God versus Science. Result just in...

I’ve said before that Tartarus, vast though it is, is a fairly empty place and gloomy with it. It doesn't produce an atmosphere conducive to discussing issues that are more germane to the world above. Hence most of what I’ve written here has been extremely self-indulgent and solipsistic. Updates are sporadic because I have little to cue me to write, not enough changes in Tartarus to provoke a reaction. Yesterday, however, whilst exploring down one of the many nameless corridors here, I entered a cavernous room that inexplicably contained a strong gale of hot, dry air and thousands of loose sheets of paper. The wind carried the sheets in strange balletic eddies before depositing them in the corners where they piled up like great, towering drifts of snow. More paper seemed to be entering the room by some means all the time so that this process appeared to be endless. The paper piled up. I made my way to one side of the room and found it to filling up with discarded sheets from sacred texts and religious treaties on the nature of God, the formation of the world and the origins of mankind. In the opposite side of the room all the sheets were scientific papers and articles refuting much of what was in the other side and making claims that atheism was thereby a sound position to take.

Whilst glancing through various stray texts, it occurred to me that when people pick up this science versus religion debate, they tend to fail to distinguish the true quiddity of the terms. Science and atheism are not synonymous and religion is not offering, or trying to offer, any scientific proof for the existence of God. It is an apples and oranges argument. Religion offers no proof and science will give no credence to things that are not evidentially provable. As such they are not well made for sensible debate.

Religion attempts to offer us a route to understanding how moral codes are derived from the notion that a God exists. This invariably requires that very human attributes are ascribed to God in order to support some notion of divine providence. It is the lack of rationality of this route from the transcendent that concerns scientists as it cannot be translated into terms that would be acceptable to scientific method.

Science, however, is amoral. It is not focused on the same issues of how we should live our lives but is more concerned with empirical discovery to further our understanding of the universe in which we live in order to, in the main, have more control over our own destiny and provide a platform for further scientific discovery.

Science gets itself into difficulties when it fails to recognise the limits of its methods. We often perceive science to be the epitome of understanding whereas, in fact, it is, in the main, a method for approximating likely outcomes. It is about constructing models that generally seem to reflect empirical experience to an acceptable degree of tolerance. What it does not do, though, is provide an exact understanding of the world as it actually is nor can it answer all questions. If scientists attempt to answer a question that is couched in a way that requires the answer to be derived from inductive reasoning it is already failing to comply with the central tenets (dogma even) for valid scientific discovery. Just because I have only ever seen white swans does not give me the scientific support for saying that all swans are white (even though my personal experience may strongly suggest it). This is why I believe that atheism is not really a scientific position. It is denying the existence of God through induction – “because I have seen no evidence of God, God can’t exist”.

A scientist can of course critique religion and religious dogma for failing to be soundly based. The mistake, though, is to say that because the logic of religion fails to be scientifically convincing that there can be no God because this makes God’s existential status dependent on religion whereas there can be no causal link, logically or chronologically. This is where so many atheists make their mistake by refuting God’s existence by critiquing something that has no causal link to God’s existence. All that these people can do is to dispute the validity of religious dogma not the existence of God.

It is easy for scientific thought to critique religious dogma for failing to operate in an evidential way and it is easy for religious thought to critique science for failing to deliver moral guidance. We’re back to the apples and oranges. Science is amoral so we should not be using religious intuition to critique it and religion is faith based and therefore cannot be critiqued for failings in scientific rigour. The religious should stop trying to intuit scientific propositions derived from religious principles (e.g. the Sun revolves round the Earth, the Earth is only a few thousands years old and so on) and the scientists should stop trying to induct propositions on the nature of God by spouting science (you heard me, Dawkins).

So where does that leave us? God knows. No he doesn’t. Yes he does. No he doesn’t, he can’t. Can so. Can’t. Can….etc.

Sometimes I think I’m the only person who is genuinely solipsistic…

We all like to think we’re special, think we’re something different. I’m by no means a committed blogger, as is clearly evidenced here (and how my soul recoils at the sheer etymological ugliness of the word ‘blogger’ and its kin), but is not this activity of blogging itself an attempt to express this difference, make it more apparent to the world that we are here? We’re not just existing, we have something to say. Or perhaps we’re not all that arrogant. But all the same, we could just watch TV, if we wanted our views to go unheard.

Small cries, then, in a big world. This is also part of what I believe drives people, myself included of course, to decide to become writers. It is a belief that our views and perspectives, imagination and linguistic brilliance will be of wider interest to all those people out there and with this will come recognition and success. Blogging (do I really need to keep using that term?) is some sort of ersatz form of creative writing, or at least can be, and can easily consume, I would imagine, time that should be put to more constructive use. I say this because an awful lot of people seem to be writers or express an interest in writing and I cannot always tell whether this means anything beyond maintaining a web log itself. We take up writing to validate our unique difference but, on doing a quick search, an expressed interest in writing is shared by another 189,000 people on this site alone. Although there is obviously a degree of rounding there (and the number may be more of an order of magnitude than scientifically accurate), it is also known that there are others here who have not declared their interests and could well add to this figure.

In days prior to the preponderance of user-defined internet content, you could decide to become a writer and find that you alone, amongst your friends and acquaintances, had this ambition. You would feel differentiated and perhaps encouraged by this. But now the internet can demonstrate that you are not unique or special at all, pretty much everyone is at it. Flicking through the blogs of those with an interest in writing (and I have applied no real scientific statistical analysis behind this) I start to develop a sense that many of the women seem also to like cats and many of the men profess accompanying interests in music and playing guitar. I’m guilty of falling into that male stereotype (there’s a pun there if you look hard enough) – although guitar owning probably describes my status better than guitar playing.

Why am I bothering to bang on about this? What has this got to do with anything at all? Well I’m not sure but it would seem that to declare yourself interested in writing is both easy and common place. But these days the poverty of such a declaration is more easily exposed. To be a self-proclaimed writer differentiates you by a fraction of one percent from all other human beings, it is no achievement in itself, even as an ambition. What makes the difference is not the intent but the writing itself. You need to forget your orgulous posturing and the existential aggrandisement that may be your hope from writing and think merely of the words. The words, if written well, will validate you, will determine whether you are indeed a writer or just someone with a vague and misdirected interest. Having the desire to be a great writer has no worth, desiring to write well, and pursuing that desire until you attain it, does – or so it would appear to me.

But Tartarus Central is not really about attaining things, or moving on in any way. It is, as far as I can fathom, more to do with adopting transient aspirations that are never really pursued with any commitment and vigour. Not everyone gets this, for instance Sisyphus continues to make one hell of a racket down here by persistently lugging his boulder around. He should just sit down and reflect on how great it would be to get the boulder up that slope rather than go through the futile activity of trying to actually do it. But he’s always grumpily muttering about “miscarriages of justice” and “I’ll bloody show them” and won’t be discouraged. I’m in half a mind to ask Gyges to confiscate the boulder, I wonder what Sisyphus would do with his time then.

"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." - Camus

“Yeah, right. Have you spoken to him recently?” – me

“No.” - Camus