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