We discussed both mythology and scientific approaches to understanding the origins of the cosmos. While the mythology serves as inspiring poetry and as a powerful force in unifying a nation it fails to address the state of the way things are and only pretends to understand essential truths about reality. Creation mythology is a form of social memory which serves to justify the existence of a people’s habits, customs and culture: the “chosen race†cannot be special when it is clearly a product of historical forces rather than magic, and so magic takes the lead in seducing our perceptions. This magic is woven by the priest-caste which seeks to control the population and does so by pretending to be given divine revelation and auspices. Religion is complete bunk.
That being said, I do have a sort of religious experience when meditating on the vast expanse of the cosmos or when observing the beautiful complexity of nature. I do indeed recoil at the notion of littering, or of treating other people with barbarism, infidelity, disloyalty and unfaithfulness – yet these dispositions arise from the heart of natural reason rather than the command of the god, or more relevant to the subject at hand, a knowledge of my own divine creation.
Ultimately while we may know of the scientific explanation this knowledge only serves a technical merit (in exploring space for example) rather than a teleological one: knowledge of the Big Bang, for instance, does not say anything about the ultimate meaning of life or why the universe was created. Understanding cosmology is similar to understanding how a ball set into motion continues to roll, and what effects it may have on reality: it is a cautionary knowledge rather than a mystical one. While I am awed by the sheer scale and number of nearly unlimited possibilities in the universe, fixating on its creation is ultimately pointless as no human can further understand why we are here than any other human. In this sense one could label me a “militant agnostic†like Michael Shermer, “I don’t know, and you don’t either.†We should, as Rousseau and the ancients contend, pursue virtue rather than the sciences, so as to live our lives properly, leaving the natural geniuses to obsess over such abstract knowledge. It is this sublime science, the acquisition of virtue, which should rather obsess our thoughts than pretensions of understanding cosmology, for the former is the labor of regular men, and the latter is a wasteful entertainment for all but the most clever of minds.
2 replies on “Random notes”
You are a bit confused, to say the least, when it comes to mythology–let alone religion. As a scholar on the subject, I must assert that mythology DOES NOT “pretend to understand the world”; it has proven time and again that it has. Myth conveys that truth in a fictive form–the gods may not exist but their powers most certainly do. You have much to learn on the subject…
You claim to be a scholar: I challenge you to provide one document of peer-reviewed evidence which supports the claim that the gods’ power most certainly exists.
By the way, if you do manage to produce such an evidence you should report it to the James Randi foundation and claim their 1 million dollar prize.