Too Important To Be Left To The Scientists

The historically aberrant rupture between art and science is inseparable from that between theology and philosophy, and between the Biblical and Classical traditions. The work to overcome those splits has now been going on for half a generation, and should be going mainstream in the very near future.

However, the art and science aspect has received less attention because, as a recent thread here has illustrated, it is extremely difficult to tell anything, not so much to proper scientists, as to people who think that they are, such as Richard "Has He Done Any Lab Work Since The Seventies?" Dawkins and his callow fan base, with their memes, with their selfishness on the part of genes, and with their wholly unscientific and in fact tautologous creation myth of Marxism, Nazism and liberal capitalism, all of which have that and several other common roots. Not evolution, purely a fact, if "evolution" is what you want to call the processes in question, as I hope that you do, since as a teological, ethical and aesthetic evaluation it is by definition incompatible with scientism. But "the survival of the fittest".

Yet it is only in our terms that the validity of the scientific method, a question which is beyond the scope of science itself, can be defended at all. There is a reason why science only ever arose in Christendom, and it is the reason why there is a mass retreat from science in the context of de-Christianisation.

Oh, well, we are just going to have to get on with it without them. Science is too important for its intellectual defence to be left to many of its current and former practitioners, and certainly to the noisiest among them in the mass media, with their appeal to unformed minds, very young and otherwise. The fixity of mind that comes from the foothills of science, also pretty much where Dawkins stopped climbing, has given us everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Osama Bin Laden.

We cannot not concern ourselves with reintegrating, and thus in every sense saving, art and science, ontology and epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, Athens and Jerusalem, faith and reason. We simply have to do this, by no means only for our own sakes. It does not matter whether or not some of the beneficiaries are grateful, or bother to learn how to understand, or even notice. So long as they are thus made able to get on with what they either do, or at least rightly believe ought to be done.