Scientism: Throwing the baby out but not the bathwater

I can only guess what it is like to awaken to this world from that pre-human state of being where the mind is first developing its consciousness. On first seeing the sky, clouds, buildings, water, grass, the forest, and the countless other things we call the world, there must be a sudden shock, or pause that grips one. Undoubtedly, the conscious life of infancy is a mystery. Researchers can only guess at 'what it is like to be' a baby. But one thing is for certain, they seem to be in awe of EVERYTHING around them.

This awe, this ever pressing passion that seizes the mind and pulls it away from numbering things, distinguishing things, and takes it all in as a sort of shock of what IS may have something more to it than merely something one may call an undeveloped mind. Maybe, as we mature, and develop our ability to communicate, we actually lose sight of this awe. Perhaps there is something in the awe that is absent in the acquisition of language, of mathematics, of what we call logic reasoning skills. It could be the case that as Jesus stated, one must be as a child to enter into His kingdom, we must exchange awe for the words we use to understand all that is around us.

Consider how we develop language. According to St. Augustine, the process involves the child observing the parent and mimicking his or her movements as to get his or her attention. But why does the infant wish to get the attention of the parent? There is much debate on this, but the simple answer is to satisfy some desire, some craving, of the child. He or she may be hungry or thirsty and this is why they are crying in pain. They recognize that their body is in pain for something and they are expressing this pain of want. However, they also notice that the parent is providing for them relief from this want, this pain, through feeding them. Therefore, the infant further notices that he or she can mimic certain sounds the parents make, usually as a cue by the parent to successively approximate a specific word such as carrot or meat, so as to avoid the pain of want which gets worse as time goes on.

Soon, the child is able to acquire a wealth of mimicked behaviors and sounds which serve as a complex of preventing the pain of want. The infant growing into the maturity of childhood, is drawn into a world of language by communicating mimicked sounds and behaviors all related to want and its prevention. He or she learns that it is an 'I' and that this 'I' does things 'for' other things. Subject and predicate are born as to be more specific on what it wants to satisfy its cravings. But the language it develops ultimately grows more and more peripheral to the original motivation of satisfying a desire to where the desires are still there but the object to satisfy the desire is proliferated into many things.

All along, we the parents are under the impression the child is 'learning' through this process. But is this really learning? Or is it adapting? For what did the child 'know' before it had to start mimicking behaviors and focusing all its energies on this (on what brings the body pain and want) and not on those things which feel 'good' to the body? We cannot say what it is since we would be using language we had developed to satisfy the want of satisfaction or rather the negation of pain and want. Ultimately, this really puts into perspective the question of what we really do know. After all, our language could be said to be nothing more than a garden of words and terms grown out of our pain, not out of our joy and happiness. Indeed, the terms joy and happiness, presumably stem from some desire we had as children to avoid pain. It is nothing more than an inspired term from the shadow of joy and happiness.

Indeed, we number things, we count them, as to see some specificity in them. I see one tree, two trees, three and so forth. But their number is only in their being trees. And trees are only those things which have some use for the prevention of pain. Mathematics is painful, not only in practice but ontologically according to this. In short, we only know the shadow of things when we speak of them with the words we have learned in this Life. The awe and wonder the infant experiences which it cannot communicate (for we residents of this world of pain we live in are unfit to give them proper names to use for joy) we see as nonsense and unlearned babblings. But maybe we are the ones babbling, groaning until as the Bible says all of creation gives birth to the joy it has hidden behind the pain of its birth.

Sidewalks

They are the running boards of our lives where we come and go to places of short distance. They are the children's canvases where earliest works of art are sketched with chalk. They are cracked and split as the years pass by, but last longer than our lifetime. Frequented by kings and queens, and yet the least of our pets will do their business on them. They are simple in design and yet can display the most intricate of patterns in their grainy texture. Both the state and citizen own them, but neither can claim the whole of them. They are sidewalks, those cemented floors that lay between house and road, between where we are and where we wish to go.

It is upon these urban paradoxes that I find myself perplexedly musing or, rather, walking and cycling on a daily basis. The inhabitants of my neighborhood are most content to busy themselves as they water their lawns, jog, or head to the park without a thought. I wonder if they ever might look down to ponder, Where does this path go and where does it come from? For as much as we know about sidewalks, none of us can account for their geography, etymology or even eschatology. And while I suspect that the most imaginative of our children may fancy rainbows shooting from their very beginning point, or some pit of monsters and a stormy abyss at their end, our own answers may not fare any better. After all, we take sidewalks for granted while investing so much time on and around them. But there is a comfort to be found in their very existence.

In Shel Silverstein's poem Where the Sidewalk Ends, he gave a rather vivid account of the sidewalk. It is where the street begins, where the grass grows soft and white, where the sun burns crimson bright , and where the moon-bird rests from his flight. But he offers nothing of as to where the sidewalk might end. And no mention either of where they begin? For where they are and where they are not must meet somewhere in the intermediary cosmos of villa to village. Is it the yawning void of Nordic Mythology where Ymir the giant gave birth to the nine worlds? Is it that purgatory in Dante's Inferno? Or is it some Stygian realm at the foot of Elysium?

Now while this is all magnificently spectacular speculating, let me say that where all sidewalks come from and where they end is abundantly clear: where we are all coming from and going to. They begin when we begin and end when we end. They are that part of us that we see so little of, even when thinking deeply and analyzing our own self-identity. They are the first and last of our steps. Akin to Aristotle's definition of time, they are the before and after, but not of motion but of motivation. They are that general and abstract expression of why we do the things we do. And perhaps this is why we overlook sidewalks so. For, like us, there is infinitely more to them than meets the eye.

Angels Without Wings (an excerpt)

One of the most obscure and perhaps shadowy topics that one can investigate is that of angels. These beings, which have captured the minds and hearts of people throughout the ages, are found in religious texts, legends, myths and even fairy tales. Indeed, one can hardly sift through a collection of sympathy cards at the local store, sentimental or religious artwork or even album covers in a music store without seeing some depiction of angels. Their very image seems to inspire a sense of security and safety and tranquility. They are often associated with the departure of the soul and presented as guides to one’s heavenly eternal dwelling place.

One of the more salient associations most have with angels is their connection with religion. For, most of the world’s religions have some form of angelic beings included into their doctrine. Whether it is as a protector of the divine realms or some messenger that stands between the Will of God and the part that humanity plays in it. Most people in Western countries that have grown up around Christianity remember various Christmas plays that portray the Angel of the Lord descending down to the shepherds in the fields at night. And the Angel, with its commanding presence, inspired fear in them so that it had to remind them not to be afraid.

This story of Christmas and the Angel of God brings to mind many of the images that one has of angels. As mentioned, the depictions of them on sympathy cards, works of art, album covers and innumerable other sources of either classical or pop iconic themes usually have one similarity to them; they are winged. Indeed, the idea of angels with wings as almost tautologous. The presence of angels assumes a being with wings. It’s as natural as a tiger with a tail, an elephant with a trunk or a fish with fins. And yet, the clear difference between these examples is that these are of animals; biological species. Angels, however, in contrast to this, are not an identifiable species. No one has managed to capture one in flight, pin its wings down and attach it to some examination table. In fact, it is highly unlikely that such a situation would be possible. Angels, after all, appear and re-appear as out of thin air. It is doubtful that such a situation is possible.

To further this point of investigating the nature of angels, clearly they are a speculative species of beings: For to know of their existence is to believe in them. There is no empirical evidence of them and are therefore outside the spectrum of science; or at least normative and generally accepted scientific investigation. Many would say that they are fancies, the product of unbridled imagination and the creation of an era that accepted myth and superstition as fact. And while many people believe in angels, and one recent study found that most Americans believe in angels, the evidence of their existence is ultimately unfalisfiable.1 In other words, one has to believe in their existence as opposed to being aware of their existence.

If one is to admit that they exist, based on either eyewitness accounts, their necessity based on some ontological system stemming from a philosophical perspective, or on the authority of one’s religion, their appearance, therefore, is limited to that; mere appearance. On cannot, as stated earlier, analyze them in the normal sense. So, the only way in which one can understand them and know more about them is based on either eyewitness accounts or the authority of scripture and the descriptions provided by their involvement in religious history. With this in mind, the general perception is that of a human-like creature sporting a majestic and glorious pair of wings. But, is this an accurate depiction of them? What do they really look like and what are the actual accounts of their appearance in history?

From the Judeo-Christian perspective, the Holy Bible has numerous references to the presence of angels and their interaction with mankind. In the Bible, accounts of individuals sighting angels and being visited by them is rather common; particularly by those that God is seeking to communicate His will to. The narrative of Christianity, in particular, with the Christianization of Rome and subsequent Medieval Europe, was the foundation for art and literature that reflected the Christian story along with the characters of the Bible; this included angels. However, what one will find is their depiction as being winged humans that descend upon earth as a bird descends down from the sky in which it is flying. This begs the question of how accurate this is in contrast to their portrayal in the Bible; or in other words, does the Bible portray angels as having wings, and if not, why is it the case that subsequent portrayals, secular and religious, are of them being winged? And so, this is where the discussion starts.

Angels, however, are creatures without wings. They have always been described, at least in the Bible, as looking very much like humans. Typically, the only difference was that of countenance. For an angel was one that had always appeared to mankind in a majestic and glowing manner. In fact, this would explain the inclusion of halos in many depictions of angels in art. In that, angels had usually either terrified, excited or simply startled humans suggested that there was something special in their appearance. The inhabitants of Sodom found them to be attractive and wished to make love with them. If this is the case, they would have been nothing short of looking at a movie star times a million. They are attractive and radiant, but nonetheless human in appearance.

And yet, the majority of people throughout history, have depicted them, in art and in literature, as sporting wings. The earliest depiction of an angel is one of a human looking creature without wings. However, in the very same century, in the tomb of a famous ruler in Italy, there were depictions of angels with wings. Furthermore, throughout history angels had been depicted as being winged things. We had seen that there are primarily two reasons for this. The first has something to do with Greek and Roman Mythology. Mercury, or Hermes, a messenger like an angel, had wings upon his feet. Naturally, then, to the pagan Christian, an angel should have wings as well. But even more than this, the very fabric of pagan thought demanded a naturalistic explanation of spiritual matters; this included beings such as angels. In order to make it believable that angels had wings, a pagan would find that angels must have wings. For how else could they travel from earth to Heaven unless they were carried by wings.

Furthermore, there has always been a confusion with angels and other Heavenly beings, such as cherubim, seraphim and other creatures. The women with stork like wings that Zechariah saw was unlikely an angel. For, an angel was with Zechariah at the time, as well as the fact that, the women were not messengers, like angels were. Furthermore, cherubim, which are bearers and guardians of those precious things pertaining to God’s glory, are no more messengers than seraphim, which express the glory of God in His throne room. And while demons were angels at one time, it is either highly unlikely that they are winged, and if they are, then it is not an inheritance of their angel origin. And so, it is with great regret, as all great truths are, to state that angels indeed do not have wings. However, while this may excite some sense of confusion or disappointment at our own conception of angels, just remember, angels can be just as effective without wings as with them. And besides, I doubt one should go about erasing all of the artwork with angels of their wings, for it seems to comfort us to see them with those splendid, feathery, white, soft wings; even if its not true.