Adam Piggott has written an interesting piece on his blog about science and God that takes no prisoners. His conclusion is that you can have one or the other but not both. One part of me agrees but another part feels that science is just a word for knowledge and surely it is not wrong to explore the creation as long as one does it while fully acknowledging the Creator and understanding everything in his light? I have to say that my personal feelings incline towards Adam Piggott’s position but I am not convinced I am correct. It may be how things are now but is not necessarily how the situation always would be. Perhaps the problem is that science easily corrupts the scientist and the type of person who becomes a scientist is often (not always) a materialist who lacks both imagination and intuition not to mention faith. Maybe the scientific method and way of thinking actually require one to close off parts of one's mind that are spiritually attuned or to atrophy these parts*.
But notwithstanding my uncertainty on the matter, let's take the position of assuming there is indeed a dichotomy between science and God. Here are some thoughts put forward as a theory – no more. This also echoes a previous post I did on technology.
What if all our science and, especially, our technology actually comes from a highly intelligent but spiritually dead demonic source, and is given to humanity to separate us from God and bring about our spiritual corruption?
The stories we hear about scientists being inspired in dreams which are sometimes taken as being somehow divine in origin may be something quite other. The spiritual and the demonic are often confused by those who have no experience of such things.
What brought about the Fall of Man from Paradise? It was when the serpent promised Eve that she could be the equal of Adam and even God if she ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now, this tree and its fruit were presumably created by God so were not bad in themselves but the sin was to eat from the tree before being ready and against the specific instruction from God not to do so. The fruit represents the mind or thought which are not bad things except when they are separated from the spiritual source and regarded as independent of God. That is science, is it not?
Eating the fruit means awakening to mind and the world of opposites it reveals and that in turn brings about the sense of a separate self. It destroyed Paradise and resulted in the Fall. Sin and death entered the world and they entered, it could reasonably be said, with science.
The process has continued. Over the last 200 years technology, put through from demonic levels, has destroyed tradition and religion and turned the world into an outpost of hell. Look at our art and architecture just for starters. Technology has corrupted our minds and now, with the diabolical fantasies of transhumanism, is even beginning to deform the human image. The Faustian pact gives us power over our world and our outer self but at the price of severing the link with the divine and our true being.
We get material power but each new form of technology takes us further away from God and the soul. We accept this happily because we only see the benefits which are not even benefits really because they soon pall and we demand more like a junkie with his fix.
Technology is about replacing man with machine, first externally but increasingly internally. Depending on machines for everything just makes our consciousness more mechanical and less alive which is why everything is duller these days. Our minds and our very consciousness become desensitised by technology and shrivel. The computers we increasingly live our lives through are stealing our souls and eroding our spiritual faculties which range from imagination to awareness of the sacred. Even our moral sense is undermined.
Where is all this leading? Is the aim to turn this world into hell and human souls into soulless zombies which the demons can exploit for their own ends? That may be why they wish to have people mentally and physically remade by technology. It is like the corruption of elves into orcs by Morgoth in Tolkien’s legendarium. But perhaps the technological advancements have another aim as well.
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Demons lack bodies. They have lost their angelic forms and do not have a physical form either. They are spirits in the inner dimensions but they crave form for the greater powers of self-expression and freedom this would give them. Is it possible that through technology, through computers, through artificial intelligence, they are trying to gain an entry into this world? Could this provide the platform they need to incarnate directly in matter? Remember they are currently neither in spirit proper nor matter. They exist in a kind of limbo world, cut off from God. By remodelling the physical world so it is no longer the natural creation they make it possible to connect directly with it. Through digital and mechanical means they can incarnate. Sensitive souls have complained about the spiritual ravages caused by the Industrial Revolution from the beginning. Blake and Wordsworth were at the forefront of this but we have ignored them because we are so easily seduced by material goods. But now things are potentially much worse. The dream of freedom offered by technology is close to becoming the nightmare of slavery to it.
This is a theory. From the normal point of view it’s crazy, the stuff of science fiction as the saying goes. But maybe science fiction can warn us of what may happen if we let it. No, what will happen if we do not take active steps to stop it. We absolutely must rediscover God and reject completely the lure of the demons before they destroy us. Could this be what happened before and brought about the necessity for God to drown a previous humanity at the time of the Flood? For one thing is certain. Even if the demons succeed their success won’t last long. God will not permit it. Surely they know that? Perhaps, but maybe their pride thinks they can get away with it this time. It's up to us to make sure they do not.
* Adam Piggott has written a later piece clarifying that he is referring to science as it is today. So, as it has become rather than what it intrinsically is though the question still remains as to whether that is inevitable given the nature of science and the type of thought that is required to pursue it.
@William - This is a matter about which it is probably impossible to reach a solid conclusion - especially as the changes panned many centuries. But here goes...
ReplyDeleteTo my mind, science is a development of philosophy - and is prone to similar problems. Adam would probably disagree, but my understanding is that the Great Schism between Orthodox and Roman Catholicism (c1000 AD) was driven by the increasing role of abstract theology/ philosophy within the Western Church (which soon after reached its flowering in medieval scholasticism) - and this was exactly the same movement of thought that later led to science and its breaking-away from philosophy.
In other words, Western Catholicism was - from its origin and causally - prone to exactly the same problems that are now seen in a much more extreme form with what-was science. What applies to science also earlier applied to the RCC compared with Eastern Orthodoxy (there was no 'middle ages' in the Eastern Catholic countries).
(The original and real science is, of course, extinct - having been bureaucratically absorbed into The System - and the same could be said for the Roman Catholic - and all other - churches. So I am talking about the situation as it was several generations ago.)
But these did not lead to really dangerous problems until the evolutionary development of Men had produced men of the kind we are familiar with today - who very soon, in middle childhood, lose the natural, spontaneous participation in the spirit and the divine which used to be universal. (This is Owen Barfield's analysis I am quoting, BTW.)
Once we were cut-off from the world of spirit, and made the choice to accept and enforce this alienation, all these latent problems of abstraction/ legalism/ materialism etc could operate unopposed.
This has been building in The West since about the Industrial Revolution, with masses of people - generation after generation - declining to choose participation/ embracing alienation as the only reality; and by now the situation is absolutely dire. All the official/ institutional world is built about negation and opposition to the traditional/ natural - and we were first cast adrift, and are now purposively evil - with an inverted value system.
In sum, I regard Adam as right about science-now, and medicine - but I also include the Roman (and other) Churches. And we can't go back to the Christianity of 100,200,500 or 1000 years ago because it had the same inbuilt abstracting/ alienating flaws as we now experience. Modern consciousness perceives the old religions are arbitrary and imposed ; and cannot experience them as natural and obvious in the way they were experienced at the time.
We seem to have painted ourselves into a corner from which it is extremely unlikely we will escape at the societal level. But as individuals we can escape by understanding and making a commitment to how things should be - to reject the choices actually made by modernism, and instead to affirm the choices we should have made.
William,
ReplyDeleteThis is a very thoughtful piece which has taken my very basic argument and gone into much more depth. I agree that science was always doomed to follow this course. In fact, any undertaking once consumed by the System becomes a tool for evil. Science is one of the big ones now as they demand obedience to its ever changing dictates but there are many others of course.
We are all big fans of Tolkien in these parts and his work was driven in part at his own despair at the industrialisation of the country lanes where he had spent his youth. Saruman and his works are the embodiment of that while the elves and Tom Bombadil are those that reject science and technology. The hobbits were the most interesting as they managed to sit comfortably in the middle; they used new advances solely in a manner that the technology complimented their lives as opposed to changing it.
We have gone the way of Saruman and things have only got worse since Tolkien's time.
Bruce,
I don't disagree with your analysis of the schism of c1000 AD, far from it. This explains much regarding the separate paths that the two great churches have taken and it ties in with what I have been thinking.
Thank you both for such interesting perspectives.
Thank you both for your perceptive comments which add a lot to the post. I think we are all more or less on the same page.
ReplyDeleteBruce, I would say this ties in to your recent post about Satan's scheme being to turn us into, or convince ourselves we are, things. That is what modern science does.
Then again, science also gave us anesthesia, hernia surgery, analgesia ...
ReplyDeleteObviously science has given us many things but there is a wider point at issue to do with spiritual attunement and understanding. What does it benefit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?
ReplyDeleteFascinating post and follow-ups, and I read Adam's original. Thank you all!
ReplyDeleteMight one say that if/when one loses one's sense of the reality of the divine and God, one loses one's ability to even judge the fruits of modern "science"?
There are numerous problems I have with modern science, and I was a part of it much less successfully than Bruce. I had horrifying depression when I was in it, probably related to spiritual warnings that I could not understand.
The peer-review process depends on radical honesty and humility from other scientists/reviewers, which they now do not have (the exception proves the rule - Dr. Charlton would obviously be an honest reviewer). Thus, almost all scientists are now incaapble of honestly judging each other's work. Results: 2/3 of all science is not reproducible, and fails it's own validity tests.
Another problem: science as conceived now cares not at all about the dangerous or bad uses of it's research. A corollary: it cares even less about the damage done to beings and test subject during the research, notwithstanding the Nuremberg Code. It's value and spirit neutral. The only criterion is that the results or the products of science must be lauded and supported by the same people who create the results. There are no referees outside "the science," which is insane. Politicians are not even allowed to criticize "the science."
Finally, The Science puts more fear and/or worship in the minds of people than God or religion. It's a terrible idol. Whatever it is now, must be rejected completely.
I'd trust a plumber or electrician before a scientist.
If science understood that its field of operation was limited to creation, and it thought of what it studied as a creation by a Creator, things might not have got to the point they have. But because science recognises no higher authority it makes a god of itself and that is satanic.
ReplyDeleteI think there is a scriptural basis for science in Proverbs 25:2 "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter."
ReplyDeleteBut, like all things created and given to us by God, such as sex, maximum corruption is Satan's goal and we can certainly see how corrupt sexuality has become in the modern age.
Agreed, William; science disconnected from God becomes as evil as sex disconnected from God.
Interesting discussion.