Knowing Humanity in the Social World by Francis X Remedios & Val Dusek

Author:Francis X Remedios & Val Dusek
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137374905
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Creation from Nothing

Immanuel Mesthene (1967) in an early STS defense of a kind of moderate technocracy nicely summarizes the claim that modern science completely denies the existence of the surd in nature. However, other cultural forms of knowledge of nature did yield contributions to description of nature that are not modern Western science, but which denied the ultimate comprehensibility of nature at the micro-level. Ancient Greek examples are Aristotelian matter and the Platonic matrix or chora. Werner Heisenberg later appealed to retrospectively justify his indeterminacy, which has been claimed to have come from his adolescent reading of the Timaeus. Chinese science, with its notion of ultimate indeterminacy or vagueness of measurement (Sivin 1995), is a prime example of this view. At the end of his book Science, (1997) Fuller claims rightly that contemporary science is moving in the direction of the governmentally directed and purely practically oriented science found in the ancient Asiatic despotisms, and is losing the commitment to absolute truth of early modern science. Fuller might say the turn to quantum mechanics, indeterminacy, and chaos is simply another sign of this degeneration in postmodern and neo-liberal science and society. Chaos theory is close to postmodern architecture in reviving classical styles, but adding them to new notions.

A feature of the Judeo-Christian notion of divine creation that Fuller, rather surprisingly, does not use is the creation of the universe from nothing, creatio ex nihilo. Fuller usually describes divine creation in ways consistent with the incomprehensible surd aspect of matter. Fuller discusses God’s design as being limited by the recalcitrance of matter (2008, pp. 172–173). This seems to reject the creatio ex nihilo view in traditional Judaism and Christianity since the first or second century. Elsewhere, inconsistently, Fuller seems to accept creatio ex nihilo (Fuller 2014c, p. 20, 22). What distinguishes Christianity from pagan religion both East and West (Greek polytheism as well as Hinduism and Buddhism), at least since Alexandrian neo-Platonist Philo Judaeus, is that God created everything (not only form but matter) from nothingness. In other creation myths, God or gods simply mold pre-existing stuff (matter) that is not itself structured. Possibly the “without form and void” and “darkness over the face of the deep” in the opening lines of Genesis were originally meant this way, but since the early Common Era have been taken as literally nothingness. The God of the Genesis, at least as interpreted for some two millennia, if not three, is omnipotent, omniscient, and rational. God is not restricted by matter in creation. This view fits well with the view of pre-twentieth-century Western science as rejecting any inexplicable aspect of nature. Hans Jonas (1967) claimed to derive both rationalist and empiricist theory of knowledge as alternative responses to the claim that through creation from nothing the universe is thoroughly rational. The two differed, according to Jonas , on the extent of human access to God’s rationality.

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