Dissident Veteran For Peace

What follows are a few thoughts on God, faith, and Christianity from mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). The text is taken from A. J. Krailsheimer's translation of Pascal's Pensées (Penguin, 1995). Specifically, they are derived from sections 418 - 424, according to Louis Lafuma's numbering scheme.

The first two excerpts are from a larger text commonly known as "Pascal's wager". I am not so interested here in Pascal's actual argument, almost all of which I have omitted, as I am in what Pascal concedes and what he believes about faith, unbelief, and Christianity.

If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being indivisible and without limits, he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is ...

Who then will blame Christians for being unable to give rational grounds for their belief, professing as they do a religion for which they cannot give rational grounds? They declare that it is a folly, stultitiam, in expounding it to the world, and then you complain that they do not prove it! ... Let us then examine this point, and say, "God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. [418]

Pascal's position is that reason cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. However, Pascal argues, reason can and does prove that one should choose to believe and/or act as if God does exist.

The idea is that the cost of the erroneous belief in a non-existent deity is low compared to the high cost of erroneous disbelief in a God who does exist. Conversely, as Pascal would have it, becoming a Christian is a win whether God exists or not.

Having assumed that his imagined interlocutor accepts his reasoning, Pascal concedes that faith in God cannot necessarily be turned on or off like a switch.

... at least get it into your head that, if you are unable to believe [in God], it is because of your passions since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so. Concentrate then not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God's existence but by diminishing your passions. You want to find faith and you do not know the road. You want to be cured of unbelief and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you ... They behaved just as if they did believe, taking the holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally ... — 'But this is what I am afraid of.' — 'But why? What have you to lose? But to show you that this is the way, the fact is that this diminishes the passions which are your great obstacles ...' [418]

Pascal's point, then, is that disbelief in God is not grounded in reason but in an emotionally or psychologically-based resistance he calls "passions". Here are few more excerpts that are not generally considered part of Pascal's wager.

No sect and no religion has always existed on earth except Christianity. [421]

***

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

I say that it is natural for the heart to love the universal being or itself, according to its allegiance, and it hardens itself against either as it chooses. You have rejected one and kept the other. Is it reason that makes you love yourself? [423]

***

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason. [424]

Labels: Christianity, philosophy, quotations, religion and science

Labels: Christianity, film & television, history, philosophy, religion and science

Note: The text below uses "true" and "false" in a manner that perhaps provides a useful illustration of Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of Sprachspiel or language-game. However, in positing the Genesis account as an example of "other practices than dividing truth from falsehood" it incorrectly implies that true and false are concepts which belong particularly in the realm of science. This does not do justice to Wittgenstein's complex understanding of truth.

Most of us wonder about our origins.

There have been two apparently contradictory accounts of it.

There is the account in Genesis of how God created heaven and earth and all living things in six days. And there is Darwin's account of how things evolved over enormously long periods, the mechanism of which is genetic variation and natural selection.

To many there is a hopeless contradiction between these two accounts.

The notion of language games helps us here, for it focuses on action rather than truth and falsehood.

We use the terms "true" and "false" in certain contexts.

Chiefly when we are investigating whether something is so or not, as in a scientific investigation.

Darwin was imbued with the methods of science, observing, sorting the true from the false; using the methods of scientific inquiry to give an account of the origins of things.

But why can't there be other ways of accounting for the origin of things, using other language games, ones that focus on other practices than dividing truth from falsehood?

A person for whom the practices of worship and prayer are central to his or her life might respond to fundamental questions in a different way and might find the account of origins in Genesis more real.

His search would be conducted differently from a scientist's. He might pray for guidance. This would not necessarily produce an answer in the scientific sense, for he would be seeking different satisfactions.

So there need be no contradiction between Genesis and Darwin, but what is important is to be clear on the nature of one's commitments.

Source: John M. Heaton & Judy Groves. Introducing Wittgenstein: a Graphic Guide. (Icon Books, 2009) pp. 120-122.

Labels: philosophy, religion and science, truth, Wittgenstein

I like synchronicity. A couple of days ago I saw an episode of Star Trek: Voyager that I thought nicely spoke to the difference between a belief in science as a tool and when that belief becomes scientism, which "exalts the methods of the natural sciences above all other modes of human inquiry." Then, today, I happened upon an essay by primatologist Jane Goodall that also touched upon the subject. In neither case was I expecting the subject matter to include the so-called conflict between science and religion. Below is an excerpt from Goodall as published in chapter 13 of The Faith of Scientists in Their Own Words by Nancy K. Frankenberry, ed.

I was taught as a scientist to think logically and empirically, rather than intuitively or spiritually. When I was at Cambridge University in the early 1960s most of the scientists and science students working in the Department of Zoology, so far as I could tell, were agnostic or even atheist. Those who believed in a God kept it hidden from their peers.

... there are many windows through which we humans, searching for meaning, can look out into the world around us. There are those carved out by Western science, their panes polished by a succession of brilliant minds. Through them we can see ever farther, ever more clearly, into areas which until recently were beyond human knowledge.

... Yet there are other windows through which we humans can look out into the world around us, windows through which the mystics and holy men of the East, and the founders of the great world religions, have gazed as they searched for the meaning and purpose of our life on earth, not only in the wondrous beauty of the world, but also in its darkness and ugliness. And those Masters contemplated the truths that they saw, not with their minds only but with their hearts and souls too. From those revelations came the spiritual essence of the great scriptures, the holy books, and the most beautiful mystic poems and writings. That afternoon [in May 1981 in the Gombe forest], it had been as though an unseen hand had drawn back a curtain and, for the briefest moment, I had seen through such a window. In a flash of "outsight" I had known timelessness and quiet ecstasy, sensed a truth of which mainstream science is merely a small fraction.

Below is an excerpt of dialogue from the Voyager episode, "Sacred Ground" by Dr. Geo Athena Trevarthen a.k.a. Geo Cameron. The encounter has a delightfully wry feel to it. The setting is that Captain Janeway has undergone an arduous religious ritual in order to obtain scientific data to help a crew member, Kes, mortally injured by a "biogenic field" after approaching a shrine. She has returned to Voyager with her information but it has proven fruitless in helping Kes. Desperate to help Kes, Janeway returns to the sanctuary where she had earlier encountered three elders while undergoing the "meaningless ritual".

Male Elder 1 (ME1): Well. Look who's come back. So, your little adventure didn't quite work out the way you'd planned it. You put yourself through a lot of trouble and for nothing, didn't you?

Male Elder 2 (ME2): Don't feel bad. You wouldn't believe some of the things people have done to themselves on their way to seek the Spirits.

Janeway (J): So there's no real ritual after all.

ME2: "Real" is such a relative term. Most of the challenges in life are the ones we create for ourselves.

Female Elder (FE): And you are particularly hard on yourself, aren't you?

J: I've always been driven to succeed.

ME1: Stubborn, I'd say. You didn't really consider sitting and waiting with us, did you?

J: Well, I'm here now, and I'm asking for your help. I want understand the purpose of waiting in this room.

FE: But isn't it enough to sit and be sociable? We're good company.

J: That's what I'm supposed to do, talk to the Ancestral Spirits.

FE: Oh (giggles), first we were a test, and now we're the Ancestral Spirits.

J: Are you?

ME1: That would be nice and quantifiable for you, wouldn't it? If the Spirits were something that you could see and touch and scan with your little devices.

ME2: If you can explain everything, what's left to believe in?

J: I know it's an important part of your religion to trust the Spirits without question, but I wasn't brought up that way. It's hard for me to accept.

ME1: So much for your tolerant, open-minded Star Fleet ideals.

J: There's a difference between respecting the spiritual beliefs of other cultures and embracing them myself.

ME1: Fine. Don't embrace a thing. It's all the same to us. Go on back to your ship and play with your molecular microscanner.

FE: You've tried all that already, but it didn't work, did it? Kes didn't get better.

J: No, she didn't.

FE: Why not?

J: The Doctor couldn't explain it.

FE: So, it's inexplicable. A miraculous non-recovery.

J: We haven't found the reason yet.

FE: But of course you will. You'll find all the answers eventually with enough time and study and the right sort of tools. That's what you believe, isn't it, as a scientist?

ME1: Be honest.

J: Yes, that's what I've always believed.

ME2: Even when her science fails right before her eyes, she still has full confidence in it. Now there's a leap of faith.

FE: Unconditional trust. Now that's promising.

J: All right ... if you're saying that science won't help Kes, what will?

ME1: You won't like it.

J: I'm willing to do whatever's necessary.

ME1: Kill her ...

Labels: film & television, religion and science

A curious thing happened as I was listening to the radio Friday night. Two different shows, separated by only an hour, featured segments touching on the same general subject--what cognitive science tells us about honesty and depression.

First at 7 PM was Radiolab, replaying an episode called "Lying to Ourselves". It first aired in 2008 and featured psychologist Joanna Starek and the team of psychiatrists Harold Sackeim and Ruben Gur.  Below is a partial transcript from the last two minutes or so of the episode. 

Co-host Robert Krulwich: ... denying certain facts about the real world ... according to any number of new studies produces people who ... are better at business and better at working with teams. And now here's the real kicker: They turn out to be happier people ...

Sackeim: ... people who were happiest were the ones lying to themselves more ...

Krulwich: Time and time again, researchers have found that depressed people lie less.

Sackeim: They see all the pain in the world, how horrible people are with each other. And they tell you everything about themselves, what their weaknesses are, what terrible things they've done to other people. And the problem is, they're right. And so, maybe it's, the way we help people is to help them to be wrong.

Krulwich: It might just be that hiding ideas we know to be true, hiding those ideas from ourselves, is what we need to get by.

Sackeim: We're so vulnerable to being hurt that we're given the capacity to distort, as a gift.

Then, at 9 PM, a 2012 episode of To The Best of Our Knowledge came on. Entitled "You & Your Brain," the segment featured an interview by Senior Producer Anne Strainchamps with neuroscientist Julian Paul Keenan. Below is a partial transcript from the last three minutes or so of the interview.

Strainchamps: I just keep thinking that what you're saying is that much of our experience of life and of the world and even of ourselves is a lie.

Keenan: Yeah. And you can either be depressed about it or just go for the ride. A lot of this remains still to be confirmed and, uh, replicated, but a lot of the indications are that we are living in a deceptive world, at best, perhaps a false world in its most extreme.

Strainchamps: ... I'm trying to figure out what the consequences are of everything you've laid out. We have no free will, we're basically lying ourselves through life. What do you do with those insights? Should you just sit back and enjoy the dream or should we all be meditating very hard and trying to lose our sense of self?

Keenan: I, you know, I'm going to go with the former. I think a lot of self-deception goes a long way, that giving yourself positive affirmations in the mirror, whether you believe them or not, would probably be the route I would suggest taking. You know, surrounding yourself with people who, even though you know they're lying to you, as long as they're saying good things, that's probably a healthy way to go. The alternative scares me. We used to think people with clinical depression didn't see the world realistically, you know, they saw it in an overly negative light. Well, it turns out, they're seeing it quite realistically and it's you and I who were seeing it in an overly rosy light, we're the ones not in reality. So, the suggestion is that reality is a somewhat scary place to be.

Strainchamps: So the purpose of therapy is to learn to be better at lying.

Keenan: Absolutely. It clearly puts into question this idea of deception is morality, "Thou shalt not lie." Well, then thou shalt be depressed.

So, here's what I found striking, even disturbing, about both of these programs. No one--not the researchers, not the interviewers/hosts--ever raised the idea that the solution to the depression that realism and honesty bring to some people is not to train or encourage people to "distort" or "just go for the ride"--to engage in deception--but to work to figure out how make the world a less painful, a less  depressing place. Yes, of course, there will always be the pain of loss and death but to suggest that deception is the only desirable or viable solution for coping with "all the pain in the world" seems to me to evince a defeatism of the worst, saddest, and, ultimately, the most ethically bankrupt sort.

12 Feb 2013 Addendum: It is has been suggested to me by a friend and reader of this post that religion is a form of deception or dishonesty that people employ in order to avoid reality. I have two responses to this: First, yes, religion can be and has been used for deceptive and dishonest purposes but that is not inherent in religion; science, too, can be so used.

Second, the idea that religion is an invalid or false way of knowing about the world and that only a scientific approach can tell us anything meaningful or true about reality is itself a deception and logically invalid. The supposed conflict between science and religion is a subject I have blogged about on several occasions and my comments on it here will be brief. This viewpoint that rejects religion is known as scientism and even the National Academy of Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have published statements rejecting it.

I'll close with the thoughts on the subject of two noted physicists. According to Freeman Dyson:

"Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.

"Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute."

Ian Barbour writes:

"I suggest that the concept of God is not a hypothesis formulated to explain the relation between particular events in the world in competition with scientific hypotheses. Belief in God is primarily a commitment to a way of life in response to distinctive kinds of religious experience in communities formed by historic traditions; it is not a substitute for scientific research. Religious belief offers a wider framework of meaning in which particular events can be contextualized."

Labels: critical thinking, psychology, religion and science

Scientism is a philosophical position that exalts the methods of the natural sciences above all other modes of human inquiry. Scientism embraces only empiricism and reason to explain phenomena of any dimension, whether physical, social, cultural, or psychological. Drawing from the general empiricism of The Enlightenment, scientism is most closely associated with the positivism of August Comte (1798-1857) who held an extreme view of empiricism, insisting that true knowledge of the world arises only from perceptual experience. Comte criticized ungrounded speculations about phenomena that cannot be directly encountered by proper observation, analysis and experiment. Such a doctrinaire stance associated with science leads to an abuse of reason that transforms a rational philosophy of science into an irrational dogma. It is this ideological dimension that we associate with the term scientism. Today the term is used with pejorative intent to dismiss substantive arguments that appeal to scientific authority in contexts where science might not apply. This over commitment to science can be seen in epistemological distortions and abuse of public policy.

Epistemological scientism lays claim to an exclusive approach to knowledge. Human inquiry is reduced to matters of material reality. We can know only those things that are ascertained by experimentation through application of the scientific method. And since the method is emphasized with such great importance, the scientistic tendency is to privilege the expertise of a scientific elite who can properly implement the method. But science philosopher Susan Haack contends that the so-called scientific method is largely a myth propped up by scientistic culture. There is no single method of scientific inquiry. Instead, Haack explains that scientific inquiry is contiguous with everyday empirical inquiry. Everyday knowledge is supplemented by evolving aids that emerge throughout the process of honest inquiry. These include the cognitive tools of analogy and metaphor that help to frame the object of inquiry into familiar terms. They include mathematical models that enable the possibility of prediction and simulation. Such aids include crude, impromptu instruments that develop increasing sophistication with each iteration of a problem-solving activity. And everyday aids include social and institutional helps that extend to lay practitioners the distributed knowledge of the larger community. According to Haack, these everyday modes of inquiry open the scientific process to ordinary people and they demystify the epistemological claims of the scientistic gate keepers.

The abuse of scientism is most pronounced when it finds its way into public policy. A scientistic culture privileges scientific knowledge over all other ways of knowing. It uses jargon, technical language, and technical evidence in public debate as a means to exclude the laity from participation in policy formation. Despite such obvious transgressions of democracy, common citizens yield to the dictates of scientism without a fight. The norms of science abound in popular culture and the naturalized authority of scientific reasoning can lead unchecked to a malignancy of cultural norms. The most notorious example of this was seen in Nazi Germany where a noxious combination of scientism and utopianism led to the eugenics excesses of the Third Reich. Policy can be informed by science, and the best policies take into account the best available scientific reasoning. Law makers are prudent to keep an ear open to science while resisting the rhetoric of the science industry in formulating policy. It is the role of science to serve the primary interests of the polity. But government in a free society is not obliged to serve the interests of science. Jurgen Habermas warns that positivism and scientism move in where the discourse of science lacks self-reflection and where the spokesmen of science exempt themselves from public scrutiny.

Source: Martin Ryder. "Scientism." Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics. (Macmillan Reference USA, 2001-2006). Page numbers and inline references omitted.

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The roots of scientism extend as far back as early 17th century Europe, an era that came to be known as the Scientific Revolution. ...

Scientism today is alive and well, as evidenced by the statements of our celebrity scientists:

"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." –Carl Sagan, Cosmos

"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." –Stephen Weinburg, The First Three Minutes

"We can be proud as a species because, having discovered that we are alone, we owe the gods very little." –E.O. Wilson, Consilience

While these men are certainly entitled to their personal opinions and the freedom to express them, the fact that they make such bold claims in their popular science literature blurs the line between solid, evidence-based science, and rampant philosophical speculation. ...

Physicist Ian Hutchinson offers an insightful metaphor for the current controversies over science:

"The health of science is in fact jeopardized by scientism, not promoted by it. At the very least, scientism provokes a defensive, immunological, aggressive response from other intellectual communities, in return for its own arrogance and intellectual bullyism. It taints science itself by association."

Noting that most Americans enthusiastically welcome scientific advancements ... Hutchinson suggests that perhaps what the public is rejecting is not actually science itself, but a worldview that closely aligns itself with science—scientism. By disentangling these two concepts, we have a much better chance for enlisting public support for scientific research than we would by trying to convince millions of people to embrace a materialistic, godless universe in which science is our only remaining hope. ...

So if science is distinct from scientism, what is it? Science is an activity that seeks to explore the natural world using well-established, clearly-delineated methods. Given the complexity of the universe, from the very big to very small, from inorganic to organic, there is a vast array of scientific disciplines, each with its own specific techniques. The number of different specializations is constantly increasing, leading to more questions and areas of exploration than ever before. Science expands our understanding, rather than limiting it.

Scientism, on the other hand, is a speculative worldview about the ultimate reality of the universe and its meaning. Despite the fact that there are millions of species on our planet, scientism focuses an inordinate amount of its attention on human behavior and beliefs. Rather than working within carefully constructed boundaries and methodologies established by researchers, it broadly generalizes entire fields of academic expertise and dismisses many of them as inferior. With scientism, you will regularly hear explanations that rely on words like "merely", "only", "simply", or "nothing more than". Scientism restricts human inquiry.

It is one thing to celebrate science for its achievements and remarkable ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena in the natural world. But to claim there is nothing knowable outside the scope of science would be similar to a successful fisherman saying that whatever he can't catch in his nets does not exist. Once you accept that science is the only source of human knowledge, you have adopted a philosophical position (scientism) that cannot be verified, or falsified, by science itself. It is, in a word, unscientific.

Source: Thomas Burnett. "What is Scientism?" AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion. (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2012). Endnote references omitted.

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See also:

• Austin L. Hughes. "The Folly of Scientism." The New Atlantis. Fall 2012, pp. 32-50.
• Edward Feser. "Blinded by Scientism." Public Discourse. March 9, 2010.
• Edward Feser. "Recovering Sight after Scientism." Public Discourse. March 12, 2010.
• Michael Shermer. "The Shamans of Scientism." Scientific American. June 2002, p. 35.
• Bob Perry. "Defrocking the Priests of Scientism." Apologetics 315. April 8, 2010.

Labels: quotations, religion and science

At the root of the apparent conflict between some religions and evolution is a misunderstanding of the critical difference between religious and scientific ways of knowing. Religions and science answer different questions about the world. Whether there is a purpose to the universe or a purpose for human existence are not questions for science. Religious and scientific ways of knowing have played, and will continue to play, significant roles in human history.

No one way of knowing can provide all of the answers to the questions that humans ask. ...

Science is a way of knowing about the natural world. It is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes. Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.

Source: Working Group on Teaching Evolution, National Academy of Sciences. Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science. (Washington, DC: National Academy Pr., 1998) p 58.

Labels: quotations, religion and science

I wasn't planning to write a post on science and religion or on Intelligent Design but I was looking for information about Dyson spheres when I stumbled upon the text of physicist Freeman Dyson's 2000 Templeton Prize acceptance speech, which you will find excerpted below. Dyson won the prize the year after physicist and theologian Ian Barbour, who has also been quoted on this blog.

The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is elementary physical processes, as we see them when we study atoms in the laboratory. The second level is our direct human experience of our own consciousness. The third level is the universe as a whole. Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence. ...

Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.

Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute.

Labels: quotations, religion and science

... when Logic congeals into all-encompassing and perfect-seeming theories, then it can actually become a very evil con trick. Wittgenstein has a point, you see: "All the facts of science are not enough to understand the world's meaning."

Source: Character of Bertrand Russell in Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009) p. 296.

Labels: art and literature, philosophy, quotations, religion and science, truth, Wittgenstein

I suggest that the concept of God is not a hypothesis formulated to explain the relation between particular events in the world in competition with scientific hypotheses. Belief in God is primarily a commitment to a way of life in response to distinctive kinds of religious experience in communities formed by historic traditions; it is not a substitute for scientific research. Religious belief offers a wider framework of meaning in which particular events can be contextualized.

Source: Ian G. Barbour. Nature, Human Nature, and God. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Pr., 2002) pp. 5-6.

Labels: quotations, religion and science

Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,

Source: Excerpt from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Ancient Sage." Quoted in The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World by Alister McGrath (Doubleday 2004) p. 93.

... science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists.

Source: Excerpt from "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge" by Stephen Jay Gould. Quoted in McGrath, ibid., p. 109.

Labels: poetry, quotations, religion and science

Thus Satan offers Christ, unfurled,
the wealth of the material world.
The Devil is, then, by and large,
materialism's fierce mirage.

So, in the light Renaissance brings,
the Age of Reason spreads its wings.
The rational now holds full sway
and science ascends as God gives way.

Materialism's steady creep
which William Blake called
"Newton's sleep,"
brings worldy blessings,
fair and fine.
Yet blinds mankind to the divine.

Such tempting gifts
this devil brings:
Steam engines, printing, splendid things
that in their wake, an age decree
of spiritual drudgery.

Source: Characters of Mike and Mack a.k.a. the Caduceus in Promethea (Collected Edition Book 2) by Alan Moore et al. (La Jolla, CA : America's Best Comics, 2001).

Labels: Alan Moore, art and literature, Materialism, Promethea, quotations, religion and science