Red or Blue Pill?

Red or Blue Pill?

Idolatry and science

The first and greatest commandment

• 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.'

This is the first and greatest commandment.

• (Matthew 22.37)

Shema• Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is

one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6)

The first of ten

• Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol …

What does this

mean?

Phineas Gage

• Railroad foreman in Vermont

• Drastic accident• Personality change• PT Barnum

Emotions

• Brain damage -> impaired judgement• Reasoning consistent• “Elliott” – a ‘modern Phineas Gage’• Decision making rests upon emotional

reaction– eg chess + winnowing

• Bodily, carnal• ‘that’s bad’

Values

• Emotions are cognitive and evaluative

• Compare:– Your wife is a teacher– Your wife is an adulterer

• Different types of knowledge

• Some are ‘value laden’

• Or, some are more important

Castles

Spiders

• Our reason is like a blanket spread over our emotional makeup

• Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature)

So what is idolatry?

• Making something more important than it really is– ‘making the penultimate ultimate’

• God is the most important ‘thing’• If God is at the centre – everything else falls

into its proper place• “The Tao that can be spoken…”• Only the holy can see truly

Blessed

are the pure in heart,

for they

shall see God

The hierarchy of values

• Monolatry– (golden calf)

• Polytheism

• Chaos

• Everyone worships something

• “You gotta serve somebody…”

Forms of idolatry

• Addiction– Physical

– Mental

• Idols give what they promise

• They take life in exchange

• Everyone is senseless and without knowledge; every goldsmith is shamed by his idols. His images are a

fraud; they have no breath in them. They are worthless, the objects of mockery; when their

judgment comes, they will perish. He who is the Portion of Jacob is not like these, for he is the

Maker of all things, including Israel, the tribe of his inheritance— the LORD Almighty is his name.

• (Jeremiah 10)

The idolatry of science

• Scientific truth is the only truth– (the idolatry of positivism)

• Or

• Scientific truth is the most important truth– (the idolatry of fundamentalism)

• "We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched."

• (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.52)

Consistent theme in literature

• Faust

• Frankenstein

• Matrix

"People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them." (Wittgenstein, 1939)

The holiness of science

• Emotional disengagement (απαθεια )

• The pursuit of truth

• “The perfect state of non-attachment”

• Attention to what is, not what is desired to be

• Therefore: ascesis – spiritual discipline

• Science is an ascesis

• “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure -that just ain’t so” (Mark Twain)

Red or Blue Pill?

• Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?

The apathistic stance

• Remember: emotions are cognitive

• Emotional disengagement is a tool

• As with all tools, we need to be taught how to use it

• We’re not here to worship the tool

• The use of a tool is power over a tool

• Virtue

"What makes a subject hard to understand - if it's something significant and important - is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect." (Wittgenstein, 1931)

The collapse of virtue

• Alasdair MacIntyre• Imagine the collapse

of science…

• "I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years."(Wittgenstein to Drury, c 1930)

• And if he walked past a bookshop in Cambridge today, doubtless he'd see pictures of Paris Hilton….

Φρόνησις • Phronesis

• Judgement/Prudence/Practical wisdom

• Compare ‘sophia’ – which became science

• We are radically “anti-phronetic”!

• It is about loving God above all things

• Only the living God gives life

• Worshipping the living God gives integrity

• "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.“

(HG Wells, from The Outline of History,

1920)

A Spiritual crisis

• The nature of a religious tradition

• An education

• A way of seeing, a way of knowing

• A way of living

• A way

Living in the Matrix

• Batteries for the system

• Our life is being used up

• Western culture is profoundly idolatrous

• God does not allow idolatry to continue

• The crisis is coming