The Inherent Self Contradiction in 'Scientific Atheism'

A couple of millennia ago man developed an emergent, reflexive consciousness of self consciousness itself. Mythological man was self conscious, aware of self and reality, reality as the "over-against", i.e. everything not oneself. With the added reflexion man was able to observe himself as part of reality. In man's focus on pragmata, the ready to hand, man was first able to observe himself as the inventor of the tools he used, in the very process of invention. The material change simultaneous to the change in consciousness led to a new manner of thinking, but one with two fatal flaws.

First, the distinction between things that arise through poiesis and things that arise through techne was lost through man's fascination with his own technical ability. This resulted in a posit of a 'maker' for all things, forgetting the self-originating sense of poiesis.

Second, the 'absolute' was conflated with the 'total' in Plato. Aware of the relativity of knowing, in the relation of the self to the known reality, and the limitations inherent in that relational, perspectival, horizonal knowing, Plato recognized that the ability to project "reality as a whole" was dependent on a privileged perspective.

Aristotle was keen enough to recognize that this perspective could not be that of a finite being, because a finite being could only have a perspective that included the whole by being outside of the whole, which is contradictory.

The solution was the posit of an infinite maker. In order for the universe to be 'one', the originary 'creator' or 'creative force' had to have every possible spatial-temporal perspective, since no single perspective could view or project the whole. This metaphysical view was pasted onto the Abrahamic Jehovah as the 'prime mover'. Post-Aristotelian science, and even more so post-Cartesian science, depends on the validity of a single mathematical projection of the whole - without that premise the validity of experiment itself has no foundation. So modern 'science' and its methodology is premised on the assumptions that themselves required the posit of an infinite 'prime mover'. The 'cosmological principle' is nothing more than a tacit admission that the assumption required for cosmology to have any meaning is a theological assumption.

The result is the inherently self contradictory stance of the 'scientific atheist'. Without maintaining the assumptions of theism, the atheist's 'scientific' methodology is unjustifiable, but he uses that precise methodology to calculate the number of the theos to zero. Since the starting assumptions are still in full force, particularly the assumptions regarding the basic requirements and nature of the theos, this achieves nothing other than a reaffirmation of Aristotle's original notion of the 'one' prime mover, now shifted into the guise of a singleton involved in the supposed origin of the universe.

Atheism is inherently a theological stance, and due to the lack of theological understanding in the mind of the common atheist, it is unable to put into question any of the basic theological tenets it has inherited. It will inevitably, consequently, result in the re-positing of the 'one' prime mover of everything under one guise or another, and the resulting positing of the privileged position that prime mover must occupy.

There are no "mere" facts

"... all "unconcealment" is bound up with mood, language and culture. Einstein's theories are meaningful only to someone trained to approach nature in a certain way, the way of Western modernity. Science requires a special mood and a special use of language. Facts are always interpreted in terms of particular, historically grounded ways of thinking: "there are no mere facts, but . . . a fact is only what it is in the light of the fundamental conception, and always depends upon how far that conception reaches""

Quoted from http://enowning.blogspot.com

A 'Scientific' Ethics?

The abstractions of science, not only within theory, but the objects of that theory, and the intepretations of the results of testing of those objects, whether via observation, experiment, survey, etc., are all initially abstracted on the basis of philosophical determinations of the things and the world from which they were abstracted. In turn these determinations always originate in a determinate philosophy, with specific assumptions, prejudices and tendencies. The more science declares its autonomy, the less visible these assumptions and prejudices become, and the less visible an assumption or prejudice, the more powerful its control. Consistency of result within a science based on such a determinate philosophy does not in any way guarantee the validity of the philosophy, as it is the predictable result of making the same assumptions at each moment of the scientific procedure.

As a result the sciences do ascertain correct concepts about the world and the things within it, but only in the manner that the philosophic base a priori considers valid. Nothing guarantees that these correct assertions are uniquely correct, complete, or even particularly important assertions about the things being studied. The validity of any science's results are strictly circumscribed within the conceptual framework to which it is indebted and of which it is incapable of questioning.

Within revealed religion, as based on the same metaphysical philosophy as the 'modern' sciences, the comparative complexity rendered necessary by the inability to leave meaning out, in the manner of the sciences, and by the inclusion of populist necessity of the inclusion of contradicting premetaphysical mythological tenets, creates a situation where the self consistency of the natural sciences, and thus their claim to a systematic connection to reality, is not obtainable. But given that the natural sciences rest on the same basic assumptions, the fundamental scientific claims cannot help but mimic the forms of the fundamental theological tenets. The 'One' haunts set theory, as that which presences only by absencing (the one as a set disappears under investigation into infinite divisibility into further multiples), in precisely the same manner that the holy ghost haunts the Christianity of anyone who takes the fundamental theological tenet "and god became man" combined with the death of that man with any seriousness. The origin of the universe in a singularity (the 'big bang' theory) makes the scientific posit of the universe's history a creationist account, whether that singularity itself has a further origin in a creator makes no difference whatsoever to the resulting account. It's not the case that American creationism is a Christianization of biology. It would be more accurate to say that it is a mythologization, in the sense of pre-conceptual, pre-metaphysical mythology, of the metaphysical/Christian biology that teaches evolution as a predestined, mechanistic causal set of temporally successive effects.

Science without philosophy has no basis in thought that could provide it with a means of abstraction necessary to its methodology. But philosophy contains far more than the basis of the natural sciences in terms of ontology, ethics and epistemology. A 'scientific ethic' is a worse round square than a Christian biology. The only potential effects of using 'modern' natural science as a basis for ethics are to either redouble the difficulty of questioning the assumptions and prejudices underlying ethics as they already exist, making those ethical assumptions that much more absolute and unquestionable, or negating ethics altogether via a reinterpretation of the base assumptions in light of a further assumption of predestination cloaked under a simplistic reduction of causality.

Description of the Moments of the Divine through a Post Religious Interpretation of the Trinity

The divine is here defined as that which allows the human being to dis-cover beings in that and how they are, their existence and essence, thought metaphysically. Within metaphysical theology three moments of the divine were posited as beings, persons, referred to in Catholic tenet as the Trinity.

Of the 'persons' in the Trinity, only Christ in his role as the second person, the Logos, is in fact a person per se. Returning to the original dynamic meaning of 'theo', 'to shine', the first moment of the trinity is the original 'shining' that allows beings to be experienced in that they are, in their pure existence. While Catholic theology was written in Latin the original Greek term Logos was reserved for the second person. Logos is the gathering-clearing enacted by the divine as it appears within man. It is this Logos, not mere speech but the entirety of context and world made possible linguistically that allows beings to be experienced as what they are, metaphysically in their essence.

The third moment is the reference to the divine itself rather than its actions. The 'ghost' is that apparition that is not graspable since it only presences through absencing. The absencing, the withdrawal of the divine itself that has always already occurred provides the first and second moments with their lighting and clearing respectively.

Self and World, or The Self= One's "own" World

Self/World:

i One's "own" World is the totality of what has been experienced and interpreted, including that experienced and interpreted at second hand and passed along.


ii Looked at from a different perspective, this is also the totality of the Self.


iii Most of the World is shared, without a fairly common sharing (within a given culture) actions that require common understandings (such as driving) would be impossible.


iv Most of what has been experienced and interpreted is inevitably second hand. Also much of it was concerned with the world as it was in earlier generations and times. That certain people seem "ahead of their time" is due to the majority interpretation being always "behind the time".


v This also means most of the self is shared and has not been grasped explicitly but through the interpretations of others (the 'One').


vi As a result individuation can only be a modification, and a relatively small one, of the primordially shared nature of the Self.


vii Conversation that is not a sharing of an originary stance towards a matter (idle talk, "shooting shit") is, in the case of someone not known well or a group, a mutual estimating of the degree to which the Self/World is shared and thereby the degree to which an a priori relation exists..


viii Conversation between those who know each other well it becomes a relaxing, tranquilizing break from the effort new interpretation requires, into the familiarity of a well-known set of interpretations and their resulting understandings.


ix The view on the World is perspectival to the individual Self-sense.


x World/Self are essentially pluralistic. Since the shared World has inherently plural origins, there is an evident distortion if only one perspective dominates.


xi The horizons of World involve space and time as pure intuitions, as Kant perceived, but space and time have to be reinterpreted as topological place and originary temporality. This also requires that the dimensionality of each be reinterpreted as horizonal.


xii The notion of the Subject is a unitary interpretation of the pluralistic Self. The Subject is essentially invental as a response to the evental, and as a result a fleeting phenomenon, once the evental situation that gives rise to the Subject is over and the Self becomes engrossed in everydayness the Subject ceases to actualize.


xiii The Subject is also simplistic in that most parameters of which the Self is cognizant are left out in order to make possible timely decisions in an ethical situation, as well as to perceive the Self as an actor within-the-World rather than self-identical with the World it itself experiences.


xiv The assessing "step back" is phenomenologically the experience of inventing the Subject. Since this "step back" is also key to the conceptual view conceptuality is essentially subjective, only in this way could it also be objective.


xv Ethics also thereby becomes essentially subjective, hence the need in any situational assessment of the ethics of one's actions (such as the legal system) motives and intentions become necessary, whereas under the moral law motive and intention were irrelevant.


xvi This invention of the conceptual stance via the Subject is the original experience of metaphysics. The posited unity of the Subject is also the root of the metaphysical demand for a unitary origin as a necessary part of explanation.


xvii The conceptual is of necessity one sided in its view, resulting in inherent abstraction in its understanding. The 'Notion' in Hegel that results from the overcoming of one sided conceptualization thereby makes possible the understanding of the concrete. In terms of ethics this both concretizes the situation and permits a simultaneous view of options rather than an oscillation between them.


xviii The options available within a given situation are always the already-projected possibilities open within the situational horizon. The act of projection itself potentiates specific possibilities, simultaneously rendering others inaccessible. Unless those potentials are actualized they can be reprojected as inaccessible possibilities when different possibilities are potentiated.

Why absolute knowing is not 'knowledge', and why every 'fact' is an illusion.

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An Answer to a (Rhetorical) Question from Zizek

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