BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol I, No. 12
Nov 24, 2004
social criticisms by
Vicente-Ignacio de Veyra III
Science's
Perpetual Crucifixion
JUST
THIS YEAR, the first radio telescope dish antenna that’s going to be
part of a 64-antenna giant radio-telescope project called ALMA was
delivered to Roman Catholic Chile, the Chile of Pablo Neruda’s socialism
and what activists described as anti-Allende feudal priests. The Chile of
today, you see, provided Llano de
Chajnantor as project
site to the consortium of scientific groups from the United States
and Europe that’s building the miracle eye beholder. Zona de Chajnantor
is a plateau high in the Andes Mountains east of the cock-crowing village
of San Pedro de Atacama,
This
giant telescope, or telescope composite involving 64 telescope antennas
each with a 12-meter diameter dish, will have its 64th antenna
piece delivered by 2010 yet, so it’s going to be a little while before
we get to see in our Newsweek copies pictures of those galaxies or planets
or stars that tickle scientific fancies.
So,
why this obsession with outside stellar societies quite more enormous than
our cosmopolitan amalgams, and perhaps to involve entities more expansive
than our standards referencing the human form as the ultimate form qua the
male God’s likeness? When the
telescope becomes available for use, the stars will of course be so much
nearer than ever, appearing to the telescope viewer almost as if the
object/subject were merely in the next block or were the next-door-girl at
her window, to possibly create a compendium of lovely theories that will
perhaps remain as theories for a long time.
Giant
radio-telescopes. To some religious eyes, these could be the new
century’s “Babylonian tower”, considering that in order to realize
such a far-reaching project it must stand on high ground, literally,
specifically an elevation of over 16,000 feet -- scientists are
constructing ALMA as the highest telescope ever built on Earth.
Astronomers at the site will, however, have to bear the cross of
temperatures ranging from below freezing point at night to desert heat
during the day on this plateau. But with the air at the site specially dry
and clear, making it one of the world's best spots for observing the stars
(Hollywood is another), scientists will joyfully regard their new plateau
haven as . . . heaven.
The
world's largest radio telescope it’s going to be, then, to be called
ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array). An array, yes, that’s what it’s
going to be, specifically of 64 giant radio-telescope antennas together
acting as one telescope via online networking, combining the zoom-ins and
zoom-outs that each will specifically do for the collective eye.
As
of today, however, people are still more familiar with optical telescopes
-- those that use lenses and mirrors. Even scientists
are themselves still busy building bigger and bigger optical telescopes.
The largest optical telescopes today are on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano,
site of the sacrifices of boys for the god Pele. These include twin
reflecting telescopes called Keck. But there are other Extremely Large
Telescope, or ELT, projects being planned still — each intending to
better the aperture of the Keck telescopes by between 3 to 10 times, and
all of them are at more or less “Babylonian tower” altitudes and
almost always employing multi-lingual scientists.
The
paradoxically-named Earthbound which is however nicknamed the "eye on
the sky", is also called the Very Large Telescope, or VLT. Like ALMA,
it is also located high in the mountains of Pablo Neruda’s Chile.
ALMA probably was inspired by the Earthbound, since the latter is made up of four separate optical telescopes, constructed such that the light from the four separate telescopes can be combined and focused. This combining will produce an image equal to the image that one would get from a much larger (but harder and much more expensive to construct) optical telescope. Right now the four main VLT telescopes are in use, and three auxiliary telescopes are still being put into place to create much larger images of the heavens. But like ALMA, it will still be within a few years that the VLT will be fully operational. In the meantime, we have to content ourselves with the awe of religious wars as TV spectacle of our times.
BUT,
YOU SEE, this isn't entirely new. For mankind has always had this desire
to enlarge its eyes and vision of things beyond the mundanely palpable.
However, it has always been science that’s been the martyr of our
progress. Martyred, because though often well applauded at moments of
production, it is also often stoned at moments of conception.
Still,
it is comforting to see science continuing to do its eye- and
vision-enlargements better than religion, despite the malicious
referencing of movies with stereotype crazy scientists. Better, indeed,
considering that religion’s wont to put words into God’s mouth (a mode
of wisdom-claiming that as a matter of course spits at science’s
open-ended theorizing) has constantly given itself the ready go-ahead to
order weapons of all types from the companies of the US Republican Party
to create wars. Which party, incidentally, also supports religious wars of
all types, be they against terrorists defying the party’s own terrorism
or against local female abortion claimants and gay dissenters and
birth-control activists.
It is sad that the societies of the world have proven themselves to be no
more sophisticated than the barrios of the Philippine islands in forever
pointing at scientific minds as the minds without Gods. Quite a pity,
considering that in philosophical Taoism the greatest sin of superior men
would be the simplification of God, which simplification has of course
been the way of much religious practice (via the verbalizations in God’s
silent mouth by the arrogance of man’s faith) and has been the non-way
of science via the verbalization of its theories as mere theories.
Scientific minds, indeed, have been the ones to adequately demonstrate a
respect beyond words for this ideal of faith at an arm’s length via the
concept God as an elusive presence. And the reason why this vision of God
through scientific wonders escapes mankind as a possible virtue is because
the visions are often left speechless beyond the scientific journal entry,
so amazed at such phenomena as the black hole and the behavior of uteral
eggs as to be epistemologically silenced; so speechless that it is unable
to propagate itself as a possible religious ethos within any religion.
Poets, too, though speech-ridden in offering awe at the world and the
world of words, really topple themselves by this very awe and thus
habitually declare their generous wordsmithings as a poverty vis a vis the
wonders of the world. It is by this self-denial that poets have become
majestic figures, an achievement in the eyes of followers that has escaped
many a religious leader.
So-called
“strong faith” is only possible, therefore, through a defiance and
dismissal of awe towards the embrace of comfortable and mind-numbing
simplifications called dogma. For if God had intended us to know Him and
hear His words, why hast He allowed to happen upon us the pangs of His
eternal elusivity? Why does an abundance of religions on earth continue to
manufacture wars through the different racist Gods’ subjects, all of
these subjects insisting on divine titles to promised lands? Doesn’t
God, perhaps, demand of us the more apt respect for this elusive godhead
as our first step to salvation and peace with other men? For isn’t the
Bible itself full of contradictions if we are to give way to the
interpretations of an amply salaried preacher? I often wonder why I see or
feel more of God by watching the wonders of nature on the Discovery and
NGC channels and less, much less of Him, in the religious preachers’
channels? In the religious channels, I see and feel nothing less than more
of human corruption at play and man’s propensity to lie about the source
of his income and the desperate psychological state of his targeted
market.
SIGH.
SCIENCE, alas, with its obsessions with large telescopes and new
quasi-Babylonian desires to touch God, will forever be regarded as the
enemy of religion. Even as it continues to actually show us the way to
experience religious wonderment and prayer via an honest astonishment at nature
strengthened by the concept God. It has also showed us how religion can be
an arrogant enemy of God’s elusive enormity and awesome character via
religious insistences upon its own readings of nature. It’s been quite a
long time now since science deposed the religious insistence that it’s
the Sun that revolves around the earth, yet we don’t see the possibility
that more Galileos will be freed from the village culture of nations’
societies insisting that science equals rock ‘n’ roll in defying
religion.
To
the antipara of religion, God can only be seen in specific
fee-collecting places and in edicts from a hierarchy and in centralized
dogmas and laws governed by linguistic analysts holding microphones. To
science’s eyes, on the other hand, be they the microscopes of labs or
the telescopes of mountains, God is out there and in here, on Mount
Banahaw as well as in the spaghetti sauce, awesome as well as palpable,
beyond the words of what religion would always insist are of the Word.
I
often wonder why the Bible would always be interpreted as anti-"idols",
for instance, as in being against the idol made by the people Moses left
behind in his visit to a burning bush. As if it were psychologically
possible for human beings to worship a sculpture. Doesn’t the idolatry
of an "idol" qua a god-symbol itself a psychological act of
being faithful towards a new God concept represented solely by a
sculpture, a concept thereby created to be no less worthy than one’s
own? For one to say that one’s polity’s God concept is the truer God
concept, one must needs be God, shouldn’t he/He? Unless he be nothing
more than a political god or an instrument of one.
My
proposal to the new century’s world is this. Let there be more science
and poetry in today's and tomorrow’s religions, and less – ideally no
more – of politics and the vermin of profits. For is it not even
possible to read the Tower of Babel’s Fall parable as symbolic not of a
God’s wrath upon a people’s mere hunger to reach Him, but as
suggesting His/Her/Its mere refusal to be known by men’s simplistic
“ivory towers” of belief?
I
plea for these considerations, for
once science as a mental practice cum philosophy is assimilated into
religions as a way of living, then perhaps there will be less use of
faiths by corrupt men seeking wealth or fame or power via the
non-questioning teachings of dogma. Instead there will be more use of
faiths by peoples seeking simple joys in the sunrise, and yet more joys in
the sun’s setting into a night of wondrous and indescribable
star-studded heavens. Sheer dogma can't give that to them, unless one
considers the appreciation of nature's ecological peace and beauty during those moments of
dangerous dissidence and possible burning at the stakes.
#
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Posted at the Bananacue
Republic website 11/23/04. Send comments to:
[email protected]
".
. . once science as a mental practice cum philosophy is assimilated into
religions as a way of living, then perhaps there will be less use of
faiths by corrupt men seeking wealth or fame or power via the
non-questioning teachings of dogma."