I think rb is headed in the direction i've been thinking toward the.
A lot of the time, trying to describe ourselves, the universe, our feelings and experiences, we forget that we're very much limited by the bounds of our own language. Nouns as discrete elements of the universe exist in our language, as a good shorthand on what surrounds us, but does "glass" really represent and describe what we think it does, what is really out there?(whichever definition of the noun you care to take)
There is no such thing, even when viewed from a human standpoint, as a fixed object. Everything is in flux, changing, interacting with everything else, constantly:
Quote:
The Cool Web
Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by,
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the roses's cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.
-- Robert Graves
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I think there's a tendency to mistake reality for our senses and capacity to describe what we sense. Reality is reality, our senses are information about reality, not reality itself and language is an abstraction of that information.
Meta-meta-reality?
What does this have to do with science and religion?
I think science are manners in which we try to apply our languages and linguistic systems of thought (yes, even mathematics is a language of sorts) to the events we see (sense) around us, so that they 'make sense' within our own sphere of language.
Nouns and verbs, matter and energy.
Religions are the predecessors of science in that they are narrative creating mechanisms. Narratives that help us understand where we are. With religion you need look only to the authority and culture as proof, with science, measurements and predictions..
Religion is absolute truth, science is absolute truth until the next bit of evidence refines the narrative/understanding or blows it away. Both are, for most people and to a significant degree, limited to the senses and the language of that person, people or culture. Even our imagination and visualisations are based on our sense experiences to a degree...
English and German are very picky (in a sense) modern languages filled with prepositions, which I think naturally lends them to technical pursuits, precision and absolutism. I don't see it as any surprise that both science and protestantism found significant homes in the western, Christian world in countries dominated by those languages.
I think much of the problems in the world as we find it now has a lot to do with the contradiction between the emergent universe, species and societies we find ourselves in, and our capacity to tie those concepts down in our clumpy languages.
So the way I see it goes like this:
Religion (relic of the ancient narrative device):
God, man, creation, good, bad. Nice and clumpy.
19th Century Science:
Mechanical universe, indivisible atoms, neatly divided species, societies classified and consistent, etc
21st Century Science:
Relativistic universe, quantum particles and effects, blurry divisions of genetics, societies without well-defined rules or groups, etc...
Understanding might be stretching the limits of our capacity to describe the understood, or at least grasped/pointed at...
I've really no idea where i was going with this, but now i've wrote it, i'm pressing submit, dammit.
