Science in the face of the smallness of humanity

To be read with ambient cosmic horror music playing in the background. I recommend this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlDivIaiuMU

"I think, in the grand scale of things, humanity thinks too much of its own understanding. It only takes a little honesty and humility to admit that we are nothing in the face of the cosmos, which indefinitely stretches out into a strange nothingness. The more difficult admission is that there is no salvation in attempting to expand our knowledge of the universe, because dust mites, however clever, are nothing when faced with the alien corpse of a sperm whale in the darkness of the ocean depths. The vastness of existence is beyond our ability to comprehend. That having been said, science ought not to proceed with the assumption that everything can be known, because there will always be an unknown horizon for us to explore. Just when science thinks it has adequately described the universe, new phenomenon will throw our certainty into panicked disarray.

It's worth noting that science has a place in human life and a perfectly legitimate employment. People like the great Carl Sagan, who are humble in their exploration of the wondrous universe, are a credit to their disciplines. The benefits of science are obvious, and there is no reason to avoid learning more about the amazing world we occupy, though complete mastery may elude us.

But science is not infallible. A common mistake, I have experienced, is to place faith in the ability of science to make all matters clear. The mistake lies in the fact that science is equipped to be descriptive of the world, but not prescriptive. It has power to tell unravel the intimate workings of the natural world, but it has no power to make value judgements or inform one how one's life ought to be lived. Science is often misappropriated as a basis for philosophies or world views, many of which history looks back on with disgust. For example, it was once declared in the name of science that the white man was superior to all humanity, and that the sterilization of society's "undesirables" might benefit humanity's general situation. These prescriptive misappropriations of science contributed, as many know, to the evils of the Holocaust, which the Nazis considered the fulfillment of everything American scientists had described in their detailed writings on eugenics.

Additionally, science has a tendency to change. What is fact one year is made obsolete the next. Today's fact is yesterday's disproved theory. The most that science can consistently afford us is knowledge of what can be safely predicted in the occurrences of the natural world. But even then, it is mere prediction, not certainty. Nothing is set in stone. The very earth beneath our feet, and how we permit ourselves to think of it, is under constant revision. There is no solid footing left, no still moments, no rest. Humanity becomes tossed about on a sea of change. But despite the uncertainty of its position, humanity becomes somehow determined to think of its rocky boat as a firm foundation, as a describer of the world and as a prescriber of values.

I think it worth noting that the prerogative to make prescriptive claims on human life has more firmly rested with religion and faith. Theology and spirituality, while not exempt from the chaotic change of the other sciences, profess as their foundations a more or less stable axiom, that there is more to life than can be empirically shown. These disciplines, more preoccupied with the truths of poetry and literature, are no less valuable than the natural sciences. They may not have the descriptive power of science, but they engender in us the honesty and humility to know that human beings are finite and in desperate need of something more. In a sense, theology and spirituality are open to the strangeness of the world, its infinite incomprehensibility and impossible strangeness.

Of course, these traditionally religious areas of human life are, like science, not without grievous faults. All too often, scripture is shown to have petty human interests at heart. Wars convenient to those who stand to benefit are often started in the name of religion. Spiritual awareness can lead to zealotry and evil in the name of good. Wrongly construed, the "word of God" can be taken to be an endorsement of ethically reprehensible practices. Faith, while a reaction to something more than human, is all too often warped into something small, petty and human.
Ultimately, it isn't what humans do or write that is interesting to me. The failures of humanity, whether in matters of faith or science, are not difficult to affirm. I witness them every day, both in my actions and in the actions of others. No, whatever human beings derive on the basis of their own inspiration and capabilities, it does not matter; it holds no interest for me. What does hold interest for me is the intrusion of the alien and divine into human life, and the human reaction to that intrusion. Such a dynamic defies all the rules of our little existence. Could such a thing could ever happen? The sheer size of the world and what lies beyond it is so immense that the human mind simply cannot take it all in. The world is completely beyond us.

And for that reason, I call scientism an overrated fad. Faith in human epistemic and rational capabilities is far less compelling to me than faith in what is transcendent of those same human capabilities. That alien and unknowable otherness, which has made itself known in whispers and brutal death, intangibly calls every human mind to contemplation. It implants symbols into the mind. The cross is both a taunt and acknowledgement of death, a call to the madness of an eternal existence. I use the word "madness" quite deliberately, for love is mad, and God is love. And by the narrow definition of rationality and reason that we insignificant specs put forth as incontestable, God is utterly insane, for his love knows no rational limit, and he will love in ways that confound our tiny sense of ethicality or logic. What he sees and does goes utterly beyond what we can see and do, and so he appears from the human perspective as irredeemably insane. There is no single logos tying his behaviors down in ways that we humans can grasp. He is wholly other. We think ourselves sane, and he mad. But perhaps it is he who is sane and we who are mad. And who is to say what constitutes saneness or madness in an objective sense? Surely not we humans, whose eyes are so imperfectly dim. And yet God has shown himself willing to stretch out his hands and reveal the eldritch truth to those open to seeing.

Logic (and any paradigm of science that glorifies logic) is ultimately a tiny god to worship; I will never understand the people who appeal to it over the  overwhelming insanity and otherness of God.

Maybe Lovecraft had more insight into faith than he could have ever guessed."

This is the Idiot, signing out.

Human Belief in Knowledge, Certainty, and Assassin's Creed

Foreword: The following is not exactly polished. As far as philosophy goes, it's pretty basic stuff. It's a discussion about Cartesian scientific certainty, which is all the rage these days. It's also about the role that faith (or belief, if you like) plays in human experience. All of this was inspired by a particular scene in Assassin's Creed 1 (minor spoilers). I wrote it without a whole lot of editing, but regardless, my convictions as to the importance of faith in human experience are firm. I hope you will see why upon reading this.

"People today tend to talk in terms of knowledge and ignorance. In true Socratic fashion, human existence has largely become a dichotomy where knowledge and ignorance represent bookends for an all-applicable standard. Certainty and grounded-ness are perceived as the ultimate goals. The highest good of discussion and discourse is to stick closely to the facts and adhere to a decidedly scientific rigor. But personally, I think it's more complicated (and yet also much simpler) than that. More than facts and certainty, I believe that the dichotomy which applies more deeply, more authentically to the breadth of human existence, is faith and doubt.

I played Assassin's Creed yesterday. It's a fun little game to play, set in the under-explored historical setting of the Third Crusade. I liked it quite a bit when I was younger, partly because it was one of the few games willing to touch on things like philosophy and religion. But things are never quite as good as you remember, and this game is not as ideologically grand as I remember it being. Essentially, it's science fiction set in the middle ages, with the player attempting to wrest control of advanced alien technology from the evil Templar Order. There is a part of the game later on in which you have to assassinate a Teutonic crusader named Sibrand, who has terrorized the people of the city of Acre with his paranoid fear that assassin's are out to get him (which is actually true, in his case). To make the player feel justified in killing Sibrand, there is a scene in which he accuses an innocent and defenseless priest of being an assassin, and then kills him. The player naturally feels enraged (and maybe a little guilty) over this.

The player makes the successful stab while Sibrand is alone, and lays the dying crusader down. "Rest now, and go to the arms of your God," says the assassin. "Have you learned nothing?" rasps Sibrand. "I know what awaits for me, for all of us." "If not your God, then what?" "Nothing," utters Sibrand, his voice hushed in fear. "Nothing awaits. And that is what I fear." "You don't believe?" the assassin asks incredulously. "How could I? Given what I know, what I have seen? This life is all we have." The talk lingers a little while, with Sibrand explaining that armed with his scientific knowledge (gleaned from the alien tech we mentioned above), he intended to free the holy land by dispelling the illusion of religion. "I followed my orders, believing in my cause," he says, whispering his final words. "Same as you."

The irony of this, to me, was that Sibrand talks about the dialectic between knowledge and ignorance as a criterion while speaking about belief in the same breath. He, a middle ages crusader, saw scientific wonders that made religion look like ignorance by comparison. In this light, holding knowledge over belief became a moral obligation; to be true to himself, he felt he needed to dismiss all belief as ignorance in favor of the standard of knowledge. But upon his death, he confesses that he acted from the standpoint of belief.

When knowledge is reduced down to its most basic axioms, when we arrive at the deepest foundations of what we think is certain, we have nothing but belief. Short of studying EVERYTHING that there is to know about ANYTHING, to the extreme point of achieving certainty in all aspects of your knowledge, there is no way to know for certain that what you know is actually the case. You have to take it on faith that your eyes are not deceiving you. How do you know the traffic light is green? How are you absolutely, beyond all doubt, objectively certain that it is green? Might it be red? You don't know; all you can do is trust your senses and take it on faith that what they are telling you corresponds to reality. Descartes, for all his faults, shines here; there is no way for you to be certain that everything you learned in school is objectively true. And even if they were true facts when you learned them, the nature of science is that it is in a state of near constant self-contradiction. What is true today in science may not be true tomorrow. The implication of this model of knowledge is that absolute certainty is a pipe dream. Nothing can be known for certain. If you are honest with yourself, I think you will find that this is true of everything you think you have ever known. Faith or doubt, not certainty, is at the base of human understanding. Everything we think we know is an assumption without ultimate proof, a leap of faith. There is no primordially verifiable evidence for human experience.

This is one reason why I am skeptical when people tell me that the dialectic between knowledge and ignorance is the only way to understand the world. I find that it is never that simple. The best that science can do is explore the world and present us with more knowledge, which then serves to update/negate what we thought was absolutely true. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, as knowledge is valuable, and without it, we would arguably remain incomplete and unfulfilled. Learning is a natural and fundamental part of what it means to be human. But the end point is that the more knowledge you have, the more things you have to be uncertain about and the more things you must take on faith.

Sibrand automatically assumed that because he had obtained knowledge, everything beyond the scope of tangible knowledge and certainty had to be discounted. He assumed scientific, factual ignorance was the great evil to avoid, but this very assumption was an act of faith. There was no hard evidence to ground his assumption that knowledge was the highest criterion; he chose where he would place value, where to put his belief. Ironically, his unbelief was wholly constituted by belief, by faith, a faith tainted with despair, a faith determined to sink deeper into doubt.

All this sermonizing is just to say this: you have far more faith and doubt than you do knowledge or certainty, and this tension between faith and doubt is at work in every moment of your life. Do with that what you will.

I only know that I want to believe in something more than knowledge, which is contingent on the ever changing interpretations of what constitutes ignorance. I want to believe in something more than Sibrand's despair. I have to believe in something, by virtue of human finitude, and I cannot do otherwise. So I will choose to believe in something good, something noble, something higher than myself, something constant and absolute. And when I look out into the world of possible beliefs that I could work toward realizing, Christianity and the hope of new life stand out to me in a profound way that I cannot, for all my powers of reason, adequately justify. I am compelled by my very existence to believe, so I will believe in hope. And in that hope, may my ordinary faith be lifted up to new heights, there to find new life."

Until next time, this is the Idiot, signing out.