I picked up a book that Sara had around the house tonight and started to read it a little bit. The author is essentially reflecting on the correlation of the 'science' and other intellectualisms, and real life. We have allowed our world (or maybe just our culture) to become a largely atomistic world. That is, we break everything down into tiny, little, understandable parts. Molecules are not molecules, they are quarks and 'atomic glue,' wait quarks are not quarks they are.... well you get the idea. We break everything out of context and try to understand it as a stand alone entity. The family is not the family, it is a loose relation of people accidentally associated to one another in a continual fashion either by choice or ignorance.
People are no longer people. They are problems to be solved, 'issues' to deal with, mechanisms and machines to be used, or 'choices.' This next quote stuck out maybe just because I am a curmudgeon in regards to my current employment (I promise not every blog will be about that), but it has implications much beyond that as well. Wendell Berry says (in Life is a Miracle),
"I have read of Werner Heisenberg's principle that "Whenever one treats living organisms as physiochemical systems they must necessarily behave as such." I am not competent to have an opinion about the truth of that. I do feel able to say that whenever one treats living organisms as machines they must necessarily be perceived to behave as such. And I can see that the proposition is reversible: Whenever one perceives living organisms as machines they must necessarily be treated as such."
I think we would all do much better if we saw the things around us not as mechanical, controllable, and predictable. A lot of the time I think that has its beginnings in our relation to God first. We often think of him as 'good,' 'great,' 'powerful,' or any other common descriptor, just to the nth degree. We should, rather, see him not in a univocal sense (great, but to a huge degree), but in an anological sense (food is healthy and a person is healthy, not the same, but we understand some correlation). We know what 'good' means, and he is that, but in a sense that the language of 'good' is not necessasrily capable of encapsulating. Once we 'understand' our relation to the God of all, it is easier to understand our relation to all that is his. Well, maybe easy isn't the word, but at least the reduction of all seems harder to succomb to at that point.
4 comments:
Interesting thoughts. What's the book called?
isnt wendell berry a good 'ol missouri boy?
wait, so God is ineffible? predicates that we assign to him dont have actual truth value, only analogical value?
The book is Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. It looks like he is actually a good 'ol Kentucky boy, still farmin' his native land.
Ummm, I think that he actually is good, that is, it is actually true that he is good. I am more saying that I think we would be naive to think his being could be nailed down with ink on paper (ineffable, I suppose), and fully apprehended by reason. I am tempted to say that by his nature he is good in a sense that is categorically different from ours, but is still understandable in an analogical sense, without the truth value of the claim being diminished. After all, I would shy away from solidly claiming too much about God that we do not know by way of his self revelation. William Placher makes a pretty good case that univocal language about God was a significant historical shift in theology (philosophy?) after like the 17th century (Domestication of the Transcendence).
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