Tarek Hassan
Political and Social
24-April-2016
A new dark age of dogma as a reaction to the
challenges of the new science and principles of uncertainty
The great discipline of science
enlarging and widening its influence and applications through standardised
observation, deduction induction, documentation, experimentation and creative
synthesis of data acting and interacting within the incredible Crucible of the
human brain/heart has been producing the most amazing wonders. Science and its applications with all the
great achievements has taken us and itself from the arena of certainty and firm
closed conclusions into a wonderful and frightening arena of openness, of
doubt, probability, randomness and never ending questions and questioning.
This great leap forwards by science has created a space for pseudoscience! A lot of adventurer abusers of human need and
fear, most of them quasi enlightened, poorly educated elements, have crept
slowly or rapidly into the openness of the new science in an attempt, not to
understand in depth the potential freedom and richness of understanding the
capabilities and limitations of reason and logic and pure rationality - a noble
and worthy quest- but to quickly fill in the areas of healthy doubt and newly
discovered modesty and humility of the new science. The new potential freedom
zones are to be quickly filled with a resurrected vision of religion/s as fixed
a priori formulae encompassing all truth past present and future.
These fundamentalist dogmatist
basking in certainty, use the modesty and humility and uncertainty of the new
science to ridicule science and to ascertain that they are the only rightful
owners and controllers of the "supernatural" areas beyond science or
scientific understanding. This
regenerated breed resurrected like unwanted ghosts from the pre-science dark
ages, zealously promulgate their own dogmas to rapidly fill the vacuum, before
humanity has time and space to contemplate the enormity and the beauty of the
challenges posed by the new science. The
new dogmas evolved to counter the fear generated by modern science, are mostly
made up of a salad of morals, religious mythology and religious faiths revived in
their rigid and dogmatic, literal form. All the better if the new pundits could
add to the anti-science brew a touch of Eastern and esoteric religions which
have the advantage that very few would or could really understand anything
about them in depth. It is nearly impossible without being bred and brought up
in the culture and being early linked to the processes of how these religious
traditions were generated and developed, to reach anywhere near understanding the quintessence
of the meaning the ‘great’ Eastern religions(including Christianity) intended
to transmit. The learned and the erudite
scientist finds himself surrounded by all these societies of "wise
people" "knowledgeable people" who abuse the scientists’ newly
acquired modesty to assert the supremacy of their hodgepodge mixture of ideas
of great Eastern esoteric wisdom mixed with the three Abrahamic religions
distorted and corrupted over the years and turned into powerful dogma
perpetrators and generators of concepts and dynamics that go deeply against
their own essences!
Whether they know it or not the same
‘religious’ groups or groupings are pulling the collective human consciousness
into regression and denial of the
importance of the revolution taking place in science. It is a revolution of great importance and
has to do with the birth of uncertainty and probability and interactivity as a
"scientific" demand!
Superficially this seems to be a licence to abandon science and rush to
the safer more ‘sure’ dogmas of the old religions taking refuge in a regressive
fundamentalism as promulgated by the religious institutions or the dogmas of
the new religious fundamentalists. If science as a system of absolute certainty
is failing us by growing to cross the threshold into uncertainty, probability,
pluralism, dynamism and interactivity principles, then other ‘safe’ god/s must
be found at once! The old dogmas are becoming reasserted and re-rooted in fascist
and fanatic ways which are much more comfortable than the terrifying new
science. Rigid, fixed and absolute truths however simplistic and naive are much
safer tha quantum theory and quarks and bosons and and expanding Universe in intense
turmoil.
For the whole of humanity it is a
great and potentially rich moment and a great breakthrough when modern science
learns and teaches us of a new interactive dynamic model of self and of matter,
energy time and the Universe, a new model
for health sciences, sociology, history, politics and economics is created
promising enormous dividends. It is a
great breakthrough to understand the effect of the Observer on the
observed. Whole new vistas of tolerance,
careful listening to the other, pluralism, and harmony between opposites are
opened, if only we choose to understand the sociopolitical and conceptual
implications of the recent developments in science. Some perceive the leap as
‘the musicalisation of the new science’.
The real danger is to shun all that
and to laugh at this "interactive relativistic" view of self and the
world using the natural human fear of doubt and of unpredictability and fear of
reserved judgment, as an excuse to regress or relapse into fundamentalism and
dogma in a way that brings to mind the darkness of the dark ages. The irony is that this newly spreading
darkness of fundamentalism and dogma is brandished by its followers and leaders
as a formula of enlightenment and deeper kno