Astrophysicist Reeves on the Invisible God, Leaves Out Invisible Problem´s of Science, etc

Mark R M Says the secular astrophysicist in hi-tech that drives the secular business world that descends from those who have superficially sliced off their religious and spiritual links, just retaining the hypocrisy. Religion largely submitted itself to science and business dictates. George Fox´s Quakers woke up in the 1600s as DesCartes began advancing his "mind-body(-spirit-nature)" split, despite concerns by Pascal. Artist-mystics-seekers like Blake, Wordsworth, and Emerson started raising awareness around nature in their movements. Post-Presbyterian eco-mystical John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and others led to the 1909 Paris Congress on the Preservation of Nature. Meanwhile, the term "science" was sliced off from"scientific philosophy" to make it align with technical mindsets in the 1800s who could control things scientifically. Bizpeople in turn took control of tech, as Edison crossed over himself, for profiteering. The 1929 Crash wasn´t the religious and non-rich messing around. Einstein represented an interesting angle, since he was a Jewish guy who could integrate as University secularism showed modernized Christian integrity, but associated it with materialism. The Universities and scientists failed to acknowledge their Christian integrity, as far as it went, and through the baby out with the bathwater.

Einstein was also very philosophical, showing what had been lost by the technical move to the term "science." He was also relatively spiritual, but disconnected from the Freud-Jung sensibility that later fostered Eco-psychology, basically. Gandhi was active, and a profound example as the automobile launched new technology. Rudolf Steiner formulated biodynamic principles along with his communitarian ideas. The US´s Social Gospel yielded mostly to liberal intellectualism, as FDR and Eleanor brought a pro-social angle.

This kind of comment grates on me more than not, since astrophysics is itself part of the unleashed Western technical mindset ravaging nature, and getting judgmental. Very doctrinally Christian, tellingly. Secularism has merely shaved off doctrinal exteriors, without the necessary spiritual transformation. Fritjof Capra has made progress in making intellectual links, while religious examples include JB Cobb´s Ecological Civilization done with biologist C Birch and economist H Daly. Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility are also noteworthy. Reeves´ very accusation of "insane" demonstrates the very impulsive drive that underlies the problem itself. For one thing, "Man" is not just Westernized humanity, as Jared Diamond showed in his book Collapse. Ancient indigenous populations faced ecological systems with certain constraints, from the Mayans to the Anasazi Pueblo people and more, and they violated those constraints as their settlement culture demanded more resources for cultural projects.

Western society, Jesus´ legacy of Christian-based cultures, shows a special pitfall, however, and as an astrophysicist Reeves is intimately party to that. Science shot upwards in social status as DesCartes´ analytical geometry revolutionized math and science in the mechanistic direction. Yet, Giambattista Vico quickly began refuting its unadapted application to human affairs, as he pioneered constructivism in more or less, ("we invent and innovate the truth.") given human complexity and special processes. DesCartes did write about the passions as he also innovated the "I think, therefore I am" idea representing a new level of human individual awareness in Western secularizing Christianity.

Copernican, Galilean, Newtonian, and so on were practicing natural philosophy. The term "science" as the physical and life sciences came into use some time in the 1800s. It´s notable how it shifts focus and emphasizes the technical reliability and utilitarian usefulness of things using science´s new tested ideas and formulas. That is, using scientific philosophy´s new tested ideas and formulas. Except, Einstein´s insights showed that even as Jewish scholars had joined Christians historically through secularism in Universities, science really is scientific philosophy. It is humans thinking, and in a very specific legacy that believed in lawfulness because an "invisible" God had coherently gained recognition in Moses and the 45+ prophets of Jesus´ heritage, corresponding to Jesus´ 2 Commandments like no 2 "Love thy neighbor as thyself, as Jesus loved others."

Thus, humans like Einstein thinking in a psychocultural legacy meant that James Watts´ earlier invention of the steam engine around 1769 as a technological achievement was first in a part of culture in fact promoting Vico´s kind of constructivism, and DesCartes´, Newton´s, and so on´s kind of mechanicism. Blake´s "satanic mills" and Wordsworth´s nature poetry like "Tintern Abbey," and Mary Shelley´s Frankenstein appeared and captured aspects of people resisting the split from nature. They were celebrating Nature´s importance. JS Mills felt depressed in his youth, and restored by Wordsworth´s poetry. Mills also went on to innovate the term "stationary state" in economics that imagines a sustainable homeostatic state of balanced use and reuse in economics. He also saw through to employee ownership, as the co-op social biz was innovated in a sequence from R Owen´s pro-social biz to labor protests.

Environmental awareness gained scientific recognition as scientific philosophy broke creationist ideas, with Darwin´s natural selection. Yet, his mental health was challenged as he suffered in his hyper-intellectual context. He was so workaholic that he barely got relief on one trip to the countryside of Scotland, and otherwise by "hydrotherapy." Jumping in rivers by a field had its own extracted Western context! Emerson had left the Unitarians, and gained new direction writing about naturalists´ botanical work he saw in France. Wide-ranging botanist John Muir in the US founded the Sierra Club, as others founded the Audobon Society, and birding associations in the UK and elsewhere organized by 1909 and a conference in Paris. And many efforts until 1972 UN Stockholm conference on the human environment, UNCHE. Ecopsychology also emerged, reminding us that our human studies in sociology and anthropology count deeply. All natural science has effectively alienated itself from human social studies, and the work of Freud, Jung, Rogers, and so on helps understand why Marx, Durkheim and others observed devastating stress in modern society´s people.

Thanks, Mr. Reeves, but science has not been angelic, and in fact has become toxically part of the problem. Fritjof Capra has been building on van Bertanaffly´s and others´ Systems Theory to try to help restore sanity and link science to the social sciences. He doesn´t use "philosophy" to emphasize the human thinking element that I, like some or many of us, see is necessary.

Da Gr @MRM I think most of us would agree that humanity has taken the protection and responsible maintenance of our home for granted. But visceral guilt and condemnation alone falls short in empowering people to find ways of amending our former insensitivities. It also invites blame laying and finger pointing which achieves nothing purposeful. All aspects of our societies have been late in coming to this realization and it’s definitely going to take all of those groups working in tandem to make any significant progress.

M Re Mo Da Gr You sound worried about offending people of science, as if their carefree opinionating about religion doesn´t make them accountable to their own integrity. "Astrophysicists" are not masters of reality, nor is "science." As someone with a strong background in science, liberal arts, and the international affairs of eco-social sustainability, I assure you, scientists are not divine beings. In fact, anti-religious scientists talking about ecological matters in terms of an "invisible God" and "visible Nature" rather urgently need a taste of how they demonstrate a tendency to make SCIENCE´s responsibility for anti-environmentalism as "invisible" as (Christian) religion´s special role in ADVANCING science itself and environmental activism. However, that requires demystifiying science and scientists, and situating spirituality and religion adequately, which I have done naturally in balancing my education and experience. Thanks to the likes of F Capra, I´m understanding the issues in growing detail.

Astrophysicists yakking and blaming religion are demonstrating rank judgmentalism and hardly showing an integrity of character, as I rightly pointed out. R Dawkins, more than this Reeves the astrophysicist, has been so public that I learned that he does apparently drive an electric car. Yet, his views are so biased and unscholarly and clouded that he´s never relaxed enough to understand that sustainability is in Jesus´ spiritual integrity and legacy directly. Instead, he equates profiteering-funded hateful fundamentalism with religion itself, and has ridiculed religion in a way that marks him as virtually unapproachable by pro-sustainability religionists. Thus, an analysis of him, like Reeves, isn´t primarily for them, scientists and off-base, religion-blaming characters. It´s for US as people of faith, conscious of God´s love to one degree or another, in evaluating THEM primarily, and ourselves secondarily. To the degree that we are active in spiritual practice and expressing integrity in Jesus, we have the potential Gandhi talked about in "being the change you want to see in the world."

Scientists themselves will need to be dealt with, at some time or another, in terms that they understand. My own efforts have involved identifying the intellectual category errors governing prevailing discourse. Massimo Pigliucci has nailed New Atheist physicist L Krauss in a key way. It involves in part restoring science to its human nature as philosophy, not "objective truth," nor absolute truth, issues that religion, spirituality, and philosophy can address empirically and effectively. Science has made contributions, and they make fine supplements. Gandhi did talk about his approach as "experiments with truth."

As people of faith, we need to understand our very fundamental importance, and that it is us who have the solution as much as we start to advance spiritual-religious integrity. Not scientists' opinions blaming religion broadly and hypocritically. Jim Hansen of NASA has gotten arrested protesting Climate Change and titled his book, something like For Our Grandchildren. He´s not imitating Reeves. He met the maverick modern progressive Christian Congressman for environmentalism and Climate Change Al Gore, and sounds like he was inspired by the very spiritual and modern Gore. Da Gr MaRe Mo , I think the religious circles fired the first shots in the battle between religious theories and scientific discoveries. But let’s no quibble over who resents who. There are also many in both camps who do see the connections offered in both approaches to observable life. Money and power have corrupted certain parts of both endeavors just as it has every other human effort. You’re correct, I don’t see the virtue of taking sides. They both have things to offer us if we aren’t distracted by bias. Ma Re Mo DaGr Your last sentence is intimately part of my operating assumptions. However, you equate that with disqualifying the need for adequate criticism of science and its sound basis, analysis. "Analysis" soundly informs us of another basic philosophical principle that is widely neglected, Levels of Explanation. In fact, in your case you are apparently using the infamous Galileo and Darwin clashes to justify implying blaming "religion" and sustaining your mystified view of science and scientists, as if it were the Pope, Jim Wallis of Sojo . net, and F Graham riding roughshod in plastic bottle and oil companies, and by extension who forced Reagan-era admin to shut down NASA´s wind turbine research, and who fail to join the Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility, making Jim Hansen´s getting arrested protesting a virtually unique indictment of "scientific complicity by objectivist extremism." UN and similar reports have their place, and Greenpeace and co. are hardly twisting the science. Also, here you express your minimization, and even trivialization of money and power, diluting it in the abstraction of its widespread presence.

Moreover, you are not paying attention to the precision I am getting at. I´m not actually taking sides. I´m addressing imbalances in general and in appropriate detail, understanding that people can choose to change if they are made adequately aware. I believe I may have already mentioned around here that my analysis has already uncovered a basic intellectual gap in discourse, and that is science not being the "absolute truth," but a form of philosophy, and religion addressing the need for spiritual modernization to shift from doctrinal blinders that freeze and lock in much hypocrisy to spiritual practice of individuals taking actions for integrity. Advancing Bernie-Obama and Social Europe style eco-social lifestyles, consumerism, and economic activism exemplify that. BTW, your blaming "religious circles attacking science first" as a "mea culpa" is itself an example of what might be called "passive literacy" as you take the word of complainers and accusers without question. Galileo´s conflict with the Pope/Vatican involved that church authority and individuals specifically, and the church´s institutional mechanisms, and that was already after the Protestant Reformation.

If you read about Galileo´s work, he didn´t present a neutral thesis. He used a provocative character named "Simpleton" to characterize the Pope, a former friend, and the Ptolemaic position. Luther himself avoided arrest in the previous century because he was fully respectful in all his conduct, while Galileo actually wasn´t. In that encounter for starters. DesCartes made his own moves at that time, no less. A French Catholic, he operated largely in Holland, alerted to Protestant religionists´ doctrinal displeasures by expulsion from Leiden U or so. As his writing progressed in analytical geometry (e.g. y=mx+b), he heard from Pascal complaining that mechanicism ignored God´s ways or the like. In the end, DesCartes was inconvenienced and alerted, but unresponsive to the concerns represented by Pascal and his expulsion. It was thus that the Cartesian "mind-body(-spirit-nature) split" emerged, on the side of science (i.e. scientific philosophy). You haven´t been able to grasp this point so far. Instead, you show that you do "take sides," and aren´t willing to question scientism (which is not actually science). Here, I´m using Historical Sociology, incidentally, a key philosophical Level of Explanation.

To situate how science emerged with monk-clerical talents in their spiritual mindsets, see James Hannam, who has done great historical work expanding the scope of the History of Science and Religion. UK Bishop R Grosseteste is linked to the Oxford Franciscan School for work in the 1200s as T of Aquinas was bursting with his scholarly fruits at the U of Paris. In 1277, the Bishop of Paris responded to concerns, and pronounced a prohibition on using Greek limiting assumptions, like objects can´t travel in a straight line, based on God´s omnipotence and lawfulness, the 1277 Condemnations. That particular point helps crystallize the intellectual role of Judeo-Christian thinking in taking ancient Greek efforts and making modern Christian-based scientific philosophy.

"Taking sides"? What about giving a "fair and balanced presentation." You´re accepting a superficial and biased fairy tale-tunnel vision version of history. The question is, why are you so inclined not to look at the issues, to hold people accountable and address misconceptions? You are avoiding my empirical discussion and its detail oriented nature by planting your coping mechanism ideas that are similar to mythologization: "nobody overcomes money and power corruption, not least religion that started it all against the pretty much all-powerful and all-knowing science."

It comes down to our own senses of self-worth, I´d say, negative or positive (not so much "low" or "high"). The 12 step groups for relationships offer a powerful spiritual technique to address our self-awareness and the loving power of clarity in God´s love that sleeps there, or is tangled up. As Jesus taught, "Clean the inside of the cup...." He said, "where there is wickedness," but in modernity we might expand that, "where there is a lost and wounded inner child with unmet needs in search of love lost in various forms of abuse and neglect." "Cleaning the cup" is more a question of John Bradshaw´s "loving our inner child" and achieving a "homecoming.".