Now that I’ve completed preparatory research essays on Schelling (The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency) and Whitehead (Physics of the World-Soul: The Relevance of A. N. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology), it’s finally time to start zeroing in on my dissertation thesis. The title I’m proposing for now is Imagination Between Science and Religion: Towards a Cosmotheandric Process Philosophy. This title captures the 3 major themes l’ll be trying to weave together in my dissertation the(o)sis: 1) an imaginal method, or way of being-knowing, or soul-making, in congress with the cycles of life, death, and rebirth, 2) a rhetorical interpolation into to the popular science v. religion diatribe concocted by the entertainment-academia complex, and 3) a process philosophy adequate to the cosmotheandric experience, to the ontologically irreducible indwelling co-presence of universe, human, and divine.
In this post, I wanted to focus on the Science v. Religion theater. Here is tonight’s first sample: an hour-long interview with Al Jazeera’s Medhi Hasan:
Dawkins would seem to me to have conceded a lot of ground here, especially when he says he just isn’t interested in the good that religion has done in the past or may do in the future (Hasan mentions Gandhi and MLK, Jr.). There is a strong pragmatic argument to be made on behalf of religion’s ongoing importance in the modern world. It has not been made obsolete by science; science has merely forced religion to become experimental/experiential. To the extent that religion deals with life itself, and by proxy, with earth and cosmos, then it guides society faithfully into higher orders of wisdom and compassion. To the extent that technoscience is beholden to and in service of life, then it, too, can guide humanity safely into deeper sensitivities and perceptivities.
Here is tonight’s second sample from physicist Lawrence Krauss:
Krauss thinks he’s offering the world’s most anthrodecentric scientific knowledge of the bare truth of our own human irrelevance and of nature’s purposelessness, but really his theology of the “specialness/preciousness” of consciousness is among the most anthropocentric ideologies I could imagine. He has erased the intelligent evolutionary achievements of geo- and cosmogenesis–billions of years of adaptive dying by trillions of living creatures–and focused only on the human, even though the human is but an individuated mode of the universe informing and surrounding us. If humans are free to know (& to love?), so is nature.
His “emboldening” scientific (=technoindustrial) gospel has already been tried for more than 2 centuries and its not working; in fact, its eating the earth and disintegrating human society. Today’s technoindustrial societies have signed what B. Latour calls The Modern Constitution declaring humanity’s independence from the cosmos. The Constitution’s founding principles are the bifurcation of nature into physical quantities over and against psychical qualities, and of the human psyche into intelligent individual/rational animal over and against instinctual species/statistical genera. We are the special species, according to Krauss. We are the only ones (and the cosmically lonely ones), he says, who can provide meaning to the motion of the suns and planets, to the universe, or to our own lives. We must grab hold of our our spiritual bootstraps and launch ourselves into the entirely accidental future of life and civilization in the universe with nothing but our desire to feel individually special for guidance.
In this Krauss seems to brandish human freedom as a weapon against the deterministic chaos of nature, capable of slaying, slicing, and dissecting her into the digital figments of a physicist’s computer codes, or the vibrating filaments of a string theorist’s math equations. But what if the chaos is already inside us? What if we can’t control it/her? What if the very thing we think makes us free (=the will) keeps us forever lost at sea? What if the very thing we say founds our species ungrounds it, quickens it beyond eudamonia into madness? What if spirit is never simply in the center, but radiates always out around to the edge?
“Science is not a fairy tale.” -Whitehead. I take it he was right. That nature is a machine made for no other reason than for us to trick, tinker with, or exploit: there’s your fairy tale.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?