Excerpt from Dreams

Becoming God (p. 148)

From chapter "Science"

We don’t need Stanley Aronowitz to point out to us that science is imbued with arrogance, especially the supreme arrogance of believing that everything can be known; or that science is about control—about, as Dawkins said, “making matter and energy jump through hoops on command”; or, to put all this another way, that having done away with the distant monotheistic sky God, humans are now trying, through science, to take God’s place, to know as much as God, to become as powerful as God, to become God.

What evidence is there for this? Well, we can talk about the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” who after the first Trinity test, famously said, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”Or we can talk about the billions of dollars spent to create artificial life or artificial intelligence while this culture destroys real natural life and denies the existence of real natural nonhuman intelligence. We can talk about the widespread belief among many of those who belong to the cult of the scientific, materialist, instrumentalist, mechanistic perspective that someday science and technology will “solve” not only such existential “problems” as pain, aging, physical limitations, and death; but also the very real problems caused by science and technology, such as toxic or radioactive waste, global warming, biodiversity crash, human overpopulation and overconsumption, and so on. We can talk about the fact that this widespread belief is an article of faith that fails to stand up to even the most superficial scrutiny, and we can talk about the fact that all the evidence in the (dying) world fails to shake the faith of the True-Believing members of the cult of the scientific, materialist, instrumentalist, mechanistic perspective. We can talk about this culture’s frenzied insistence that there be no limits on growth, “knowledge,” exploitation, power, wealth. We can talk about the fact that this culture is killing the planet. We can talk about the fact that although methane burps have started, and although it is widely understood that anthropogenic global warming is caused in great measure by the burning of coal, oil, and gas, none of the mainstream proposals to curb global warming seriously propose stopping the burning of coal, oil, and gas. These proposals take industrial capitalism as a given and the real world as that which must conform to industrial capitalism (just as an omnipotent God could make all others conform to His wishes). If we define insanity as being out of touch with reality, this is by definition insane. The real world is the real world. This culture is not the real world. The stock market is not the real world. The US government is not the real world. Laboratories are not the real world. The real world is sockeye salmon, black terns, Ethiopian wolves, Mekong giant catfish, Sicilian fir, the Columbia River, the Amazon Basin, polar ice caps, the Pacific Ocean. And one of the many things these cult members do not allow themselves to understand is that without a real world you do not have a social structure, even a social structure in which you can make believe that you can force matter and energy to jump through hoops on command. No planet, no you, no matter how megalomaniacal you may be. Fantasies aside, you ain’t God. Believers in the Cult of the Industrial God, believers in the Cult of the Scientific God, believers in the Cult of the Mechanistic God, are staking the life of the planet on their entirely unsupported and unsupportable faith that, through science, humans, or rather Humans—Homo sapiens sapiens: the wisest of the wise—will be omniscient enough to be able to find solutions to the crises caused by the burning of coal, oil, and gas without stopping the burning of coal, oil, and gas, and will be powerful enough, omnipotent enough, to be able to make these plans work, in violation of the straightforward “scientific laws” of cause and effect which they say govern the universe. Doesn’t that sound like God, or rather a cult who pretends they’re God? How is the continued belief in these plans, in the face of the violation of those “scientific laws,” any less ridiculous than fundamentalist Christians believing that Jehovah stopped the earth from spinning so that Joshua could win the battle of Gibeon?