In case anyone noticed, at the end of the video regarding glaciation, the speaker rattled on for several minutes about dark energy, a topic apparently covered in earlier Space Time videos. I was listening with half an ear and even less of my brain when I heard the phrase, "...the universe behaves mechanistically..." and I immediately thought, "Oh, come on, who still thinks of the universe in that way?" Scientists, it seems.
It's an issue for me not because I'm anti-science -- I'm not -- but the hidden assumptions in the philosophical underpinnings of the development of science in the West are another matter entirely. Someone could write a book about that called, "Where The West Went Wrong." The whole Cartesian/Newtonian mechanistic view of the universe may have given us a host of practical applications, but it's come at the expense of the rest of life. At the very least, it's a foray into the heaping sands of intellectual aridity. I cast my vote with Thomas Berry, who said the Universe is not a collection of objects so much as it's a communion of subjects. But more on Berry's perspective of the Universe later. I'm not ready to delve that deeply into that subject matter just yet.
Suffice it to say, for me the Universe is a vibrant, living Reality in which we participate, and I'd rather we participate consciously and conscientiously than stoop to seeing objective reality as nothing more than an intellectual plaything, or the Earth as just a set of utilitarian resources to exploit, with life and existence further debased into mere commodities to sell.
My hope is that science becomes a yoga for the West; in other words, that it continue to delve as deeply into the mysteries of existence as is humanly possible, and becomes a medium for the discovery of the deepest truths we are capable of fathoming. Anything less is beneath us.
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