One Cosmos Bob

The great and even sometimes correct physicist, Albert Einstein: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." In the view of many, religion is primitive, childish, and "nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses." Therefore, for Einstein, science without childish nonsense is entirely lame.


Could this be why he refused to eat his peas and accept the unsettling implications of quantum mechanics? Yeah, probably. If only he had practiced a less primitive and childish religion -- or maybe even understood his own -- perhaps he could have realized that complementarity and nonlocality are here to stay, irrespective of what mere physicists have to say about them. I mean, God is surely a physicist, but not only a physicist.

I think even Einstein would agree that physics can only discover truth, not invent it. And if physics arrives at a theory which renders the person who affirms it an illusion, well, so much the worse for the theory. Back to the drawing board.

God will wait for the prodigal scientist. What did Robert Jastrow say? "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Now, what is so interesting about this is that, at the top of that mountain, man doesn't discover an equation, or a singularity, or subatomic particle. Rather, what he discovers is another... face? Jesus Christ!

We'll get back to this provocative idea later, but let's just stipulate at the moment that it is indeed possible to come face-to-face with reality and to graze in the mirror and recognize the phase before one was born. There I AM, just as I left him!

As we were saying yesterday, there is no object that lacks an "interior horizon". It is forever inaccessible to the cold and eager grasp of the materialist. Hate to be so antipromethean, but Way It Is.

"Even subspiritual entities are not completely bereft of this kind of protection.... There is no being that does not enjoy an interiority, however liminal and rudimentary it may be" (Balthasar, but see also Whitehead for exciting details).

The above holds true unless, I suppose, your faith in yourself is total, in which case there is literally no getting through to you, because you are entirely complete and therefore closed.

"what we actually experience of the world always remains an infinitesimal sector of the knowable" (ibid).

For as the "sphere of knowledge" expands, so too does the edge that shades off into the unKnown. Thus, if restricted to the horizontal plane only, it is quite accurate to say that "the more we know, the less we understand," and it is not difficult to see why this must be the case.

To playgiarize with another shopworn truism, it is possible to know more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing, at which point we are granted tenure.

Conversely, only the Raccoon knows a little nothing about everything.

The little "nothing" we know about everything is that inaccessible essence known only to... God? But isn't it interesting that even this little "nothing" speaks to us?

In other words, in the act of knowing, there is a kind of "cosmic movement" from interior to exterior. But the moment we try to clutch at that interior, it recedes back to its private sphere, like a mirage in the desert road on the way to Vegas.

Thus, "even so-called exact science remains an approximation of the truth about the essence of matter. It is no more and no less than a never-ending attempt to woo the core of the material world, which is not directly available to sense perception" (ibid).

Rather, it is veil upon veil upon veil, just like Einstein's "primitive" religion, Judaism, says it is. Not sure if Einstein ever got to the next part, which is that the veil simultaneously conceals and reveals, which is why reality is always a revelation.

Is this a bad thing? No, of course not, unless you think that a negligee on a Victoria's Secret model is a bad thing. Nature woos us with similarly seductive veils, and we don't mind at all. Rather, she can use us until she uses us up.

Does this mean that we are championing the romantic and irrational? Hardly. Well, sort of. Again, we can know any number of things about nature. Just not everything -- any more than one could know oneself completely. Indeed, assuming that you don't even know yourself, and that you know yourself best, what makes you think that you could completely know anything else? What are you, a machine?

Balthasar: "[R]eality, not merely by reason of some accidental circumstance, but by reason of an intrinsic necessity, must always remain richer than any cognition of it," and "the truth even of the lowest level of being contains a richness that so utterly eludes exhaustive investigation that it can continue to engage inquirers until the end of time yet never ends up as a heap of unmysterious, completely surveyable facts."



For those of us who actually enjoy science, this should be wonderful news, because it means that there is no end to the knowledge party, no matter how late one arrives. Like the burning bush, or the wine at the wedding, or the feeding of the five thousand, there's always more where that came from.



However, this cosmic fact will not be a liberating joy, but a frustrating persecution, for those who pursue science with secret pretensions to omniscience. There are always scientific party-poopers, those annoying know-it-alls who tell everyone to break it up and go home.



For such narrow-minded and snake-eyed scolds, it will be extremely disturbing to learn that God enjoys playing a little dice now and then. And history teaches that the biggest gamble of all was the creation of a bunch of big-brained Einsteins with the freedom to deny that he plays dice.



But even before that -- before mind -- comes the shocking phenomenon of Life and all it implies. For when God told the cosmos to get a life, he wasn't just serious but really yoking around with time. Time to roll 'dem bones!



To be continued....

Para. 1: Einstein I'll take (with a grain or two here & there); your comment re: the troll's drawdown on Albert's aphorism is perfect:


for Einstein, science without childish nonsense is entirely lame.

Para. 2: what could be added or subtracted? 10 of 10.

Para.3: So much quotable throughout, well-characterized by this paragraph. Sentence 2 alone is a tour de force. I must memorize it or work it into a song lyric. Perhaps sentence 3 could be the song title.

Para. 4:I remember my father-in-law, a devoutly modern renaissance man/taxi-cab driver/telescope builder quoting Jastrow to me at he apex of his "highest peak", after having skewered me for my "faith".

Para.5: Ah, yes. How to render that revelation into a succinct 4 part formula we can fit on a 3x5.

Para.6: Boo. It is scary to us is it not to confront the reality that we are all straw men, as

Para.7: so succinctly expresses it. But do you get back to Para.5 later?

Para.8: "there is no object...that lacks an 'interior horizon'...[which remains]forever inaccessible to the cold and eager grasp of the materialist." Am I parsing this correctly? "Way it is", dude.

Para.9-14: amplifies the preceeding, culminating in tenure

Para.15-17:

millenialism

A quote from a comment stream by someone named TitusStaccato

I liked this weeks program on all counts. Libertarian Millenials is a spot on label. I think it applies my Gen X a lot too. I am not implying that Snowden specifically is part of this creedless creed, but the Libertarian Millenialism I recognize in myself, wanting to be--I believe it was P J Buchanan's term "a multimedia ninja [motorcycle rapping adult film] performer" --I believe the demographic rootlessness of the middle class of the last three decads is probably the culprit in part. Not being quite young enough to be a millenial allow me to delude you into believing I have an insightful perspective on the causes.

Millenials are not all bad people and under no circumstances shouldbe used as a food source without first consulting with the millenial in question. What millenials are lacking, speaking for myself (a late X-er) are ordinary affiliations such as church, scouting, Indian Guides or even school clubs. If like me the millenial's family finally seemed to get rooted when they were past 10 years old, the part missing from the normal socialization and practical skill set that comes from, for example learning in groups of peers while chaperoned/ learning in an ordered or stratified group environment. Computers retard progress in those sorts of skills and serve as a shield to hide the deficiencies, in the same way radical politics, bizarre fashions and food fetishes do.

I used to tell myself that I would fill in those traditional knowledge gaps later, but I never wanted to start way behind the Joneses in learning to start fires or chart a course on a paper map thus never did. I've got arithemetic down pat though. The millenial strives for fame, glamor and/or money and generally doesn't believe in nation, family or creed because he has been taught formal analysis critical theory to look for goblins of political incorrectness and ignores the bigger picture. Anger, unless it is trivial and extremely personal OCD anger is grounds for automatic dismissal and one less person the millenial has to deal with. It is narcissm wrapped in a false choosines that borders on misanthropy.

So the big concern is 45 million entitled jerkweeds whose only skill is feeling good about themselves, I can recognize the type. Millenials' enablers are only as bad as the average millenial requires. But when a millenial body is displeased it behaves like the 150 million zomboid Shi'ites who are the world's other great scourge. Meanwhile the lack of talented shepherds is preventing the millenials from doing the only thing that could possibly save him or her, patriotism, tradition, or a laissez-faire competitive challenge. The solution is to make outer space seem attractive to all of them and their enablers and launch them all out there. The strategy "I hear Allah calling, sign right here, see ya" .
I'm sure I am missing something in this analysis but I hit the high points of why we're doomed, in my own words. Here is a link to a non-partisan think tank devoted to keeping the future from being insubstantial, the Long Now Foundation,http://blog.longnow.org/02013/... Please remember to recycle.