Dear Dr. Meyer:

It seems to me (I hope, by the way, you are well, and had a good memorial visit, if indeed you went; or regardless of whether you went) that we might avoid making over-broad statements on the subject of science being a religion by asking, not whether it is a religion or not, but to what degree----and in what aspects.

Now I agree in part with your statement a); but I do not think that science was conceived of as a religion, but, rather, as traditional religion has disappeared from contemporary life, science has filled part of the gap; while the rest has been filled by oppositions to prior religious statements. Society, it seems to me, cannot function without religion. (By religion I mean a set of fixed beliefs that undergird human interactions: statements about what was, what will be, and what ought to be done: in other words, answers to what we cannot know: for as you and I have agreed, only the present can be known.)

Science became, grammatically, a religion, when it became a count noun, and people began to refer, not to science, but to the science.

Contemporary sexual morality has been obtained from a procedure of dissonant counterpoint (you may wish to look up the term) with respect to the prior morality. What is dissonant becomes consonant, what was consonant, dissonant. Any principle that, in times past, ultimately served to prepare a way for the raising of children, is to be thrown out. Children, if they are not snuffed out in the womb, are to be the lowest priority of the potentiality of the sexual act. They will be abandoned by families, and made fodder, once they have reached a ripe age, for the neo-pederasts. None of this is scientific, but it is an integral part of the contemporary religion. Unlike the old religions, there is no art that I know of, no St. Matthew's Passion, that can beautify these pronouncements; the words of the gender priests are stale and sterile. I therefore surmise that this particular aspect of religion will not last very long.

I am a heretic both to science; to the contemporary religion; and to the old religion: equally detested by the catholics and the gender priests. I survive by not admitting to my heresy. As for my attempt to create an alternative religion: of physics interpreted psychologically, and of putative royal origins-----this, we must admit, had been a failure.

All I can say by way of belief now, is that as what society calls "mental health" continues to decline under the failures of contemporary religion, some madman will break free of societal constraints, and become a prophet. The course such a prophet will face (as I have found out) is perilous, far more so than for the prophets of old. Nevertheless, some one of these madman is bound to succeed in time, perhaps with roughly the same probability as a given sperm finds an egg; and, warped by the depredations of what he has experienced, will found his own warped religion: which will heal some aspect of the world he was emitted into, and create its own dysfunctions into the far future. Thus has it ever been.

N.I.C.

On Thu, Jul 14, 2022 at 3:10 PM Ernst Meyer <ernstmeyer@earthlink.net> wrote:

    July 14, 2022

    Dear Nikola,

    Thank you for your visit. Permit me to try to articulate more clearly
    what I was too tired and too depressed to say to you when you where here.

    a) Contemporary science is contemporary religion.

    b) The Lutheran orthodoxy in which I was brought up identifies faith
    (Glaube) as the key to salvation and reality, and hence to knowledge.

    c) The physicists' assertions that mathematical symbols express the
    reality of nature, and thus by implication of the Divine, are articles
    of the contemporarily dominant religious faith, a totemism which
    exploits and celebrates the circumstance that humans are part of nature.

    d) Mathematics is a set of languages the "truth" of whose sentences is
    consequence of scholastically, of socially secured agreement among
    members of a scientific "elite". Mathematical reasoning is largely an
    extension of the arbitrary invention and definition of mathematical symbols.

    e) The frequencies of sound which we are able to hear (and to voice),
    the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation which we are able to feel
    (as heat) and to see (as light), the geometric structures and patterns
    which we are able to identify - are expressions of the circumstance that
    our eyes, ears and brains are integral to the world with which they
    interact.

    f) Just as in the Middle Ages, men invested ?disproportionate amounts of
    wealth in building church spires as a physical approach to the deities
    imagined to be enthroned among the clouds, so today we invest
    ?disproportionate amounts of wealth ($11,000,000,000.- to position an
    infrared telescope at a Lagrange point a million miles away, for the
    purpose of receiving radiation emitted when time, space, energy and
    matter purportedly hatched from singularity.

    g) The singularity whose explosion (in the "Big Bang") created time,
    must itself have been outside of time, i.e. timeless, timeless as is the
    present as a dimensionless hyperplane. The beginning and the present
    mirror each other both mathematically and intuitively, as being outside
    of the stream of time.

    h) The quantum is the epitomy of the atom. It is the repudiation of
    ultimate indivisibility. The existence - or hypothesis - of quantums
    defines numerical limits of divisibility. I understand the hypothesis of
    quantums to be a mirror image of the hypothesis of electromagnetic
    radiation, defining as it does, the limit of velocity.

    i) These musings require no answer.

    j) Thank you again for your visit, and stay well.

    EJM