At that point in the video Neil basically says that when someone like Issac Newton couldn't figure something out he invoked the ancient Greek theater device of the Deus ex Machina, "a character or thing that suddenly enters the story in a novel, play, movie, etc., and solves a problem that had previously seemed impossible to solve." The religious minded individual of today might say, "ah, well, that's the boundary of our knowledge, the rest is "God's" domain." and a scientific minded person might say "ah, well, that's the current boundary," and then goes on to see if the limit can be pushed back some more. The act of looking seems to create something to be discovered, in that it creates and eventually fulfills the possibility that more can be known, and more looking will always equal more discoveries ad infinitum, pushing the veil further out into the infinite.
State religions have a hard time updating themselves, but I recently read a quote by a person who practices magic who said that magicians had always used the latest discoveries to aid in their work. As far as they were concerned, any new information about the world made their work that much more effective. When a new planet is discovered it's given astrological associations, and there are even details about the influence of large asteroids in the asteroid belt. Alchemists like Issac Newton were always at the forefront of discovery, although their processes were couched in a symbolic language, perhaps in the same way that a Master Mason working with advanced architectural techniques would keep certain secrets about the craft out of the hands of unworthy neophytes.
A religiously minded person, and especially one who gives these types of experiments some of his time, is not necessarily an ignorant buffoon who thinks that the world is 6,000 years old, or that science is the devil, or that no new discoveries should be taken into consideration. Now if every religious minded person was lumped into the same category and then that group was assumed to be homogeneous in all ways, one could defame all non-secular people in the same convenient way that racial slurs are used to attack all members of a single race. Hopefully the '#trending' of secularism doesn't swing the pendulum of society too far in that direction and create a new crusade.
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"The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." - Marcus Aurelius
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." - Plato
31 May 2014, 4:10 am
