of Rome largely went to the Byzantines, who spent a lot of time on art and architecture, but not so much on philosophy or science.

2. The separation of "Christiandom" from the Islamic world meant that many of the great mathematical and medical discoveries in Islam (plus access to the philosophical texts of ancient Greece) were not accessible to Europe.

3. The political dominance of the Church in Europe, from Constantine all the way until the Reformation, made it almost impossible for people to generate new ideas without risking an accusation of heresy. Plato and Aristotle, great though they were, became dogmatized by their incorporation into Church theology, and the greatest thinkers in this time period (from Augustine to Aquinas) were really theologians and not philosophers (in their subject matter). There was such a paralysis and stagnation of ideas through the Middle Ages that we needed to have a Renaissance just to figure out where Europe had actually been 1200 years earlier. And only then, after clearing our blurry eyes in the Renaissance, could we get an age with Galileo (and more importantly Copernicus and Newton); only then could we get Calvin and Luther giving Christian civilization permission to break from Papal doctrine; only then could we get Spinoza allowing us to analyze religion from outside rather than within.

So I think we need some time to culturally adapt to our current state of being -- and that will assume that we don't destroy ourselves first.

Aedes,

Thank you for an intelligent and fairly well-informed reply. I was just yesterday complaining that I must radically summarize long and complex arguments to get anyone to read them, only to have points I've omitted raised as if they were disproof. Were I at liberty to go to greater lengths I would have made the argument for what I call 'Conscious Evolution' in full as a prelude to this discussion. As it is, it was reduced to two short paragraphs.



Shreeve writes: 'If human evolution were an epic, the Upper Paleolithic would be the chapter where the hero comes of age. Suddenly, after millennia of progress so slow that it hardly seems to progress at all, human culture appears to take off in what the writer John Pfeiffer has called a "creative explosion."'

I propose that this abrupt change was triggered by conscious recognition of the relation between artifact and artificer. Before then it had been an instinctual aspect of proto-human behavior to connect the sounds or footprints of animals, for example, with ideas of food or danger, but as an instinctual aspect of behavior, the idea was not available for conscious re-application.

Once it was - it was, and man began to ask 'who made me?' - 'who made the world?' and 'what can I make?' He began to refine his tools and make art, and hunter-gather tribal groups formed multi-tribal and social groups by employing the great artificer in the sky as an unquestionable authority for social law, but these are ramifications of what was a relatively discrete event, even while the consequences are still being played out today.

By doing so I aim to show that the proto-human condition, wherein man acted in the course of the artifact-artificer relationship without conscious recognition of it, is similar in many respects to the way in which we apply science as a tool while ignoring science as a rule for the conduct of our affairs.

I then go on to suggest that recognizing the truth value of scientific knowledge will trigger another evolutionary leap forward, but you do not seem to agree that science has the necessary qualities for you go on to say: 'You can use modern physics to give a country power or to blow up a city. You can use modern medicine to cure the ill or to execute prisoners. The morality has to do with how science is employed, not whether it is employed.'

This is correct if science is employed as a tool - but not if the truth-value of science is recognized, and scientific knowledge employed as a rule for the conduct of human affairs. As I say: 'In scientific terms there are no human groups - national, racial or otherwise, but a single species inhabiting a single planetary environment.' What motive does this provide for blowing up a city? It is only divided by scientifically groundless religious, political and economic ideologies - in terms of these ideas such immoralities are rationalized.



While science was employed to produce the mustard gas - hubris cannot justly be attributed to science. Hubris was a function of asserting religious, national and racial identity in face of the scientific facts - and using science as a tool in pursuit of the immoral ends rationalized in these terms. Thus it is not that 'our ability to invent far outpaces our ability to understand' but that we willfully misunderstand.

As an example, consider the capitalist economic motives that bind us into dependence on fossil fuels, when using renewable energy to electrolyze water, and thereby produce hydrogen/oxygen fuel has been a possible technology, at least since 1890 when it was employed by Professor Paul La Cour to heat and light the High School at Askov, in Denmark where he worked.

In relation to your last three points - I have elsewhere discussed at length the Papal Court of the Inquisition established by the Church of Rome in 1233, in response to the return of the works of Aristotle and Plato to Europe from the Eastern half of the former Roman Empire. I've related this to the imprisonment and torture of Galileo in 1632.

Did you realize that it was only 18 years later - in 1650 that the politics of religious absolutism ended with the establishment of nation states in the Treaty of Westphalia?
The legal basis of the nation state however, was the 'Divine Right of Kings' a religious law dating back to 751 A.D. - that the newly formed nation state inherited a backward approach to scientific knowledge from the Church.

(In fact they were not newly formed, but re-described. The feudal system - headed by the Church of Rome, and religious wars raging across the continent for most of the previous century, established the divisions that were formalized in the treaty.)

Jean Jacques Rousseau's 'Discourse on Inequality' (1754) is a readable example of how this implicit 'doctrine of double truth' was handled in the history of European thought. For further examples see Descartes 'Meditations' or Hobbes 'Leviathan' - indeed, there's hardly an example of philosophy before Darwin that doesn't bend reason to make room for God.

Therefore, while it might seem on the surface that the Reformation and subsequent Enlightenment periods gave us secular rationalism - it can be shown quite clearly that they upheld, if re-defined religiously founded social, political and economic structures previously in place.

While it's difficult to argue that any one person or generation has yet been in a position to understand the implications of this, let alone do anything about it, nonetheless, there is a moral failure in the use of science to serve ends described by mans fond ideologies - in blatant denial of the scientifically conceived facts, that follows directly from a religious monopoly of the moral, only ostensibly rejected.

In the 1970's, as a primary school pupil I was required by law to attend religious assemblies every day. 'All things bright and beautiful' - 340 years after Galileo, 'all creatures great and small' - 240 years after the Industrial Revolution, 'all things wise and wonderful' - 120 years after Darwin, 'the Lord God made them all!'

It's a complex function of being disciplined to obedience, taught religion at school, school being a state institution and state law being concerned with right and wrong, but I can assure you from experience that I grew up with the impression that the social order was divinely sanctioned - and indeed, in Britain today, that's the actual claim!

Early on in my philosophical investigations I suffered tremendously from the impression that thinking things critical of the system equated with sin, that I understand from the inside Rousseau's, Descartes, and Hobbes' attempts to find comfort in compromise. It took me years plugging away to cut through layer after layer of ideological gift-wrap to find there's nothing real inside. The only real thing we have is science - all the rest is assertion ultimately premised upon threat and use of violence.

Because they are false to reality, action in the course of these religiously conceived ideologies has externalities: namely, the energy crisis, climate change and environmental degradation - threats of extinction now looming like huge dark clouds on the horizon. In spite of the terrible seriousness of the threats George W. Bush cited 'national economic interest' as the reason for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol (and even this was a massively inadequate compromise between national actors protecting their economic interests.)

In short, these extinction threats cannot be addressed in the same terms that create them - and consequently, continuing to act in the course of these ideologies we will become extinct. In the closing days of his presidency Bush has opened up ANWAR to oil exploration - it's economically rational, rational in terms of international politics, but morally bankrupt because it's scientifically unnecessary to cause the damage it will cause.



While relatively young, science is valid knowledge that does not draw upon a traditional basis of authority, but insists upon empirical evidence and replicable experimental results, underlying theoretical understanding open to disproof in face of further evidence. It is essentially a method of directing reason to achieve increasingly valid knowledge of reality - and as mentioned above, action in relation to valid knowledge has valid consequences. But it's more than an organism responding correctly in relation to the physical, chemical and biological nature of the reality it inhabits - but the morally correct course to adopt science as a rule for the conduct of our affairs.

In comparison, traditional bases of authority argue that something is good or right because that's the way it's always been done. This strategy is dependent on a static conception of reality as asserted by religion - not the dynamic, evolutionary understanding of reality demonstrated by science. While it might be argued that traditional ideas and methods are tried and tested, in a dynamic world they lend themselves to a 'catastrophe first' approach to problem solving.

Taken as a whole, the picture of reality now painted by science, while not complete, is largely coherent, highly valid and demonstrably not the same picture painted by religion, nation and capitalist ideology. We are biological/evolutionary/psychological beings - not immortal ghostly souls in disposable fleshy wrappers. We are a single species occupying a single planetary environment - not distinctly national, and our planetary environment is limited in its ability to provide us with resources and absorb our waste.

Because what we do has consequences, because things change as we act upon them, it's therefore vital that we act in anticipation of the effect of our actions and the problems ahead, rather than carry on as we traditionally are until we sail off the edge of the world and plunge into eternal night to the belated consternation of all aboard!

Lastly, and addressing your last point - you say: 'So I think we need some time to culturally adapt to our current state of being -- and that will assume that we don't destroy ourselves first.'

This is not a safe assumption. 340 years after Galileo and 120 years after Darwin - how much time do you want? The Church held up rational knowledge for half a millennia, and now there's 50 years left, tops! According to the U.S. Geological Survey web-site, there's around 40 years worth of known recoverable oil reserves at the present rate of consumption, and all of the major reserves have been identified.

If we run into the energy crisis divided by religion, nation, and capitalism - governments armed with nuclear weapons will be drawn into conflict while being undermined at home by economic collapse. At the same time climate change will be hitting hard with half the coastal cities in the world underwater, with ten to twelve billion people packed into that much less space. Fuel and food will become increasingly scarce, the lights will go out - and unimaginable horror will be unleashed, until a flash in the sky finally ends it all.

So you take your time. I wouldn't want to offend against anyone's delicate religious sensibilities, or for them to miss a pound, dollar or yen they might grub before the end. It's only the existence of the human species at stake. No rush.

Anyhow, I hope I've explained myself better and answered your objections. Thanks again for you post. Keep well, iconoclast.

I meant to post something to my blog.