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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Science as Imaginative Projection.

Each science begins from an imaginative projection of beings as a whole and stakes its claim to a specific region of beings. The projection of the World is always Self-overreaching. This projection may be philosophical as mathematical, as in the case of the 'modern' natural sciences, or as experiential as in Aristotle, or in some other manner. Only to the degree that science is projected philosophically does it amount to more than a collection of sundry techniques.

The metaphysical projection of the 'universe' originated in the notion of the 'true', constantly present and unchanging nature of a reality that underlay all appearances. As part of the Reformation, this 'true' world as universe became limited to mathematical projection only. This move was neither scientific nor philosophical, but religio-political in nature.


The initial projection is not simply the milieu in which specific theories within the sciences appear, but determines the 'facts' that dispute with or corroborate those theories. Such 'facts' remain appearances interpreted already within an explicit or implicit projection of beings as a whole. The circularity of theory creation and data interpretation is founded on the imaginative projection.

In terms of the mathematical projection, physics is posited as the basic science. However the initial projection, itself conceptual, is driven by the conceptual development of tools through technology. Rather than driving technology, 'modern' natural science is inherently an accounting-for beings (facts as technologically interpreted) in the manner and mode in which they have already been revealed and made to appear by technology. Thus the actual base science within the modern period is and continues to be accounting as accounting-for.

In the sense that physics and chemistry maintain explanatory power in their accounting-for specific results can be judged within the bounds of the metaphysical projection, reduced as it is to a projection of measurability only.

Taxonomic empirical studies such as zoology are based solely on the classificatory nature of technological enframing. On the basis of accounting-for they appear as mere inventory-counting.

Studies such as archaeology and anthropology amount to no more than an imaginative form of tourism unless they are utilized as techniques within the science of history.

Why "Christian Science" is a Redundant Term

Put simply, Christianity projects a fictional reality based on assumptions (ideology) that themselves have their foundation in the specifically Christian description of the theos. Science, that is, modern mathematical science, as opposed to other forms of knowledge acquisition, measures that projection of reality and no other. Western science is thus by definition ontotheological Christian science.

'Scientific atheists', or secular humanists, or whatever their current favoured self-description happens to be, both assume the Christian theos and deny it simultaneously. The founding assumptions of science have no basis without the specifically Christian projection of the nature of the theos, mathematical projection has no justification in terms of believing it describes reality, nor do theories or the experiments designed to justify them have any meaning in terms of describing reality. They measure and describe the projection of reality they began with, which is inherently a Christian projection.

Were a non-believer) to deny the possibility of a being that has the attributes of the Christian theos in a non-contradictory manner (an a-theist has by definition accepted the theist assumptions, and merely calculated the number of existent theos to zero - a calculation that affects nothing of consequence since the assumptions about the theos remain intact), that non-believer would have to also abandon the assumptions that arise from it and have no alternative justification, such as:

• the privileged vantage point (and with it privilege in general)


• the notion that a concept is anything more than an abstract fiction


• the possibility of projecting "reality as a whole" either imaginatively or (which comes down to the same thing) mathematically


• the belief that theory is anything more than a convenient fiction that under certain circumstances can roughly predict behaviour


• the belief that an experiment can demonstrate anything universal.

The result? All of the tenets and methods of post-Cartesian science must be abandoned along with any faith that the results of those methods demonstrate anything other than that theory predicts and experiment demonstrates what was always implicit in the initial, fictional, and inherently Christian mathematical projection.

This ideological projection is, in fact, the common sense world as most westerners experience it. The question that poses itself, at this point, is whether an experience of reality that does not require ideology (belief, faith) is possible. The way that self-consciousness experiences itself and reality inherently requires ideology due to its hermeneutic basis. But is there a demonstrated experience of reality that both includes the experience of self-consciousness, while going beyond it in a manner where ideology becomes irrelevant? While such an experience has been explicitly described by a good number of people, to those who have not themselves experienced it at best one can demonstrate its possibility, due simply to the limitations of self-conscious conceptual thinking.

Why Heidegger appears difficult ...

"If you find yourself making sense of Heidegger by relating what he's discussing with concepts from another philosopher, you're mistaken. Heidegger understands things in a different way, so the challenge is to discover how to think along with him. The difficulty isn't that his way of thinking is particularly complicated, but that it is different."

- Quoted from http://enowning.blogspot.com, commenting on the book "
Heidegger's Later Writings
A Reader's Guide. Lee Braver, London, Continuum, 2009."

Nevajay I. - How is it Possible to Conceive Being in Science

Nevajay I. - How is it Possible to Conceive Being in Science




The above link is an interesting essay on an interesting question. While science requires an understanding of Being in order to justify itself and its work, it avoids this question itself and more and more tries to discredit the work done as being irrelevant to the scientific enterprise.




As I am currently working on the inapplicability of the reductionism inherent in the methodologies of the natural sciences to the human being, and the resultant failure of Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Neuropsychology to achieve anything close to the sometimes outrageous claims made for these endeavours, the loss of their supposed subject matter by their methodology, and the resulting speculative and inherently biased nature of their 'findings' is of real concern to me in terms of the ease with which it can be misused by 'sciencists' who view science in ideological and religious terms.

Post Religious Theology as a Change in Terminology, or, you can lead a horse to water ...

The stubborn horse that refuses to open its mouth (mind) in this case is personified in the 'secular humanist'. Unable to perceive the irrelevance of atheism in the context of a post religious (non theist) era, the secular humanist hangs on to a rigid ideology with the same basis as that of the fundamentalist theists, who on their side are also unable and unwilling to recognize that the reality in which they live is post-Christian and that it's no longer a question of apologetics for faith. Apologetics are worthless in the face of the complete irrelevance of theism itself.

Asking thinking to speak on the level of scientism or religionism is holding it to a standard that doesn't measure up to it.

The root theo preexisted the notion of a substantial being referred to as 'a' god, it was purely verbal with no nominal formulation. Theo in the current context refers simply to the 'Event'. Study of the Event is the ground of studies in any particular regional ontology.

The area of theology that in a religious context studied 'a' god, its implications and correspondences or contradictions with religious tenet, becomes the study of the evental, the transformative, a purely verbal posit with no nominal (or noumenal) formulation.

The other facets of theology, namely theology of the psyche and theology of nature encounter similar changes in meaning on this side of the epochal break.

Theology of the psyche, of course, includes all the 'human sciences', depending on whether one is discussing the individual or collective psyche. Theology of nature includes all the 'natural sciences'. Each sub-study of psyche or nature has to be re-grounded in the evental, only then can questions of appropriate methodology be attended to.

Reformulating things in this terminology sounds alien to many, if not perverse. But aside from the important advantage gained by tossing the cartesian language and its resulting subjectification, isolation and mechanization of beings a priori reduced to meaningless objects, it self-excludes the contingent of closed minded ideologues that have turned 'science' into scientism, a religion of its own with all the negative features of fundamentalist religionism without even the possibility of forgiveness for one's anti-scientistic sins, the most deadly of which is, of course, any questioning of the tenets of scientism.

Thinking is tired of stubborn horses that won't open their mouths to drink. They are welcome to their ideology of a reductive universe dehydrated of meaning.

Thinking is and always has been heretical. It is time for heresy to be honest about what its real opponent and opposite consists in. That opposite is, and alwaya has been, Stupidity.

Post Religious Theology, Fundamental Ontology and Non Philosophy

Some years ago I heard a minister in the United Church of Canada deliver a sermon discussing the meaning of Christianity in a post Christian era. Heidegger's early description of his enterprise as 'fundamental ontology', while in many ways abandoned as his work progressed, retains some cogency as a descriptive. Laruelle's Non-Philosophy, by its nature a quirky term (certainly Laruelle doesn't intend his work as a hatred of wisdom), while it may distance him from some of Heidegger's early, necessary, but temporary enmeshment with metaphysics, in other ways intends many of the same tendencies of thought as the later Heidegger, a Heidegger of course only possible on the basis of the accomplishments of the earlier. Non-Philosophy's odd relation with thinking as the end of philosophy seems at times merely an unnecessary formalization.

The line between philosophy in its non-metaphysical guise and speculative theology in a situation where god as a being is no longer posited blurs and recoils upon itself in multiple ways. Theology without a substantive being as its posit is in no way the same thing as the 'Death of God" theology, which remains within the posit of a substantive being, simply one that is no longer present but only past. Heidegger's 'thinking as thanking' implies a theological thankfulness that is no longer directed at a substantive being. Thinking is thanking no-thing, then, yet it remains a thanking. Saying is obligated by no-thing, but the obligation remains.

If anything that obligation grows all the stronger.

The revealing that is technology has already revealed a good deal to a nuanced eye. That much of the revelation took place in the most technical of sciences first then is not surprising. While other sciences meander between cartesian and postmodern definitions of their basic posits, or have lost contact with their base posit to the degree that each 'theory' is really another attempt at founding the science itself without understanding the nature of foundation, at least in the quantum and thermodynamic areas of physics the metaphors of metaphysics have had no meaning for a fair time.

Philosophy it seems, by its nature, is agnostic. Is the philosopher, though, also by nature a Gnostic? Is it possible to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, today reincarnated as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's hands, the impotence and uselessness of understanding wonderfully and wittily unable to share any transparency with the irrelevance and thoughtlessness of explanation?

Theism and atheism continue their bickering as two sides of the same coin, still probabilistically coming up heads or tails in their coveted determinism, but it's fiat money that lands on the table with a flat sound like the aluminium coins of the old East Germany, and like those coins, guaranteed by a World that no longer exists.

Behind all of the madness (pairing its nails perhaps?), and biding its time, the post religious collection of stories wrought with a complexity and severity beyond any testaments, Finnegan's Wake, reincarnates the Word itself in its newfound, though ageless, unsubstantial power.

Dawkins' Intellectual Dishonesty, or Why Dawkins Should Be Sent Down

This quote is from Dawkins 'rebuttal' to Not in Our Genes, a book by Lewontin and others that criticizes Dawkins obsessiveness with the genome as the only means of inheritance.

"So, life is complex and its causal factors interact. If that is "dialectical", big deal.
But no, it seems that "interactionism", though good in its way, is not quite
"dialectical". And what is the difference?

" . . . First (interactionism) supposes the alienation of organism and
the environment.... second, it accepts the ontological priority of the
individual over the collectivity and therefore of the epistemological
sufficiency of..." (emphasis mine).

There is no need to go on. This sort of writing appears to be intended to
communicate nothing. Is it intended to impress, while putting down smoke to
conceal the fact that nothing is actually being said?"

After reading Popper's quilt quoting of Hegel to make points he couldn't have made if he had any comprehension of Hegel whatsoever, it no longer surprises me to see this kind of intellectual dishonesty from a supposed scientist. But let me continue.

Quoting half a sentence, then claiming that "nothing is actually being said" is the height of "putting down smoke". The sentence chosen is interesting, if only psychologically, because it is at the crux of the most cogent criticism of Dawkins' views. If he does quote the sentence fully and the reader does understand the terms involved it will at least put Dawkins' enterprise into severe question in the reader's mind. Dawkins' ideas on the genome as replicator, as with all simplistic natural selection, view the environment as a fixed, external reality that is not affected by the organism as much as vice versa. Dawkins' emphasis on the genome as the focus of evolution with the organism playing the role of mere vehicle is precisely a flagrant dismissal of the notion of ontological priority.

Now that the human genome project has demonstrated that genes in fact are evental, and behave more like elements of a language, meaning something specific only in an actual cellular and organism/environmental context, Dawkins' actual views on the genome are no longer materially cogent in any case.

But that his views' lack of cogency originated in unquestioned assumptions that proved dead wrong combined with a lack of comprehension of basic philosophy (thinking), together with his intellectual dishonesty in this feeble attempt to defend himself from accurate criticism, leaves his views on other matters suspect, if not to be completely ignored. If an undergraduate at Oxford handed in a paper with the above he would not simply be failed, but 'sent down' (i.e. kicked out of the university permanently) for intellectual dishonesty, yet a man capable of publishing this in a scholarly journal was given the Simonyi Professorship at the same school?

It's time to take note of Dawkins' intellectual dishonesty along with his scientific ignorance and ideological rigidity as the major characterizations of his work. Together they add up to the Dawkins we know - the loudmouthed charlatan who is determined to turn science into a religion.

Quote taken from Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature
by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and R.C. Lewontin (Pantheon Books, 1985)
Reviewed by Richard Dawkins in "Sociobiology: the debate continues", New
Scientist 24 January 1985
http://dba.fc.ul.pt/evo/textos/Dawkins.pdf

Preface to Book, or Why Phenomenology Overrides Science in the Study of the Psyche

Studying Art History, my wife spent a good deal of time looking at various things such as statues of the Buddha in various cultures. As part of these studies the abilities of the natural sciences were utilized, as well as the methodologies of history and art history in particular.

Natural science, for its part, can tell you many interesting things about a statue of a Buddha. It can give you its measurements to uncanny detail, its composition, approximate age, the probable locale from which the stone was quarried and the distance to where the statue was located, the exact physical latitude and longitude of that location, etc. I could go on and on.

And yet for all the natural sciences can add to the repertoire of knowledge an Art Historian has regarding a particular statue of the Buddha located in a particular place in the far east, it all remains a more or less irrelevant addendum. To those not familiar with the different sciences, their different realms of study, methodologies and applicability this may seem either simply odd, or part of some “unscientific” plot to keep the natural sciences out of art history.

So what is it that the natural sciences cannot tell us about the particular object of study that we have in front of us, a statue of the Buddha from any given ancient eastern culture?

Firstly, as an object, there is nothing theoretically or practically of importance that the natural sciences cannot tell us. True, on a quantum level there are things that are indeterminate even theoretically, but they don't really impact the type of knowledge that art history is. But we didn't begin by discussing an 'object'. We began by discussing a statue, in this case of the Buddha.

No matter how accurate the natural sciences can describe the objects form and material composition, nothing in its properties can determine for science that the object is, in fact, a statue. 'Statue' is not a determination of an object at all, it is a determination of a thing. 'Things' always exist in and for a World of comprehension and form part of that world of context and meaning. The 'historical' part of art history deals with this statue precisely in its context and meaning as a thing, and with a rigor unknown to the simple exactness of natural science attempts to reconstruct some of that World of meaning that gave birth to the thing.

We aren't finished with the statue by examining its thingliness in the context of its world (or ours), though. It is not simply a statue, but a statue of the Buddha. History exhausts itself in its determinations of the statue as situated, contextualized thing, but we are looking at it through the methodologies of art history, not simple history. As art the statue is a Work, a work that reveals the Buddha by presenting the Buddha.

As a result of a myth that crept into simplistic art history at some point, and has been difficulty to stamp out, there is an idea that art somehow 'progresses'. Concomitant with that myth is the myth that art is by and large 'representational' in nature. It results, in the worst cases, in the notion that pictorial art was some type of primitive method of photography that 'progressed' to higher and higher realism but has now been replaced by 'real' photography and continues as some sort of 'cultural' curiosity.

In contrast to this, the statue of the Buddha does not represent, because nothing was presented formerly that could then be re-presented. It is also not symbolic, it does not function as a symbol of something that somehow exists similarly but differently elsewhere as in the semiotic signifier/signified pairing. It makes as little sense to say that the statue is not the Buddha as it does to say that the statue is the Buddha. The statue reveals the Buddha. It also makes no sense to say, well, perhaps it does for Buddhists, but not for rational westerners. Belief is not at issue in the statue, because it was not at issue in the World that the statue hails from. Belief implies the choice between belief and doubt. One can, I suppose, doubt that trees exist, but it doesn't make one a more rational westerner, it makes one of interest to psychiatrists. The same goes for the statue of the Buddha within its context.

Why did natural science have no means of looking at the meaning either of the thing as a statue, or the work as the Buddha? Natural science doesn't deal with things, or works, fundamentally it deals with objects, which is to say it doesn't deal with meaning, understanding, or truth, but with description, explanation, and correctness.

I thought Dawkins had embarrassed himself enough ...

Quantum Fluctuations

I had thought the implosion of Dawkins "biological" theories would have been enough for this pseudo-scientific charlatan, however as the above link demonstrates, he's not above bringing in misrepresentations of physics in order to attempt to convince a public even less familiar with the notions of quantum mechanics than they are with modern evolutionary theory.

The following is my response to this latest video stream of bullshit:

I'm a bit baffled by how Dawkins and his cohort manage to conflate relativity theory with quantum mechanics, while physicists around the world have been trying for nearly a hundred years to solve the contradictions between the two. One of the main difficulties remaining for relativity theory is that as a theory that systematizes the universe as a whole, it becomes subject to Godel's incompleteness theorem, i.e. any self-consistent system implies the existence of a meta system. QM does not have this issue as it does not propose that the universe as a whole is systematic. However, let me set straight a few of the specifics proffered by this particular pseudo-scientific charlatan.

The total amount of energy in the universe we presently occupy is approximately 10^120 x 10^140 (including degrees of gravitational freedom) quanta, multiplied by the amount of energy per quantum. Sorry to dump water on your drum roll, but each quantum contains an infinite amount of energy, not zero energy. Any infinite amount of anything placed into a finite container will, of course, constantly spill over, creating a measurable, testable release of energy. This energy has indeed been measured and tested, and is known as the Casimir Effect. The University of Leicester, in particular, has proposed sending a probe into space in order to test whether the energy from the Casimir effect could be utilized.

The quantum void, as well, is not nothing, although it is certainly not a 'thing' either. The base particles of matter have no mass and are only differentiated from void by form (angle and spin). Odd isn't it that the ultimate materialism winds up, at the quantum level, being dependent on form - or to put it as Heisenberg did "Plato was right after all.". Mass comes about if/when these particles move in a certain fashion. Rather than being "space" the void could better be pictured as a seething layer of massless particles constantly being created and destroyed.

In fact the void bears a striking resemblance to some facets of Eckhart's mysticism as well as confirming Aristotle in the notion that space is illusory. Put simply, as Aristotle said "unformed matter and the void are not differentiable and therefore the same.". Eckhart's description of the godhead, originally a gnostic term, was that the godhead had no attributes that could be posited of it - i.e. no positive attributes. Eckhart's godhead, then, would also not be differentiable from the void.

Please note that I'm not proposing an intelligent universe, or a personally involved one. The crap Dawkins is displaying, though, proposes through a pile of pseudo scientific crap what is obvious to anybody sensibly familiar with dialectic - i.e. for the void to have self-identity it has to be compared to its opposite, i.e. its difference. The universe may well be the difference that provides the void with its selfsameness as void. Given that Identity and Difference underly all logic as well as all dialectic it would be hardly surprising to learn that this "law of thought" is actually a law of the universe.

Perhaps with the results of the human genome project having pulled the rug out from under Dawkins' genetic bullshit he now has to try to dazzle with his lack of knowledge of elementary physics instead. (in case you're unfamiliar with the results, genes do not translate to phenotypes in any direct manner, in fact genes function much like language, providing the nouns and verbs with which an organism can self-organize its system - linguistics has become the most relevant methodology for genetic exploration).

One thing is certain, though. It's far easier to demonstrate that Dawkins is a bigoted white upper middle class ideologue with no relation to either science or religion, than to prove or disprove the existence of something ('god') that we haven't even defined.

Seynsgeschichte: Lost in Space

Seynsgeschichte: Lost in Space

Dawkins the Political Ideologue

“Biologism is the doctrine, still prevalent in white nationalist ranks, that understands human races in purely zoological and materialist terms, as if men were no different from the lower life forms — slabs of meat whose existence is a product of genetics alone.”

Interestingly, the author of this quote, published at http://www.toqonline.com
in their February 2010 issue was discussing Schmitt, the ideologue of Nazi biologism.

More interestingly, given the admittedly white nationalist beliefs of the author, this type of biologism is dismissed as “too right-wing, too Nazi, and too philosophically naive".

Dawkins' notion of the genome as the fundamental being, the replicator, with his concordant description of the organiam, whether bacteria or a human vehicle, as simply a vehicle to properly replicate and improve the genome, obviously fits in well with such a definition of biologism.

So we have Mr. Richard Dawkins, too right-wing, too much of a Nazi, and too philosophically naive to appeal to white supremacists.

A book in the 1980's which included contributions by Lewontin among others accused Dawkins of precisely this, as did Stephen J. Gould.

Dawkins so-called rebuttal rests on name-calling, an assumption that his readership won't understand philosophical terms and he can therefore write them off, and the final act of intellectual dishonesty in the rebuttal, in which Dawkins claims “nonsense”, referring to a sentence from the book that he only half quotes. Exactly how half a sentence is supposed to make sense is apparently a question beyond Mr. Dawkins readership. Oddly enough, the sentence is about ontological priority, one of the key concepts that relegates Dawkins' work to the crank ramblings of a politically charged ideologue.

Given Dawkins' hero status among secular humanists, it poses an interesting question: Heidegger claimed that none of the humanisms that had existed to that point "valued human dignity high enough".

Do secular humanists value human dignity lower than white supremacists?

A Hermeneutical Dialectic

The study of the Invental necessarily proceeds by means of a hermeneutical dialectic. This dialectic, rather than attempting to sublate apparent contradictions, maintains them in their contradiction and utilizes the idea of a constantly self-modifying ideology to hermeneutically approach them. In this manner not only are the contradictions maintained but may be pushed further apart to discover their difference in a more profound manner.

One facet of the hermeneutic is to discover the difference between apparent contradictions. One of the basic questions is not how to sublate Identity and Difference, but to ask "what is the difference between Identity and Difference?", in that they are interdependent contradictions. In this case the difference is known in English by name of the Same.

The ability of the Self, as society, to hold and maintain both sides of the dialectic is the key to the Invental Subject's ability to come to a decision at all in a given situation, in response to a given Event.

The Invental Subject

**The Invental Subject**


Insofar as the Subject, within metaphysics, is the 'sujet', the topic, the matter, and hence also the substantive, in particular the material substantive of the Self, the Invental Subject is of an entirely different nature.

The Invental is in many ways the pure abstract, "the face we put on to meet the faces that we meet." As abstract the Invental is also //simple//. The society that each of us are, behind the mask, is simplified into the Invental agent that is able to quickly decide and act in response to the Evental within the specific situation understanding that most parameters are unknowable in themselves. The Invental Subject is the actor in the real Events that shape lives and societies. As such the Invental Subjects maintains the contradictory nature of being both the Real and the Abstract Subject simultaneously.

How the self invents and reinvents this Subject is the core of the notion of authenticity vs inauthenticity. In a pure everydayness of the workaday world the Subject is neither authentic nor inauthentic, in essence it is //missing//, it is only noticeable by its absence. As an Event of personal or societal magnitude becomes apparent an authentic or inauthentic Subject arises in anticipatory response.

The inauthentic Subject results from the identification of the Subject with the ego. The ego, the voice of insecurity, fear and ultimately paranoia constantly tries to assert control by spreading its fear and its insane need for an impossible security to the rest of the self, and without detachment from the ego it is very difficult to refute its claims to have the self's best interests in mind. Although the ego's own selfishness is the root of its ineffectuality in the face of the Event, in anticipation of the unknown nature of the coming Event its fears and insecurities seem rational and cogent. Its constant chatter, as well, is confusing and distracting, yet tranquilizing as well in an extreme way as it gives the illusion of constant presence and thus a constant present.

The authentic Subject, in distinction from this, takes into account reasonable worries and insecurities but allows the caring nature of the self to assert its ethical preeminence over the ego's selfishness in determining the view that 'one' will have and does have on the Event, and the corresponding decision and action to be taken. Dasein doesn't lose its authenticity due to 'falling'. The experience of falling is another insecurity of the ego, which feeling no ground beneath it is in constant delusion that it is factically falling. That the mode of authenticity arrives with much effort, and disappears leaving just the trace of its passing on the Self, is that it is a form of the transient, Invental, abstract 'one', while the Self is in itself always a multiple, its own society, that in a temporal manner grounds itself by a constant anticipation and a corresponding remembrance and repetition.

Subject, then, in this sense carries similar connotations to the way the term was used in the idea of the 'British Subject'. That Subject is subject to the Crown, which includes the government, civil and criminal law, and by extension society as a whole. It is this Subject that is the owner of rights, while freedom is the a priori of the Self's ability to comport itself to anything at all. The Subject is also the bearer of public duties and the recipient of public privileges. It also becomes the target of the moral law. The civil law was personified for the peasant through the Lord, generally the Lord of the Manor or other officiate. As the subject of the moral law, however, and within the ego-christian notion of right and wrong, the subject has no 'rights', only 'right'. The 'right' is the 'right to follow the law' and nothing more. The subject of the ego-christian has one duty, obedience to the Lord of imagination, the personified God of Jesus, and one privilege, that of eternally existing as the ego-personality it is. The ego of the ego-christian clings to this 'law', 'right' and 'duty' as its means of purchasing some form of security at the expense of a loss of contact with reality. The eschatology of the ego-christian is merely another facet of the ego's inability to face its own mortality, which it pushes onto the 'sinful' at the always-fast-approaching day of judgment. In the same way the extreme evangelism of the ego-christian (or the ego-sciencist for that matter) attempts to mollify the ego's fear, grounded at root in the knowledge that it is in fact mortal, that its beliefs are fictions. By spreading belief it can reassure itself of the reasonableness and thereby the truth of its ego-professed ideology.

Of course the evangelical, almost desperate figure of the ego-christian is by no means the only type of christian, or even the predominant one. Most christians, like other people, spend most of their time in an average everydayness of work and other concerns in a manner that is neither authentic nor consumed by ego. While at times when Events arise they may feel and temporarily succumb to the insecurity of the ego, they also recognize its selfishness as unethical, and thereby implicitly recognize the precedence of the ethical decision and action over a vocalization of a moral law.

The ego type also, of course, exists outside Christianity. The rise of a simplistic mechanistic scientism is one cogent example. While actual science left the mechanistic conception of nature behind in the 20th century, sciencists such as Richard Dawkins, antiquated as they are in their particular sciences, continue to loudly proclaim their onto-theologically based atheism and evangelize for the abolition of all religion. This is in the name of the myth of 'progress'. But the myth of progress itself is no more than the present infinitely extended, through which their terrified egos postulate some form of continued existence while simultaneously denying it.