|
"Problems arise when an effort is made to localize the omnipresence of nature’s dynamical
powers in the guise of local executive objects performing forceful acts. This "prescriptive objective definition"
is the source of profound human conflict. Localizing the omnipresence of nature's powers is what Richard Dawkins
rails against in his denunciations of ‘the God Delusion’ yet he has been building this same baseless assumption into
the foundations of his own scientific theory"
Ted Lumley and Alan Rayner
Opposing views from the same dichotomy
Confrontations between bitterly opposed ideologies, each of which inconsistently accuse the other of wrongdoing and
inciting conflict, continue to pervade modern human culture. The current debate raging between fundamentalist advocates
of science and religion is a potent example. What both sides of such confrontations cannot admit, however, is that
what they implicitly or explicitly rail against in their opponents’ argument is actually what they themselves depend
upon in constructing their own position – the belief that it is possible to isolate the insides from the outsides of
discrete objective realities. Most fundamentally, this belief arises from supposing that the informational (material)
and spatial (immaterial) aspects of reality are mutually exclusive.
No sooner does the existence of an objective "outside reality" become taken for granted, than the scene is
set for oppositional and paradoxical systems of logic to become entrenched in human endeavours to isolate "one"
from "many", "self" from "other", "us" from "them" and "here"
from "there". This "outside reality" becomes an ineffable "somewhere else" from which
Divine, Newtonian or Darwinian "Forces" can somehow be exerted upon the contents of "inside realities"
and into which these contents can be excluded. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is hence given cause to ponder: "to be or not
to be, that is the question: whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?"
Complementary Views of the Same Reality
The grounds for opposition between discrete conceptions of reality are, however, dissolved as soon as it is
recognized that there is no scientific evidence and can be no scientific evidence for the localized existence of
objective outsides and insides in a fluid dynamical cosmos that necessarily includes limitless (non-local) space
everywhere. The way is then clear for the development of a mutually inclusive, local-non-local logic of "somewhere
as a dynamic inclusion of everywhere", whereby all local manifestations of energy flow are understood as
responsive informational configurations of receptive space.
With this "inclusional" logic, objectified
opposites are transformed into dynamic relational complementarities in evolutionarily co-creative (neither competitive
nor co-operative) natural communion with one another. The basis for human conflict
embedded in what C.S. Lewis alluded to as "the whole philosophy of Hell…the axiom
that one thing is not another thing and, specifically, that one
self is not another self…. to be means to be in competition", is rendered obsolete. There is no verifiable or
falsifiable objective outside reality upon which to found such an abstraction. It makes sense to love our natural
human neighbourhood not as an exception from but as an inclusion of our local-non-local fluid self-identity.
|