| You Can't Fight City Hall. |
[Dec. 10th, 2004|03:04 am] |
One of the consequences that comes from studying the Sciences is an occasional feeling of purposelessness. Scientific disciplines encourage, nay, require, one to see the Sum of Things from a very distant point, and this causes the kind of theological nausea to which I refer. As one gets farther away from the personal motivations that drive everyday life, all of humanity, and then all of existence, seems to blur into a single point-- devoid of "purpose". Matter, after all, does not care. The atoms that compose our bodies do not give a whit if we take them all and jump them off a bridge. The entire universe, active though it may be, is without motivation, without emotion, without *humanity*. It is a very impersonal place, looking at it scientifically, and that is, once again, a bleak thought. One cannot cling to the idea of the soul, either-- synaptic firings are testable, supernatural entities are not. Chemistry and Biology will, without a doubt, one day reduce our thoughts, actions, and emotions to mere causality. At every turn we find the material nature of things. Human beings are metaphysical entities awash in a sea of the material. Even our bodies and minds are material, completely and utterly-- and any urge we get, any thing we do, is nothing more than the result of chemical reactions.
One feels like a child left without his parents at a carnival-- despairing, clueless, and utterly turned around, and that is the only side of the coin some people choose to see. Certainly, even the most avid proponent of science must see it-- but there is a cure to this theological nausea.
After all, a lost child at a carnival is, with the proper application of perspective, a rambunctious youngster in a fantastic wonderland, free of constraints and supervision. Just as the universe does not care if we jump off a bridge, it is powerless to stop us from doing whatever else we will to do. Even as our sentient nature places us apart from the rest of the known universe, it gives us domain over it-- with no one to oppose us but ourselves.
This has all been said before, but one benefits from the occasional rehashing of the obvious. |
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