Science and Human Law

 

The transcendental and sacred dimension of knowledge continues to be necessary, as a more or less conscious psychological incentive of scientific practice, as well as a functional element linking scientific priestly action with the mythical- ritual axis that finances it, and above all, as a necessity symbolic of covering an onto-theological scope that supports a mixed mythical-ritual structure between universal and human law, such as that presented by contemporary societies. Science is sustained in this way, with an aura of transcendentality and divinity inherited from the myths of universal law due to the humanist failure of philosophy.  For this reason, it cannot be surprising that the human masses today look to science, with a clear theological attitude: science, just like previously religion, is the evidence of a perfection and an order that confirms the meaning of the universe. Outside the scientific communities, the general public shows little interest in theories of nature (cosmological theories, evolutionism and others), it is as secondary as it was in the Middle Ages although for different reasons. In the same way that in the Middle Ages the main interest in natural facts was their ability to provide symbols for moral realities, his interest today is also moral, obeys the same practical requirement, but in reference to the possibilities of vital improvement in this world. And something similar happens in relation to the general epistemological plane of science, linked to the needs of primitive determination , since science is required to have the same capacity to corroborate group identity as was required at the time of the religion.

It would be a mistake to limit scientific narratives to the formal works that have flourished in the last hundred years and that have culminated in the specialized and protocolized languages ​​of the essays authorized by the canon of a group of institutions. Formalization closes scientific languages ​​to any discussion not limited by its own principles, which makes theoretical and observational propositions not exportable outside of a very narrow framework of argumentation, to the point, as in the case of contemporary physics, that they do not have semantic content within the scene of everyday experience. But scientific theories are accompanied by a host of additional narratives, corresponding to the determinations of a specific mythic- ritual axis , which make them intelligible and integrable in the Lebenswelt (World of Life, or everyday life). Such narratives are not those that appear in the specialized press or scientific publications, although they are the ones that articulate them and create their conditions of possibility. I am referring to the narratives formed by the archaeological remains of the universal law that constitute the uncritical knowledge of the group in relation to concepts such as truth , reality , everything , unity of knowledge , possibility of an objective and independent knowledge of the human , possibility of explanation and prediction , and some others more, all of them linked to each other in the mythical-ritual structures that were derived from the narrations of the king-god . Concepts such as those named have entered the mythical plane of universal law as pre-valuations corroborated by the millennia of positive civilizing experience (in the sense that certain human groups prevailed) in a totally uncritical way (how could it be otherwise) and they go unnoticed. In Edmund Halley's preface to Newton's Philosophia Naturalis Principa Mathematica , we are told that Newton has opened the closed chest of truth , a truth that, as we read in the scholium of the definitions of the work, distinguishes false concepts and appearances used by the common people, of those other mathematical concepts that serve as absolute referents, a truth that is in itself , and without relation to something external (absolute time and space).

Scientific onto-theology , heir to the social functionality of the narratives of religious myths, has thus become the major obstacle to the full development of humanist narratives. The nucleus most reluctant to change is the physicist-mathematician, in whose formulations is irrefutable metaphysics by experience. However, the myth that the priests of physics so jealously monopolize cannot go beyond the language in which it is formulated without entering into clear contradictions. The most obvious has been produced as a result of Gödel's theorems : if physics is formulated in the language of mathematics , and mathematics is an incomplete system , physics does not have a method to prove its most basic propositions, let alone, their theories. Physics has defended itself with respect to Gödel's theorems by means of arguments in which it claims the right not to be a consistent system, protecting with great zeal the closed preserve of its priestly wisdom: the proofs are for the theorems of mathematics, while in physics the evidence for any particular result is unquestionable to those who understand it. These puerile defenses of a metaphysical creed on the part of science, already denounced forty years ago by Paul Feyerabend , are but a sign of the epistemological weakness in which these theories move. Today we cannot know if the propositions of the most general models of physics (those that claim a unified description of the universe ) really express universal laws. Physics argues that the test of theory is the experimental result, its predictive capacity, but it is a circular argument, since the theories had an origin in human experience (otherwise they would not say anything with meaning to man), and they find in the experiment the human regularities that had already been introduced into it. This is not the case with the theories of quantum physics , which have proceeded from mathematical formalism to experience, but as they are a mathematical formalism, they have the problem of incompleteness. In both cases, the alleged universal law of physics is compromised.