The Center Of The Universe Is Some Jive Ass Shit

 This is precisely where I think the “battle” between science and religion exists: in the fight for which gets to claim the role of defining reality.

Based on that, I think it's inaccurate to call those self-serving declarations of science that Epstein felt entitled to practice is "pseudo-science." I agree with what Marilynne Robinson said, if religion is answerable for bad religion then science has to be answerable for bad science - especially as so much of it exists quite contentedly within what is called science.

Eugenics was scientifically sound enough in this country to base laws on it and force the sterilization of individuals by it; until the Nazis took our example to its logical extreme, and embarrassed us out of it altogether.

Science really has no more claim to “objective truth” than religion does (and the concept of “objective truth” as most people bandy it about was done in by Kierkegaard in the 19th century in Denmark). I can remember (a few years ago) how apologists for Thomas Kuhn pulled his concept of paradigm shifts back from the ledge by arguing Kuhn was not undermining the “objective truth” (read: “God’s knowledge”) basis of science. But his concept clearly does (whether he meant it to, or not, is beside the point). Science changes (forget “progresses” or its synonym, “evolves”) because paradigms change, not in response to new information, but in response to new arguments. Newtonian physics is not Einsteinian physics is not quantum mechanics. Which is not to say one wipes out another. Existentialism replaces idealism and empiricism, in one sense; and in another, it doesn’t. And none of those replace Platonic metaphysics or Aristotelian logic, anymore than deconstructionism replaces Western philosophy, even as it critiques its bases and analyses.

In theology, few of us may be Augustinians any more, or Thomists, but try to engage theology without those two fundamental schools. You’re just kidding yourself or betraying your ignorance if you think you can. To return to Kierkegaard’s conclusion, the more we think we can get an objective perspective (which means to see as we imagine God sees; or “perfectly,” if we prefer to be Platonic), the more we mire ourselves in subjective experience. And, I would say, culture. You really can’t formulate an idea that can’t be imagined, much less understood, in the context of your culture. Even a “perfect” idea involves a cultural concept of “perfection.” And that concept lines up with your culture, not the nature of the universe. Just ask the victims of British colonialism; or French; or Belgian.

How this happens is more simply explained. The arguments of any paradigm shift may be based on new information (atoms; quanta), and the paradigm shift may allow room for new information; but there is no fundamental change in how decisions are made. They are made by a community that gains authority by numbers accepting the new arguments, not by superior rationality. The old guard pass away, the young Turks become the “establishment,” and the world spins on. 

I’ve studied literary criticism, theology, and law. Starting with the first one, I was trained in contemporary literary theory in the late ‘70’s, encountered the new theories of structuralism and reader response criticism, “multicultural” theories like feminist studies and colonialism critiques, even the then “bleeding edge” of deconstructionism. (Derrida’s Of Grammatology had just been translated into English when I was in graduate school, and the translator, Gayatri Spivak, was a prize guest in our seminars for a semester. She seemed to regard us all as yokels in Austin. So it goes.) Almost 50 years later all of that is as ancient as British imperialism. And about as well regarded.

In law I learned the traditional forms of statutory and constitutional interpretation, and even a bit in jurisprudence about legal realism. “Originalism” and “textualism,” equivalent to religious fundamentalism and biblical literalism, now control, at least among the Sinister Six from their Olympian heights. None dare call that “progress.” Or they shouldn’t, anyway.

In theology, the “new” historical interpretation theories of the Jesus Seminar are already forgotten (not really; but neither are they the bleeding edge anymore), and much of what I studied was already old news in other seminaries at the time I studied it. Reagan and the CIA obliterated liberation theology (which would now be simply dismissed as “woke”), although I see its influence still (if not its truly radical nature) in Pope Francis and in Pope Leo. There are shifts that reaffirm the status quo, shifts that alter it. The latter seem to disappear quickly, but actually persist. Status quo changes, and very slowly for the better.*

What does this have to do with the “battle” between science and religion? Everything. The fundamental conflict is over who gets to define reality: engineers, or preachers? That’s the popular dichotomy, and it’s a false one. The fundamental concept of reality is not explained by mathematics and data (what even the empiricist David Hume called unimportant information to the question of how we understand existence), anymore than its explained by strained Platonic metaphysics and the tangled mess of Christian doctrine/dogmatics. But those two warriors vie for the superior position, the authority to provide the Grand Unified Theory of what it all is: God’s Creation, or the product of physical laws (or at least wholly explained by those “laws”. And both, in their claim for “truth” (which both understand in a Platonic context, even if one claims to be Aristotelian), assert a claim to know the mind of God: either literally, or metaphorically. Because that’s the objective standard, one set (again) by Plato (it’s not an ideal that has anything to do with the Hebrew Scriptures). My claim for the basileia tou theou has nothing to do with the claims of quantum computing (which, after all, is mere techne in Plato’s world), but everything to do with how AI is used, and abused, and misdefined (and who picks up the pieces after that bubble explodes). I am not in conflict with science. I am in conflict with the claim to the superior explanation for the world and how we should then live in it (which seems to be largely as consumers of technology and its products). Computers are not “wrong.” Using computers to further inequality and injustice, is quite wrong. And science really has nothing either fundamental nor useful to say about that.

I’ve wandered far afield from the original post I quoted, but I wouldn’t leave you here without redirecting to that post. The “objective” view of sexual intercourse and consent has consistently been viewed from the male perspective. “Incels” today are merely boys primed by popular culture (James Bond being the paradigm, since Playboy is gone but Bond is forever) to believe women are merely sex objects and receptacles for male desire (Pussy Galore is even more clearly a lesbian in the novel than the movie. Still, it just takes a good man to change her mind.). The same paradigm permitted Jeffrey Epstein to walk away from serious charges of sex trafficking in Florida, something the prosecuting attorney admitted under questioning by Jasmine Crockett, recently. “Walk away” because the victims were poor, from broken families, and easily portrayed as deserving their fate because, after all, they accepted poverty and took the rich man’s money. 

“Objective” is always a matter of perspective. We condemn Epstein now, in no small part because he preyed on young women from a higher economic bracket than those in Palm Beach, and he did it in NYC, where people with more money (and so, power) took it more seriously. Acosta, in Florida, was just following the cultural rules. But then came the paradigm shift.

Or, as some Christians would put it, the arc of the universe, which bends towards justice. They would also call justice the moral center of the universe, and urge us to take it more seriously. Which is not such a bad idea. What, after all, would science put at the center of the universe. The laws of physics? And how should we then live?

*I have to belatedly add that liberation theology came out of a central concern for the people as the starting point of Christian concern, and out of the experiences of corruption and oppression in the Americas. And it can’t be coincidence that the echoes of that theology (however faint) now sound from the Papacy, where the last two Popes have been: from the Americas.

There is still more light to spring forth.