The Christian Modern affirmed the existence of Deity, but argued for a dominant mechanistic reality over which God had no practical input or control. The Christian Modern would argue. However, ask a Modern Christian what causes an object to fall back down after being thrown into the air, and he will more than likely reply “gravity.” Tell him “The answer is 'God', not 'gravity,'" and he will go "ah" because you should have clarified yourself. He did not understand you to be speaking spiritually but scientifically. Why did the Modern have to speak in terms of disclaimers, clarifications, and rejoinders when speaking about spirituality? Because the largest context and overall tone of Modernism was that what can be known can be known apart from God.
How can two kinds of answers exist for the same question if the Modern Christian really believes that God created one world? How can the spiritual answer be God and the scientific answer be gravity? In this two-dimensional world, which dimension is the more practical? The overwhelming consensus would agree that the practical answer is gravity while the impractical answer is God. Why? Gravity is more practical because gravity is pervasively experienced as a natural law, and natural law has definite negative (flying a plane into the ground) and positive (flying a plane to Rome) consequences.
Gravity is "upon" us every single moment of our lives and is immediately appreciated or sensed. What of God? Well, in a more "spiritual" sense God is upon us, but that explanation is unreasonable within a mechanistic framework. That explanation is not saying anything at all. The Modern is often more conscious of the "pull" of gravity than he is of the "pull" of God. This is his scripting. Oftentimes, the answer “God” has been given as an argumentative acquiescence to Christianity and practically nothing more because it lacks the manifestation "material" things afford.
This schismatic reality is not the systematic reliability Isaac Newton had in mind when he codified the laws of motion. Newton understood that the world has a machine portion that is mechanistically integrated. However, that mechanistic portion is not all that exists. Newton never said it was all that existed. The monotheistic God as described in the Bible was Newton’s Final Reality. Newton's God is infinite, "bracketing" the finite, mechanical portion of reality. Because His God is infinite, He has of His own volition made Himself intelligibly known. Because He has made Himself understood by intelligible means, He, too, has a definite and practical relationship to the world: He created it. He is the most liberal context ever.
Newton did not have to leap from physical to spiritual worlds. Inconsistency in one did not force him to find cover in the other. He did not have to operate within a dichotomy, which is one of the reasons Newton and his generation did not manifest the anxiety disorders so rife throughout Modern and POMO cultures. Newton’s concept of causes illustrates a consistent flow and reference of material to the immaterial, of finiteness to infinity, of physics to metaphysics, of the world to God. Newton’s world is one world.
Newton did not even know the material cause of gravity, but his logical reliability did not hinge upon that specific lack of scientific information. His logic was not rooted in information or in the machine portion of reality. Newton's system was not an exhaustive system that sought to reconcile all data on the basis of matter. Finite things are subject to change, so science can be expected to develop, progress, and expand. He did not have to know everything there was to know in order to say that something was so. He did not have to pretend to stand on "absolutes" in order to validate his faith in God. Newton was free from that mindset which can be described as premodern if anything.
POMO
Showing posts with label deity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deity. Show all posts
Friday, February 25, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
EINSTEIN & THE CLOSED SYSTEM
Newton's laws codified the idea of the integrated system and contributed to the normalization of the common Modern man an unwavering logical reliability in the material consistency of the universe. The idea eventually splayed into two very broad, divergent interpretations of Newton's system.
One view was the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system: the material world is all that exists. This scientific emphasis says that material laws are "high" or ultimate. If God exists, he is within the system as a material portion of that system. Because material begets material, God, in any personal sense, is necessarily the product of the material universe. This strictly scientific interpretation of reality was the dominant mindset of the Modern world and can be generally described as atheistic because, as a closed system, it claims a functionality independently of God or any deity whatsoever.
Following the popularity of Newton's discoveries, the 18th century Enlightenment galvanized the closed system position. That closed system can be described as all of natural law, including the total of natural causes and effects in the universe, is integrated (uniformity) into a reasonable way (closed system). To the Modern this goes without saying. To predecessors of Modern, scientific discovery, this was an epic revelation. So the pull of gravity on the moon relates to the pull of gravity on earth in such a way that all objects on earth weigh about one-third their earth-weight on the moon.
I can say “all” because within the Modern systematic mindset is a reasonable relationship between the pull of gravity on the earth and the pull of gravity on the moon. Materially, the entire universe is one environment. Its natural laws are self-contained and provide the Modern with a rigid form of consistency to which he can attribute his logical reliability and subsequent common sense. Consequently, the closed system perspective allowed the West to wrest from nature its mathematical formulae. The Enlightenment was committed to understanding the natural world on the basis of reason alone without the influence of religious belief. To sum it up, it can be said that the Modern worldview converges upon the focal point that what can be known can be known apart from God.
Scientists contributed to Newton's discoveries for the next two hundred years until Einstein changed physics altogether. In his Laws of Motion, Newton's “object” was an idealized particle in which he theorized an infinitesimally small “center” without consideration of the other real particles making up the object. Though eventually proven to be an oversimplification, the idealized particle was used to illustrate such complex behaviors like planetary motion and human behavior. Strict interpretation of Newton's Laws would apply to every particle of the object, resulting in exponentially erratic behavior of the object not yet understood by classical science.
Einstein published his Special Relativity in 1905. Einstein's discovery was a science of space, not objects, per se. Classical physics bifurcated position and motion, studying each separately from the other. Einstein was interested in how objects relate to the overall behavior of space. What he discovered was that space “bends.” Consider how water responds when an object is submerged. It responds totally appropriately: absorbing the object and totally integrating itself with the object's every blemish. Space is similar. An object inserted into space, “disrupts” that space, creating a uniquely complimentary environment. Further, if that object is hurtling through space, how unique is the relationship now between space and the object?
The complexity of Einstein's genius is that he created a science independent of the referential frame of any observer. The simplicity of Einstein's genius is that two observers in the same referential frame (fixed point) moving at the same velocity of earth are likely to observe a single, similar phenomena while two observers in different referential time frames (and, therefore, moving at different speeds relative to each other) may not observe the same phenomena. Though relativity here is contingent upon the referential frame of two observers, the entire theory is contingent upon a point that exists independently of each observer.
Einstein's relativity challenged the simplicity of Newton's assumption of how mass and motion interact. As it became popularized, the effect of Einstein's theory was a significant contribution to the undoing of other classical assumptions that were largely religious and naturally underpinned a multitude of then current cultural expressions. Once Einstein's Special Relativity was published (his General Relativity followed in 1917), Western culture was self-consciously experimenting with the ramifications of relativity.
One view was the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system: the material world is all that exists. This scientific emphasis says that material laws are "high" or ultimate. If God exists, he is within the system as a material portion of that system. Because material begets material, God, in any personal sense, is necessarily the product of the material universe. This strictly scientific interpretation of reality was the dominant mindset of the Modern world and can be generally described as atheistic because, as a closed system, it claims a functionality independently of God or any deity whatsoever.
Following the popularity of Newton's discoveries, the 18th century Enlightenment galvanized the closed system position. That closed system can be described as all of natural law, including the total of natural causes and effects in the universe, is integrated (uniformity) into a reasonable way (closed system). To the Modern this goes without saying. To predecessors of Modern, scientific discovery, this was an epic revelation. So the pull of gravity on the moon relates to the pull of gravity on earth in such a way that all objects on earth weigh about one-third their earth-weight on the moon.
I can say “all” because within the Modern systematic mindset is a reasonable relationship between the pull of gravity on the earth and the pull of gravity on the moon. Materially, the entire universe is one environment. Its natural laws are self-contained and provide the Modern with a rigid form of consistency to which he can attribute his logical reliability and subsequent common sense. Consequently, the closed system perspective allowed the West to wrest from nature its mathematical formulae. The Enlightenment was committed to understanding the natural world on the basis of reason alone without the influence of religious belief. To sum it up, it can be said that the Modern worldview converges upon the focal point that what can be known can be known apart from God.
Scientists contributed to Newton's discoveries for the next two hundred years until Einstein changed physics altogether. In his Laws of Motion, Newton's “object” was an idealized particle in which he theorized an infinitesimally small “center” without consideration of the other real particles making up the object. Though eventually proven to be an oversimplification, the idealized particle was used to illustrate such complex behaviors like planetary motion and human behavior. Strict interpretation of Newton's Laws would apply to every particle of the object, resulting in exponentially erratic behavior of the object not yet understood by classical science.
Einstein published his Special Relativity in 1905. Einstein's discovery was a science of space, not objects, per se. Classical physics bifurcated position and motion, studying each separately from the other. Einstein was interested in how objects relate to the overall behavior of space. What he discovered was that space “bends.” Consider how water responds when an object is submerged. It responds totally appropriately: absorbing the object and totally integrating itself with the object's every blemish. Space is similar. An object inserted into space, “disrupts” that space, creating a uniquely complimentary environment. Further, if that object is hurtling through space, how unique is the relationship now between space and the object?
The complexity of Einstein's genius is that he created a science independent of the referential frame of any observer. The simplicity of Einstein's genius is that two observers in the same referential frame (fixed point) moving at the same velocity of earth are likely to observe a single, similar phenomena while two observers in different referential time frames (and, therefore, moving at different speeds relative to each other) may not observe the same phenomena. Though relativity here is contingent upon the referential frame of two observers, the entire theory is contingent upon a point that exists independently of each observer.
Einstein's relativity challenged the simplicity of Newton's assumption of how mass and motion interact. As it became popularized, the effect of Einstein's theory was a significant contribution to the undoing of other classical assumptions that were largely religious and naturally underpinned a multitude of then current cultural expressions. Once Einstein's Special Relativity was published (his General Relativity followed in 1917), Western culture was self-consciously experimenting with the ramifications of relativity.
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