Role Of The Web In Political Activism

I'm going to be talking to you today about the role of the Web in political activism. So I spent time with these activists and asked them whether or not they were using social media, whether or not they were engaging with the Web, and why they might be doing it.

Going out into the field and speaking to political activists is really important, because it gives you an insight into their ideology, their motivations, and why they think it's important to use certain Web technologies.

In order to go and speak to these activists, I needed a method of research that combined computer science and social science. And that's where Web science came in.

I have a background in international relations, so I knew about political ideology in theory and doing an MSc in Web science, and knowing about networks and organisation online was really important for me.

So with that in mind, I turned up in London, ready to observe how these political activists were using the Web for their protests. And what I found was that, broadly now, in 2013, there appears to be a lot of apathy, or even outright hostility, towards the Web and social media.

The main reason? The NSA.

The story had just broken that large American online corporations, like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, were cooperating with the NSA and collecting lots of personal data about citizens from not just America, but all around the world. This was something that had kind of been known beforehand, but not to this scale. And it put a lot of these activists off engaging with these mainstream websites and these mainstream social media services, because they saw them now as part of the establishment.

If you look back towards the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, these technologies were technologies of liberation for many people. But now, only two years later, they have become technologies that symbolise surveillance by the state, the loss of privacy by individuals, and the general ability for both corporations and governments to keep citizens in line and stop these kind of protests.

Discovering this was extremely important for both my research, but also for Web science. Because I think it showed how it is very important to look at both the social and the technical aspects of the Web together.

The Web is this thing, which is computers, but also humans. It's humans influencing technology, and technology influencing humans. And if you don't look at how one affects the other, it is very difficult to say for certain how society is being changed and developed.

So, in my experience, taking a problem and taking historical analysis of something like political activism and saying, OK, we know that political activists have engaged with the Web since the early 2000s, and this has changed as new technologies have come in, but how is it going to change in the next decade? In the next two decades? And what does that mean for the way we do politics in this country?

Some questions that will be arising, which I think only Web science can answer, are, are we seeing a change in the relationship the citizens have with states and governments? If people exist online and connect to these kind of networks, do they then stop having as much of a connection to their state and their government in their local area? Does that then change politics? Does that then change the way that we debate?

All these kind of things are really important discussions, which are going to take place in at least the next 10 years.

NYC Events For the Political Junkie - In the Mainstream and Out

New York was the home territory for two major Presidential contenders in 2008: Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. It's no coincidence that the city is rife with political activity - it's the headquarters for numerous national news sources, and it's also home to the single Zip code with the highest level of political donations to both major parties. The breadth of NYC events available to someone interested in politics means that it's easy to sample lots of different ideologies - and maybe learn a thing or two.

The Barack Obama Meetup is one of the many NYC events that bring together hundreds Obama supporters to talk about the Senator's plans and policies, and to share grassroots campaigning strategies. Of all of the NYC events dedicated to Democratic party politics, this is one of the most active.

For a view a bit out of the mainstream, the Henry George School of Social Science offers NYC events that revolve around the economic teachings of Henry George, who called for a single tax on the value of land. A movement that has brought together socialists, anarchists, and radical capitalists, the Georgist political movement has remained alive (and lively!) in the city where Henry George himself once ran for mayor. The NYC events hosted by the school include introductory and advanced lectures on economics from a Georgist perspective.

On the other side of the mainstream, the Junto is a unique NYC Event. Hosted by veteran trader Victor Neiderhoffer, it's a wide-ranging discussion forum covering investments, economics, and politics, all viewed from the perspective of Objectivism. Although Junto is an NYC event, it's named after Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia gathering of the same name.

The radical bookstore Bluestockings hosts numerous anarchism-themed gatherings. Unlike stereotypical anarchists, the visitors to Bluestockings' NYC Events are likely to be well-versed in Proudhon rather than punk rock. Events range from discussions about the lessons from world travel, to instructions on activism, as well as numerous movie and book events.

The feminist group NOW hosted their national conference in New York last July. Although feminism is a social rather than political movement, it's a movement with broad political implications. NYC events like this showcase the city's intellectual diversity - Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani were counting on its votes in the 2008 general election, and each hosted NYC events to galvanize supporters. Since the city is home to preeminent magazines literary/political on the right and left - from The New Yorker to The National Review - NYC events have always shown that regardless of their beliefs, residents of this cosmopolitan locale can find the perfect venue to express their views.

The Dangers of Confirmation Bias in Teaching Homeschool Science

People's beliefs are based on past experience, but not always on fact. Have you ever expected someone to act a certain way based on your prior experience with her - then said, "Ah ha!" when you saw an example of that behavior? That is an example of confirmation bias, the human propensity for finding ways of upholding an existing hypothesis - and it's not a good thing. As a homeschool teacher, you must be aware of your own tendency for only presenting information that agrees with your preconceived notions. This is a particular danger when it comes to teaching science.

Selective Thinking

There are many ways that confirmation basis can negatively affect our thoughts and our lives. Just like racial bias toward a particular category of people, confirmation bias toward data can cause you to shy away from particular concepts or freely embrace the wrong information. It leads you to search out only the information that upholds your beliefs and shun conflicting information because it doesn't fit into your belief system.

We see evidence of this in the news all the time, especially around election season. Those who favor one political front runner over the other will eagerly grasp onto any favorable information regarding their chosen candidate while refuting - or even attempting to hide - denigrating facts. You will also do the opposite - gleefully sharing anything that makes the other guy look bad.

It comes to play in confirming our superstitions, too. Let's say you believe that walking down the sidewalk backwards at noon on Wednesday brings you good luck. While doing so, you see a black cat that decides to cross the street rather than cross your path. Then you spy a piece of paper wedged into the crack of the sidewalk and you pick it up only to find it's actually a hundred dollar bill. Even though you may have gotten drenched by a passing truck driving through a puddle and missed an important appointment because it took you too long to get there, your mind will focus only on the good things that happened because it confirms your belief that walking backwards is positive.

Selective Teaching

In terms of teaching, confirmation bias can easily slip into any day's agenda but especially during science lessons.

One way this is often evidenced is through the curriculum homeschool parents choose. If they describe themselves as Christians, they will choose only science textbooks that uphold their Creationism views. On the other hand, secular homeschoolers tend to seek out science resources that focus strictly on facts and often present Darwinism and the Big Bang theory to their kids.

While there's nothing wrong with any of those views, it could be a disservice to your kids to present only those views. Because of confirmation bias, which leads parents to actively seek out and teach only scientific facts that uphold their personal views, many parents deny a full, well-rounded education to their children. This can be especially confusing for kids who can easily find differing opinions online and through other resources. How will you explain the Big Bang theory to kids who have only been taught that God created all things in the universe?

Rather than have to try to explain it away, it might be best to present both scientific worldviews and show how both of them can fit into a Christian, creationistic worldview. Kids are smart. They know how to discover and explore the facts that may be eluding them and preventing real, deep understanding of scientific topics.

There's no need to be afraid of information because it is just that: information. Don't let your personal confirmation bias prevent your child from getting a whole education. As a homeschool science teacher, it's your job to give them all the information they ask for without fear and help them investigate it further.

Renaissance Science, Registered 21st Century Rebirth Document

This essay is the birth certificate of the 21st Century Renaissance. It shows how the life-science of the Classical Greek era's Humanities has been upgraded in order to bring balance into Western technological culture. Many philosophers have warned that the fate of human civilisation depends upon achieving that goal.

The ancient Greek Parthenon represented a Greek life-science culture, symbolising concepts of political government long lost to modern Western science. The Ottoman military once stored gunpowder in the Parthenon and in1687 a Venetian mortar round blew the building into ruin. Recent restoration techniques using computers revealed that strange illusionary optical engineering principles had been used in the building's construction. We know that they were associated with the mathematics of the Music of the Spheres that Pythagoras had brought back from the Egyptian Mystery Schools. We also know that Plato considered that any engineer who did not understand about spiritual optical engineering principles was a barbarian.

Harvard University's Novartis Chair Professor, Amy Edmondson, in her online biography of Buckminster Fuller, The Fuller Explanation, wrote about how Fuller had plagiarised Plato's spiritual engineering discoveries and used them to derive his life-science synergistic theories. Those theories, which completely challenged the basis of the 20th Century Einsteinian world-view are now the basis of a new medical science instigated by the three 1996 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry. During the 21st Century the complex Fullerene geometrical reasoning has brought about the rebirth of the lost ancient Greek optical science of life. This is now rewriting Western technological culture, so there is a need to know why Buckminster Fuller wrote that this reunification provides a choice between Utopia or Oblivion.

After presenting complex geometrical reasoning, Professor Edmondson wrote, "By now familiar with Fuller's underlying assumptions, we shall take time out to introduce some background material. The origins of humanity's fascination with geometry can be traced back four thousand years, to the Babylonian and Egyptian civilisations; two millennia later, geometry flourished in ancient Greece, and its development continues today. Yet most of us know almost nothing about the accumulated findings of this long search. Familiarity with some of these geometric shapes and transformations will ease the rest of the journey into the intricacies of synergetics."

Human survival now depends upon a more general understanding that ethics is not about how science is used but about what is the ethical form of the spiritual, or holographic structure of science itself. There is no need for the reader to become conversant with the complex geometrical equations suggested by Professor Amy Edmondson, in order to follow the journey of ethical logic from ancient Egypt to the 21st Century Renaissance. However, before undertaking that journey we need to realise the nightmare scenario that the unbalanced 20th Century understanding of science has forced global humanity to endure and which Buckminster Fuller warned about.

In 1903, Lord Bertrand Russell's book A Freeman's Worship was published, containing his vision of A Universe in Thermodynamic Ruin. This nightmare mathematical assessment of reality stated that all the most ennobling thoughts of humankind amounted to nothing at all and all life in the universe must be destroyed. Lord Russell wrote that humans must endure, with total despair, the hopelessness of living within a reality that was totally governed by a lifeless energy law that Einstein was to call The Premier law of all science.

The name of the law governing 20th Century technological culture is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is also known as the Universal heat death law or, the Law of Universal chaos.

That law demands the total extinction of all life in the universe when all heat is dissipated into cold space. As a result of that law, all life sciences, including global economic rationalism, can only be about species moving toward this imaginary heat death extinction.

Buckminster Fuller's life-science energy does not obey the heat death law. It is based instead upon fractal logic, which exists forever. Einstein's governing death-science law is the correct basis of modern chemistry, but that chemistry is balanced by Plato's spiritual engineering principles, or the functioning of Fullerene holographic 'chemistry'. While mainstream science does indeed accept that fractal logic extends to infinity, no life science within the Western technological culture can possibly be part of its workings. That mindset can be a serious distraction to biologists who seek to associate rain cloud fractal logic with the effects of climate change upon human evolution.

In 1996 within an Open Letter to the Secretariat of the United Nations on behalf of the Science-Art Research Centre of Australia, Australian National Library Canberra Australian Citation RECORD 2645463, a complaint was made that the Australian Government was unintentionally committing a major crime against humanity for endorsing a totally entropic educational system governed by the second law of thermodynamics. At the United Nations University in Washington the complaint was handed to the United Nations University Millennium, Project-Australasian Node, for investigation. Seven years of peer reviewed research ensued, concluding that the complaint was justified. In 2006 a formal Decree of Recognition was issued by the Australasian Division of the United Nations University Millennium Project, attesting to the urgent global importance of this issue.

Having contrasted the 21st Century rebirth of Classical Greek fractal logic life-science - the New Renaissance, with the 20th Century nightmare, we can follow Professor Amy Edmondson's advice to begin our journey of ethical understanding from ancient Egypt. (George Sarton's, A History of Science argues that ancient Kemetic theories of Egypt were scientific and established the foundations of later Hellenistic science).

The ability of the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom to reason that two geometries existed to balance the workings of the universe was praised by the Greek philosopher Plato, whose fundamental idea was that "All is Geometry". Old Kingdom wall paintings depicted that evil thoughts prevented evolutionary access to a spiritual reality. The geometry used to survey farm boundaries lost each year when the River Nile flooded was quite different from the sacred geometries basic to Egyptian religious ceremonies.

The BBC television program about the collapse of the Egyptian Old Kingdom by Professor Fekri Hassan of the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London, explained that some 4000 years ago, a prolonged drought collapsed the First Kingdom, soon after the death of King Pepy II. Professor Hassan explains that 100 years after the collapse, hieroglyphs record that Egyptian government was restored when the people insisted that the ethics of social justice, mercy and compassion were fused into the fabric of political law. It is rather important to realise that at that point of time in history, ethics associated with fractal geometrical logic had been fused into a political structure.

During the 6th Century BCE the Greek scholar Thales went to Egypt to study the ethics of life-science at the Egyptian Mystery schools and he advised Pythagoras to do the same. Pythagoras learned that evolutionary wisdom was generated by the movement of celestial bodies, which the Greeks called The music of the Spheres. It was thought that this harmonic music could transfer its wisdom to the atomic movement of the soul through the forces of harmonic resonance, such as when a high note shatters a wine glass.

The Platonic tradition of Greek philosophy was to fuse ethics into a model of reality called the Nous, postulated by the scientific thinker Anaxagoras. The Nous was a whirling force that acted upon primordial particles in space to form the worlds and to evolve intelligence. The ancient Greeks decided to invent science by fusing further ethics into the fractal logic structure of the Nous. The harmonic movement of the moon could be thought to influence the female fertility cycle and this science could explain a mother's love and compassion for children. The Classical Greek science was about how humans might establish an ethical life-science to guide ennobling political government. The idea was, that by existing for the health of the universe, human civilisation would avoid extinction.

The Classical Greek life-science was constructed upon the concept of good and evil. Good was For the Health of the Universe. A very precise definition of evil is found in Plato's book, The Timaeus. Evil was classified as a destructive property of unformed matter within the physical atom.

The ancient Greek atom was considered to be physically indivisible and it can be considered that the anti-life properties of nuclear radiation had been classified as evil. Modern chemistry is constructed upon the logic of universal atomic decay, which is governed by the second law of thermodynamics. The Egyptian concept of evil thought processes leading to oblivion echoes Plato's and Buckminster Fuller's concepts of an oblivion brought about through an obsession with an unbalanced geometrical world-view.

The Max Plank Astrophysicist, Professor Peter Kafka, in his six essays entitled The Principle of Creation and the Global Acceleration Crisis, written over a period from 1976 to 1994, predicted the current global financial collapse being brought about by "scientists, technologists and politicians" who had an unbalanced understanding of the second law of thermodynamics. Kafka wrote in chapter four, entitled Ethics from Physics, that the second law of thermodynamics had been known for centuries. Kafka realised that it had various other names throughout history such as Diabolos, the Destroyer of Worlds, the evil god of Plato's Physics of Chaos, now the god of modern Chaos Physics.

The science to explain a mother's love for children involving both celestial and atomic movement became associated with the Science of Universal Love taught in Greece during the 3rd Century BCE.

Julius Caesar's colleague, the Historian Cicero, recorded during the 1st Century BCE, that this science was being taught throughout Italy and across to Turkey by teachers called 'saviours'. He considered that such teaching challenged Roman political stability. During the 5th Century some 1000 years of fractal logic scrolls held in the Great Library of Alexandria were burned. The custodian of the library, the mathematician Hypatia, was brutally murdered by a Christain mob during the rule of Pope Cyril. Hypatia's fractal logic life-science was condemned by St Augustine as the work of the Devil. In his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon marked Hypatia's murder as the beginning of the Dark Ages.

Encyclopaedia Britannica lists St Augustine as the mind which mostly completely fused the Platonic tradition of Greek philosophy with the religion of the New Testament, influencing both Protestant and Catholic religious belief in modern times. His translation of Plato's atomic evil as female sexuality, influenced the 13th Century Angel Physics of St Thomas Aquinas, known as History's Doctor of Science. During the mid 14th Century until the mid 17th Century, Angel Physics was used to legalise the imprisonment, ritualistic torture and burning alive of countless women and children. The argument that Augustine's banishment of fractal life-science logic in the 5th Century was responsible for Western life-science becoming obsessed with the second law of thermodynamics can be validated.

The Reverend Thomas Malthus derived his famous Principles of Population essay from the writings of St Thomas Aquinas and used it to establish the economic and political policies of the East India Company. Charles Darwin, employed by that company, cited Malthus' essay as the basis of his survival of the fittest life-science. Darwin, in the 18th Century, held the essay as synonymous with the second law of thermodynamics.

Plato's Academy had been closed for being a pagan institution in 529 by the Christian Emperor Justinian, Banished Greek scholars fled to Islamic Spain where their theories were tolerated. The Golden Age of Islamic science, from which Western science emerged, included the Translation School in Toledo. Islamic, Christian and Jewish scholars worked together to translate the lost Greek ideas into Latin. The Franciscan monk, Roger Bacon, during the 13th Century studied work from Jewish scholars familiar with the research undertaken at the Toledo school. Pope Clement IV encouraged Bacon to write his pagan ideas in secret, but after the death of Clement IV, Roger Bacon was imprisoned by the Franciscans.

Roger Bacon developed ideas about flying machines, horseless carriages,submarines and self propelling ships from the same Islamic source that later inspired Leonardo da Vinci. Roger Bacon studied the optics of Plato and the upgrading of Plato's optics by Islamic scholars. Unlike Leonardo, Roger Bacon agreed with Al Haytham, History's Father of Optics, that the eye could not be the source of all knowledge, an erroneous idea of reality that Descartes and Sir Francis Bacon, the Renaissance author and father of inductive reasoning, used to usher in the age of industrial entropic materialism. Thomas Jefferson, inspired by Francis Bacon's vision of a great Empire for All Men based upon all knowledge from the eye, depicted the concept onto the Great Seal Of America.

Cosimo Medici, with the help of Sultan Memhed II, re-established Plato's Academy in Florence during the 15th Century. Cosimo appointed Marcilio Ficino as its manager. Ficino wrote about the Platonic love associated with the Music of the Spheres influencing the atoms of the soul. He carefully avoided serious charges of heresy by placing eminent Christian figures into his writings and paintings associated with the new Platonic Academy. Two famous paintings commissioned by the Medici that survived the Great Burning, instigated by the Christian Monk Savarola, illustrated Ficino's cunning.

In 1480 Botticelli was commissioned to paint a portrait of St Augustine in His Study, in which a book is depicted opened at a page displaying Pythagorean mathematics. Alongside the written formulae is an instrument for observing celestial movement. Augustine is gazing directly at an armillary sphere, an instrument used to calculate data relevant to Pythagoras' Music of the Spheres. The Saint's halo, accepted at that time as representing the consciousness of the soul, upon close examination, has a spherical book-stud within its orbit, depicting Ficino's atom of the soul responding to the Music of the Spheres.

At the same time that Botticelli was commissioned to paint Augustine's portrait, Ghirlandhiao was commissioned to paint a portrait of Augustine's close colleague, St Jerome in His Study. Again, with careful examination, Jerome's halo can be seen to have a spherical bookstud placed into its orbit, demonstrating that Botticelli's depiction of the atom of the soul associated with the Music of the Spheres was not coincidental. Both Botticell and Ghirlandaio were mentors to Leonardo da Vinci.

By realising that Roger Bacon's knowledge of Platonic optics was generally superior to Leonardo's, the Science-Art Research Centre of Australia, in collaboration with a cancer research team at the University of Sydney, during 1986, was able to successfully modify the optical key to Leonardo's da Vinci's Theory of Knowledge. This discovery also corrected the optics understanding of Descates, Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Russell, Emmanuel Kant, Albert Einstein and other scientists who considered Al Haitham's optics as being industrially impractical.

The Science-Art Research Centre's correction to the crucial optics key was published in a Science-Art book launched in Los Angeles in 1989 under the auspices of the Hollywood Thalian Mental Health Organisation. In 1991 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Peirre de Genes for his theories about liquid crystal optics. In the following year the vast new science and technology, predicted by the Science-Art Centre's correction of da Vinci's work, was discovered The principal discoverer, Professor Barry Ninham of the Australian National University, later to become the Italy's National Chair of Chemistry, wrote that the Centre's work encompassed a revolution of thought, as important to science and society as the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions.

Leonardo da Vinci was certainly a great genius, but he was not really the Man of the Renaissance at all, because he was unable to comprehend the life-energy basis of Plato's spiritual optical engineering principles. He had attempted to develop the relevant optics for several years then reverted back to what Plato had referred to as the engineering practices of a barbarian. On the other hand, Sir Isaac Newton, was a genuine Man of the Renaissance, as his unpublished papers, discovered last century revealed. His certain conviction that "a more profound natural philosophy existed to balance the mechanical description of the universe," was based upon the same physics principles that upheld the lost Classical Greek Era's science of life and they are now at the cutting edge of fractal logic quantum biology.

The 20th Century began with the aforesaid Lord Bertrand Russell's horrific acquiescence to enslavement by the second law of thermodynamics in 1903, followed in 1905 by Einstein's unbalanced E=Mc2. TIME Magazine's Century of Science lists Maria Montessori as the greatest scientist of 1907. Her association with President Woodrow Wilson, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Jefferson and Teildard de Chardin demonstrated how the entropy law embraces Plato's definition of evil. Montessorri called the second law of thermodynamics the energy greed law. Montessori and de Chardin's electromagnetic life-science key to open their Golden Gates of the future were derived from concepts based upon the spiritualisation of matter and humanity evolving with the cosmos. That was in direct contrast to the electromagnetic understanding of Alexander Graham Bell.

President Wilson was genuinely troubled by the loss of life during World War I. He and Alexander Bell chose Darwin's entropic life-science as the electromagnetic key to the future of America rather that Montessori's. After World War II, High Command Nazi prisoners at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal protested that Adolph Hitler had based the policies of the Third Reich upon the the Darwinian Eugenics of which Present Wilson and Alexander Bell had been involved with.

The scientist, Matti Pitkanen, can be considered to have upgraded de Chardin's ethical electromagnetic key to open Montessori's Golden Gates to the future. De Chardin insisted that the gates would only open for all people at the same time and not for any chosen race nor privileged few. Pitkanen noted that the earth's regular deflection of potentially lethal radiation from the sun fulfilled the criteria of an act of consciousness, protecting all life on earth at the same time.

The 1937 Nobel Prize Winner for Medicine, Szent-Gyoergyi, wrote a book about scientists who did not recognise that their understanding of the second law of thermodynamics was balanced by the evolution of consciousness. The title of the book was The Crazy Apes. In his 1959 Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959, the Molecular Biologist, Sir C P Snow, argued that the inadequate understanding about the nature and functioning of the second law of thermodynamics by his fellow scientists was scientifically irresponsible. He referred to their thinking as belonging to their neolithic cave dwelling ancestors. The title of Snow's lecture was The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. This book was listed by The Times Literary Supplement as one of 100 books most influencing Western public thinking since World War II and has been systematically denounced ever since.

During the past 15 years, science has developed so rapidly that it has given the Humanities no time to grasp the significance of the social ramifications of the rebirth of Fuller's Platonic spiritual, or holographic, engineering principles from ancient Greece. Organised religious opposition to criticism of the understanding of the second law of thermodynamics from Christian schools, Colleges and Universities has been extremely thorough throughout the world. For example Professor F M Cornford, educated at St Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge, was made a Fellow in 1899, becoming the Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy in 1932, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1937. His grasp of the ancient Greek fractal science of life can be shown to be completely illogical, yet it is the foundation for well organised international academic study courses at the present time.

Since 1932 Cambridge University has produced ten editions of Cornford's book Before and after Socrates. Cornford states in this book that Plato can be considered as one of the greatest fathers of the Christian religion. Encyclopaedia Britannica advises that St Augustine was the mind which mostly completely fused the Platonic tradition of Greek philosophy with the religion of the New Testament. Such pious academic reasoning flies in the face of Plato's spiritual engineering principles being observed functioning within the DNA as a function of a fractal life-science evolutionary function, and is therefore ludicrous.Plato defined that reasoning as being ignorant and barbaric and the language of engineers not fit to be considered philosophers. The Harvard Smithsonian/NASA High Energy Astrophysics Division Library has published papers by the Science Advisor to the Belgrade Institute of Physics, Professor Petar Grujic, arguing that the Classical Greek life-science was based upon fractal logic, a totally incomprehensible concept within the much lauded ancient Greek study courses currently set for post graduate studies.

Having arrived at the destination of Professor Amy Edmondson's journey from ancient Egypt to modern times, in order to be educated about the importance of Buckminster Fuller's geometrical understanding, we are able to grasp the stark reality of the title of his book Utopia or Oblivion. The objective of this essay, to construct the foundations of the Social Cradle to nurture the Florentine New Measurement of Humanity Renaissance, was derived from that book. The following explains the Science-Art Research Centre of Australia's long and arduous struggle to help contribute towards the vital human survival research now being carried out under the auspices of the New Florentine Renaissance.

In 1979 the Science Unit of Australian National Television documented the work of the Science-Art Research Centre into its eight part series The Scientists-Profiles of Discovery. During that year, at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, China's most highly awarded physicist, Kun Huang, proposed a research plan that was put into operation by the Centre. Professor Huang was angry that Einstein and the framers of the 20th Century world-view were unable to discuss the Classical Greek life sciences in infinite biological energy terms. He proposed that by observing the evolutionary patterning changes to species designed upon ancient Greek Golden Mean geometry, it should be possible to deduce the nature of the life-force governing their evolution through space-time.

Huang suggested that the world's seashell fossil record would provide the necessary patterning-change information. The research was assisted by the communities of the six towns comprising the Riverland Region of South Australia. During the 1980s the Centre's several seashell life-energy papers, written by the Centre's mathematician, Chris Illert, were published by Italy's leading scientific journal, il Nuovo Cimento. In 1990 two of the papers were selected as important discoveries of the 20th Century and were reprinted by the world's leading technological research institute, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in Washington.

By deriving an Art-master optics formula from the Italian Renaissance, which can be considered to be associated with fractal logic, a simulation of a living seashell creature was generated. By lowering the musical harmonics a simulation of the creature's fossil ancestor was obtained. By lowering the musical order by a different amount, the simulation of a strange, grotesque creature was generated. The Smithsonian Institute identified the fossil as being the famous Nipponites Mirabilis that drifted along the coast of Japan 20 million years ago. It was designed to drift along upright in water in order to ensnare its prey. Chris Illert became the first scientist to link its evolution to a living seashell.

In 1995 the discovery won an internationally peer reviewed Biology Prize from the Institute for Basic Research in America. China's most eminent physicist, Kun Huang, was greatly honoured. The work was acclaimed for the discovery of new physics laws governing optimum biological growth and development through space-time. The Research Institute's President, Professor Ruggero Santilli, in collaboration with the Centre's mathematician, made a most important observation. He observed that the accepted scientific world-view could not be used to generate such futuristic simulations. Instead it generated cancer-like biological distortions through space-time.

The Centre's Bio-Aesthetics Researcher, the late Dr George Robert Cockburn, Royal Fellow of Medicine (London), who had worked with the centre's mathematician, became concerned by the scientific community's refusal to challenge its obsolete understanding of the second law of thermodynamics. He published several books about creative consciousness based upon the ancient Greek fractal logic life-science. His correction to Emmanuel Kant's Aesthetics was later found to be validated by the 19th Century's mathematician Bernard Bolzano's Theory of Science. Bolzano's own correction to Emmanuel Kant's ethics had been assessed by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations- vol. I - Prolegomena to a pure logic 61 (Appendix) (1900), as being the work of one of the greatest logicians of all time.

We know that Bolzano corrected the ethical logic of Immanuel Kant by using aspects of fractal logic, as the famous Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem of 1817 is now synonymous with the pioneering of modern fractal logic. The Aesthetics associated with Emmanuel Kant belonging to the destructive entropic world-view are hailed as being of global importance during the 21st Century, when, in fact, they are known to be obsolete. J Alberto Coffa's book The semantic tradition from Kant to Carnap: to the Vienna station, edited by Linda Wessels - Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1991 contains the statement "Kant had not even seen these problems; Bolzano solved them. And his solutions were made possible by, and were the source of, a new approach to the content and character of a priori knowledge." The famous Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem was based upon fractal logic concepts.

In the book The Beauty of Fractals- Images of Complex Dynamical Systems is a chapter entitled Freedom, Science and Aesthetics by Professor Gert Eilenberger, who also corrected an aspect of Kantian Aesthetics in order to upgrade quantum mechanics into quantum biology. Professor Eilenberger wrote about the excitement surrounding pictures of fractal computer art, as demonstrating that "out of research an inner connection, a bridge, can be made between rational scientific insight and emotional aesthetic appeal; these two modes of cognition of the human species are now beginning to concur in their estimation of what constitutes nature".

The Science-Art Centre had discovered that by using special 3-D optical glasses, holographic images emerge from within fractal computer generated artwork. The excitement within the art-work itself extends to the realisation that, over the centuries, certain paintings reveal the same phenomenon, created unconsciously by the artist, indicating the existence of an aspect of evolving creative consciousness associated with Plato's spiritual optical engineering principles now linked to the new Fullerene life-science chemistry.

The electromagnetic evolutionary information properties generated into existence by the liquid crystal optical functioning of the fertilised ovum are transmitted to the first bone created within the human embryo. From the Humanoid fossil record, each time that bone changes its Golden Mean patterning design, a new humanoid species emerges. It is currently altering its shape under the influence of the same physics forces responsible for seashell evolution, as was discovered by the Science-Art Research Centre of Australia during the 1980s. The sphenoid bone is in vibrational contact with the seashell design of the human cochlea.The design of Nipponites Mirabilis was to keep its owner upright in water, the cochlea design is to enable humans to balance so as to keep them upright on land.

The cerebral electromagnetic functioning of creative human consciousness as a Grand Music of the Spheres Composition has been adequately charted by Texas University's Dr Richard Merrick in his book Interference. The Fullerene life-science of the three 1996 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry has found expression within the medical company, C Sixty Inc. The Science-Art Research Centre in Australia considers that Buckminster Fuller's crucial Social Cradle within the Arts, under the auspices of the Florentine New Renassaince Project might be able to bring to the public an understanding for the global betterment of the human condition.

China's most eminent physicist, Hun Huang's research program can now be upgraded to generate healthy sustainable futuristic human simulations through millions of space-time years, and from those human survival blueprints the technologies needed for overpopulated earth to ethically utilise the universal holographic environment are becoming obvious. The 20th Century adage that ethics is how one uses science is as barbaric as Plato's Spiritual engineering classified it. Ethical consciousness has quantum biological properties beyond Einstein's world-view as has been proven by medical research conducted under the auspices of the Florentine New Measurement of Humanity Renaissance.

Dr Candace Pert's Molecule of Emotion, discovered in 1972, referred to in the films What the Bleep, do we know? and Down the Rabbit Hole, has been experimentally extended into further realms of holographic life-science reality. Dr Pert's Molecule of Emotion is the same in humans as in a primitive cell, but has evolved by increasing the speed of its molecular movement. Associated with this emotional evolution is the functioning of endocrine fluids necessary to maintain cellular health. The Florentine life-energy research has established that endocrine fluids evolve within the earth's holographic electromagnetic environment, affecting health in a manner beyond the understanding of an unbalanced 20th Century world-view.

On the 24th of September 2010, on behalf of the President of the Italian Republic, Dr. Giovanna Ferri, awarded the "Giorgio Napolitano Medal" to Professor Massimo Pregnolato, who shared it with Prof. Paolo Manzelli for research conducted in Quantumbionet/Egocreanet by their Florentine New `Renaissance Project.

This essay has explained the primary obstacle that has prevented Sir Isaac Newton's 'more profound natural philosophy to balance the mechanical description of the universe' from being brought about. The knowledge of how to correct this situation has become central to the objectives of the Florentine New Measurement of Humanity Renaissance of the 21st Century. This essay is the Birth Registration Certificate of the New Renaissance.

Copyright Robert Pope 2010.

Political Activists Websites and Email Forwarding to Politicians

Have you ever been to a political action committee's website that has a particular issue they are currently working on. They do everything to get you all hot and bothered to take action and call or write your congressman or senator. Many have relays, where you can type out your response and send it in via their website and many folks take them up on it.

Such an automated system is interesting indeed. But what if a website had all views on it, that is to say Republican, Democrat and Independent? So you could pick what you wanted to send rather than them telling you what to say or do and to whom. And if such a website has all views it is of much more value in that it gives government an instant polling in real time.

Although one who studies political science and history might say that there are issues with that too, as we are a Republic and moving policy like the wind changes can be even more disruptive than either path of the hardliner left or right. Politicians need to appease the masses, but the masses are swayed too easily by media day to day and thus although you maybe thinking you are helping things you maybe causing long-term problems.

Such a website would do well as it would be a place for all voices to be heard and interesting in that it is similar to the voting ballots where opinions of each side are there. But if you have many different opinions then people can pick which one they want to send and that way the politicians and staffers do not get inundated with blockages of their email systems from the exact same letter from 400,000 people. Meaning if a citizen or business has a different issues they will not get through.

Additionally such a website with forums and blogs and such system is good as it keeps the restless rabble rousing natives busy in all their sound and fury and allows them an outlet for opinion as everyone seems to have one these days. Perhaps we need to come together and discuss all the issues online for the betterment of all mankind? Consider this in 2006.

Politics with a Difference - Science-Fictional Constitutions

It's fun to set the world to rights on paper, and SF authors are no slackers when it comes to inventing constitutions.

Some of them are recognizably "close to home" in that they merely tinker with what we already have. Neville Shute's In The Wet (1953) portrays an amendment to one-person-one-vote democracy: everyone still has the vote but the more solid citizens have more than one. I must say I'm attracted to the idea of extra votes being awarded for education, achievement, marriage, etc, with the aim of giving more power to the well-behaved elements of society! Yay! Down with the riff-raff! Sorry. Wasn't me. I never said a word...

Let us proceed to madder and more colourful ideas.

Barrington Bayley, an SF genius if ever there was one, in his Collision with Chronos (1977) describes a free-floating space colony called Retort City, shaped like an hour glass, whose constitution could not have been dreamed up by any other author. The colony's two halves are known officially as the Production Retort and the Leisure Retort. As the terms suggest, one is given to work and to the production of material goods, while the other is given to leisure and aesthetic culture. And neither half envies the other. This despite the fact that they are so segregated, that only new-born babies pass from one to the other! Generations alternate: a father living in the Leisure Retort will shunt his newborn son to the Production Retort and vice versa.

The inhabitants of the Leisure Retort were scarcely aware of the workers who served them, and the workers, in their turn, regarded the participants in the aesthetic leisure culture as idle drones who would probably have been happier doing something useful.

Envy is avoided by the Exchange of Generations.

Each babe was taken from its mother a few hours after birth and transported to the opposite retort, usually to be reared by its paternal grandmother, who previously had surrendered her own child... now the babe's father or mother.

The arrangement was made even more perfect by virtue of the fact that the double exchange could be made simultaneously, even though in real terms a time lag of decades was obviously involved. This was because of the flexible phasing of the two retorts in time. On the same day that a couple parted with their new-born child, they received that child's own offspring... their grandchild.

The protagonist does not share the general satisfaction with this regime. He had been born in the Leisure Retort but his father had hidden him, wanting to keep him, and the deception had lasted for ten years... long enough to make the eventual forced move traumatic. I won't give away any more of the plot. And Retort City is only half the scene of this incredibly rich book.

Another impressive display of political creativity is that achieved by Jack Vance in The Anome (1973). In the subcontinent of Shant on the planet Durdane, the 62 cantons each have their own laws and cultures and have little in common. They are ruled by a nameless unknown, called the Faceless Man because his identity is never revealed. The idea is that no one can suborn a person whom one does not know. Government is cheap, since all the Faceless Man has to do when someone breaks a law is press a button to detonate the offender's torc - a ring containing explosive material that is fitted around every adult citizen of Shant. The Faceless Man, with a couple of assistants, roves the country, enforcing whatever laws each canton has made for itself. Each Faceless Man chooses his own successor; absolute secrecy is preserved.

It makes for a great story though one does wonder how much it could ever work in practice. The same thought will occur to readers of Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed (1974), which is a seriously worked-out portrayal of an anarchist society. Could anarchism ever really work? With a change of mindset, maybe it just could! At least, reading the novel I almost thinks so, though with regard to the anarchist aim of utter freedom we are prompted to ask ourselves whether the change of mindset which makes the system possible may acquire an oppressive orthodoxy of its own. The verdict is unsure. The anarchists of Anarres may or may not be heading for political and social failure. We are left to wonder.

Philip K Dick's Solar Lottery (1955) envisages a world state in which the ruler is chosen by chance. It is a whackily gripping novel, and true to its own inner laws, so that its lack of exterior credibility does not matter. It turns out that the so-called chance election of the ruer has been fixed, and not by a really bad guy either; just by someone who was fed up with things as they were. In A E van Vogt's The World of Null-A (1948), a Games Machine appoints the World President and other officials, though here the results are supposed to stem from the tests of ability set by the Machine, rather than from chance. Here, too, it turns out that the process is being tampered with.

The abilities required in the rulers of the Uranian cities described in the Ooranye Project are such that no political system known to man could fit the bill. Uranian rulers - Noads, or "foci" - must have a quality known as lremd, which could be called "steering" or "juggling", the kind of awareness with which anyone who has to multi-task in our world (teachers, mothers, managers) must be familiar. But on Ooranye the need is far greater, and the multi-tasking ability is necessary in its heightened form, lremd. Government on Ooranye tends to be light and cheap, with huge trust being placed in the Noads and especially on the Noad-of-Noads, the Sunnoad. Only exceptional individuals can hope to fill these roles. If a Noad goes bad, no constitutional procedure exists for his/her removal, so something unrecorded has to happen, some violent remedial action by private citizens, with no questions asked. If a Sunnoad goes wrong, the result is more surprising to our mentality. A Sunnoad may be Corrected by someone who dares to use force. If the action is justified, the Corrector is acclaimed as such, while the Sunnoad stays Sunnoad, and the reign is, if anything, enhanced by the successful Correction. But death is the swift penalty for a would-be Corrector who fails.

Lastly may I mention what is surely one of the most loveable of political tales: Double Star by Robert Heinlein (1956), in which an actor is pressurized into impersonating a political leader during a temporary emergency, only to find that he has to take on the role permanently and for real. Interestingly, the Solar System-wide culture described in the novel is a constitutional monarchy in which the imperial throne is occupied by the House of Orange. One of Heinlein's best - absolutely unputdownable.

Why Atheists Will Never Find Proof of God And Why Information Sciences Did It

Actually, Is it possible to find the real proof of God?

Yes, if you really want to. If Truth - the truth of existence of God- is not your goal, no one can ever convince you to even consider a point of view that opposes what you believe to be correct.

I like to browse through "YouTube" looking for fresh ideas and insights. As religious and atheistic beliefs are related to my work, I sometimes enjoy watching videos of intellectual battles between atheists and believers.

I find my personal stance on these "debates" is that I am not on the side of believers, because often their position is backed up only by their belief in the sacredness of their religious scripts and authority of specific religious prophets.

But I don't support the atheists either. They platform themselves on words "science" and "objectivity," but if we look closer at how they approach the idea of God, we can see that they are quite irrational too, and not less than their opponents.

In my previous article I mentioned that the first common mistake atheists make is confusing "God" as an independent mysterious entity with religious interpretations of Him.

The second issue is that people naturally become irrational when they approach a problem without any intention to find the truth. If they have preconceived notions of their rightness, their arguments inevitably lose objectivity as in this case, when atheists do not accept even an idea of a possible proof of God.

Here is a typical example of a lame generalization used by atheists that I found in an atheistic video series:

"How can we prove or disprove God, if people say they cannot examine or test or have anything to do with God? How can we know what we are looking for?"

Let's look closer at what is actually said and how "unbiased" the real approach is of those who claim to represent scientific objectivity.

First of all, what kind of "people" say that we "cannot examine or have anything to do with God"?

Probably only those who have never had any experience of either examining God or "doing" something with God.

Who are those people?

Usually atheists.

I personally, have examined, tested and experienced God, as many others do, who come to God voluntarily and consciously at the age when we are able to make independent and responsible decisions of our own.

Yes, here we talk about personal experiences that cannot be objectively measured with scientific devices, but which nevertheless are absolutely true for a system of individual perception for an individual person. Multicultural, spiritual literature is a compilation and recording of hundreds of thousands of spiritual experiences that people have shared with the world. What is that but a huge amount of empirical data about "doing something" with God?

I agree that personal experiences are not objective "proof of God," however, to be perfectly scientifically honest; we cannot ignore these phenomena that have been experienced and recorded by hundreds of thousands of people for thousands of years. We also cannot ignore the phenomena of miracles, which are also quite well documented, especially during the 20th century.

True scientists, like Einstein, who look for Truth, never slam the door before the face of a new higher mystery that is waiting to be explored. Rather than jump to the conclusion that 'this is not possible,' they see the mystery as the peak of a new unconquerable mountain, which is hiding in the sky above the clouds just waiting for those who dare climb it.

Does it make sense to approach an inexplicable phenomenon with a ready-made attitude of rejection of the possibility to reveal the mystery of it? I don't think so as it is simply not productive.

True scientists and mountain-climbers have one thing in common: until they have courage and an open mind to believe that it's possible to get to the peak where no one has ever been before, they don't conquer the Everest or make mind-blowing scientific discoveries.

On another hand, the attitude of rejection makes sense, too: It is comfortable as it saves us from the possible embarrassment of admitting that at this moment we are incapable of explaining something.

This might be the reason why for many atheists the logic, functionality and precision of nature has never been enough proof of God as the ultimate Creator, as well as, tons of testimonies of those who have had their own personal spiritual experiences.

The third observation relates to how atheists use the word "science" when they attack religious irrationality.

Before opposing science to God, let's see what science actually is. According to Aristotle, "science refers to the body of reliable knowledge itself, of the type that can be logically and rationally explained." According to another definition, science is "any body of knowledge organized in a systematic manner."

Nobody will argue that the modern science has a very broad spectrum of "organized and logically explained knowledge," which includes: formal sciences, natural sciences, social sciences, behavioral sciences, political sciences, informational sciences, etc.

But here is the question: What kind of "science" do atheists use to justify their views?

As I noticed, the majority of atheists love to confront bible-proponents with their own "scientific trinity" of cosmology, microbiology and physics. Their argument is nearly always the same: there is no God as "science" could not discover its physical particle yet.

Come on, if all these debates are more than just entertainment, let's have a bit more common sense: How would it be possible to come to any relevant proof of God if we narrow modern science and its methodology to physical and natural sciences like physics, cosmology or microbiology, and exclude the other knowledge that equally coexists with these disciplines, for instance, formal and information sciences?

Are they less important?

Probably not, as formal sciences are rooted in Logic and provide logic as the ultimate instrument of exploring the Truth in any kind of other scientific discipline.

How rational would it be to apply methodology of physics or microbiology to cognitive or politic sciences? Sure, it's nonsense.

If there is no such thing as a particle of philosophy or linguistics, does it mean that they don't exist?

It's a well-known fact that we live in a dual world of tangible materialistic outer reality and intangible reality of thoughts, feelings, logic and information. So, let's leave the study our brain's cells, neurons and receptors to microbiology, but let's not confuse the brain with the mind as they are different things; and methods of physical sciences with all microscopes and telescopes are useless when dealing with the mysteries of the mind, and it's an easy extension to include the mysteries of the soul and God.

It's like using knives to eat soup and spoons to cut steaks.

By the 21st century science has accumulated enough instruments to successfully deal with any kind of knowledge or problem. Why not apply methods of system and information sciences to the phenomenon of God?

In the sense of understanding the essence of God and proof of God, system-informational approach is far more productive than anything else, as it offers the understanding of God as the ultimate and neutral informational system.

Any proof, including "proof of God" starts with unbiased observation and the collection of data. Then we organize this data using a system approach and mathematical logic. As any proof requires a system, we have to arrange all existing information into the totality of one hierarchical system before we can finally see what is what.

The system-informational approach leads us to an astonishing conclusion that in the world of information and systems in which we live, each system is formed by its own logic, which organizes the elements of the system in a perfect order with the purpose to serve the needs of the creator of that system.

As our Universe is a totality of magnificent hierarchy of endless systems, the God as the Creator of this divine system totality or System Matrix, must be not less than the Absolute Logic or the Absolute Law of Unity, which unites all possible elements of the universe in a perfect order.

Is it there any science-based framework other than system-informational approach that would allow us to conceptualize all existing information into one harmonious totality? No.

Is there any other neutral non-religious way to approach the ideas of God and Truth besides system and information sciences? Unlikely.

Maybe it's time for those who really care for truth to re-consider scientific approaches to the idea of God and move from the physical sciences to a system-informational methods when dealing with non-materialistic reality.

Humankind has enough knowledge and information to finally realize that the proof of God existence is possible and quite simple.

From God to Newton and The Reconcilation of Science and Theology

It is common sense that in the so-called “Dark Ages” of the medieval Europe, theology predominated in all the area from theocracy to regalia and became the absolute authority in the spiritual world of European. Science was left no space in the magnificent palace ruled by theology and was seen as heterodoxy. At that time, the conflict in relations between science and theology was serious, or more exactly, the oppression theology put on science was cruel. For instance, Italian philosopher and scientist Bruno because of his insistence on scientific truth was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in Rome in 1600. Great physicist Galileo, for believing in and publicizing Copernicus’ heliocentricism, was put into prison for life.1 Under the great pressure and in the context of Western European fanaticism, there was hardly possibility and space for science to emerge. Up to 17th and 18th centuries, science began to advance rapidly and defeat theology eventually. God became “master not at home” and Newton became “chamberlaine in the world”. Why did it happen in Europe? The key is to find out the origins for the rise of modern science. To see it, we first look into Western traditional weltanschauung.

Western traditional weltanschauung is a kind of dualism. Toward no matter what in nature, morality or religion, Western people often has a dualistic attitude. For example, the classical two-valued logic based on true or false duality founded by Aristotle continued to use today. Moreover, the dualism of mind and body, subject and object, noumenon and phenomenon, ideal and reality, collective and individual and so on, could easily be found here and there in Western history and culture. Especially in religious beliefs and metaphysics, Western people adhered to a dualistic position so obstinately that the transcendent world and the real world were departed completely and heaven and earth were separated absolutely.2 No matter in significance or value, the former is always higher than the latter. Probing into the origins of the dualistic worldview, we could retrospect to ancient Greek philosophy (especially metaphysics) and Christian theology.

Plato’s theory of Forms asserted that the realm of Forms and the realm of things are opposed.3 “The Forms are those changeless, eternal, and nonmaterial essences or patterns of which the actual visible objects we see are only poor copies.”4 Although Aristotle tried to overcome Plato’s system of the dualism of Forms and actual things, he didn’t give up the dualistic idea of reality and phenomenon5, e.g. the distinction between matter and form.

Another element of Western traditional dualistic worldview is Christian theology. It is obvious that the city of God and the city of the world as well as faith and reason are resolvedly distinct in the Bible. Christian theology assured that any values and ideals that could not be fulfilled in the world could be achieved in paradise only if you affirm the existence of God and believe in God piously. If compared to the absolute Christian beliefs, any ethical or moral value or temporal ideal shows immediately insignificance in itself. For instance, Jesus’ response to the questions about paying tax - “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”(Matthew 22: 22) typically represented the dualism of Christian theology.

The Christian theological thought above mixed with Plato’s theory of Forms and Aristotle’s metaphysics latter constructed the voluminous system of scholasticism. In more than a thousand year of the medieval ecclesiastic system, the Christian theology was the dominant ideology of Western European.

In this context, although the scientific researches were never stopping completely, the scientific seeking and the exploring of nature and even all the secular concerns confronted with such a perfect, pure and transcendental realm constructed by Christian theology were suffering despisal, neglect and oppression. Christian theology became the unique absolute standard of Western people and persecuted those disobedient. Despite that theology nearly held all the power over all the secular and holy affairs and science seldom had space to develop, the theological worldview could not be necessarily ever-victorious and ever-valid. Once coming across holistic changes or encountering the assault of heterodox thought, the faiths of Western people would be lax, which would shake and even destroy the whole Christian theological worldview.

Renaissance in the 15th and 16th century first revolted. The sense of self-awakening catalyzed by humanism and the revival of ancient Greek and Roman cultures broke down the unified complexion under the reign of theology. Man as a scientific master instead of God in the theological world became the center of social life and academic researches so that science gained a valuable chance to grow.6 Then Reformation, against the moral corruption of the Catholic Church and the sham of the dualistic opposite of soul and body, advocated “justification by faith” and religious tolerance and rejected the absolute authority of and the spiritual control by the Church.7 Therefore, science got rid of the spiritual restriction of theology. Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th century in Europe further fulfilled the ideological liberation of Western European.8 Reason replaced faith and theology receded into the background. Modern science emerged as the times require.

The intellectual revolutions above are the main causes for the rise of modern science, but in the final analysis, the origins are from the collapse of Christian theological worldview and the rise of the scientific worldview. It is obvious that the collapse of Christian theological worldview was going with a series of the intellectual revolutions-Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment. But generally speaking, it could be explained in terms of the inherent problems of Christian theological worldview within and the assault of “heterodox” thoughts from outside.

First, the system of medieval scholasticism that wholly made a stand for Christian theology, although it tried to shorten the huge gap between reason and faith, yet because of its insistence on “faith superior to reason”, finally could not keep the balance and harmony between faith and reason. On the one hand, J. D. Scotus’ theory of “double truth” accelerated the departure of faith and reason.9 On the other hand, mysticism contended a direct encounter and mystical union with God, such as J. Eckhart said “God and soul were neither unaquainted nor far away, so soul was not only consistent with God, but identical with God.”10 Mysticism distained all secular affairs, consequently, theological dualistic worldview was transformed into a transcendental monistic worldview which refused any intervention of human reason. W. Ockham’s nominalism argued against the doctrines made up by scholasticism and the arguments of God’s existence. His principle of simplicity known as “Ockham’s razor” contended that “what can be explained on fewer principles is explained needlessly by more”11, which became a “prodder putting medieval theological system into disintegration.”12 Consequently, Western European in the late Middle Ages lost their confidence in Christian theological worldview and began to resort to reason.

Secondly, Copernicus’ heliocentricism affected the worldview of the current scientists and philosophers in Renaissance and geocentricism of the theological worldview was seriously challenged. Human lost the superiority constructed by Christian theology in the cosmos and the dualistic relation between heaven and the world was loose. Scientists at that time e.g. Galileo only regarded God as prime efficient cause of the physical world and deprived God of the title of final cause. Therefore, the power and the omnipotence of God were questioned. Other scientists such as Bruno because of the influence of scientific explore, mostly adopted a pantheistic position as a substitute of the theological dualistic worldview. Meanwhile, a tendency in modern philosophy gradually emerged to cooperate with science to rationalize the world. For example, Descartes “first made use of God’s existence for the objectivity and actuality of the physical world and then locked God into coffer and explained the structure of the world in a scientific view.”13 As for the problem of the transcendental world in theology was “hanged” and became a “pseudo-problem”. The pantheistic metaphysics of Spinoza excluded the existence of the transcendental world, which also gave a deathblow to the dualistic theological worldview. On the other hand, the empiricism initiated by Locke developed to Hume became a radical positivism of skepticism, which ultimately denied spiritual substance and the existence of causal necessity and denied all the attempts of the arguments of God’s existence through human reason and empirical facts, which greatly fluctuated the basis of theology. Kant’s theory of the antinomies and critical rational theology contended that the transcendental world or noumenal world, the existence of God and the immortality of soul could not be proved, consequently, theology was excluded from human knowledge. Hegel’s rationalistic dialectic metaphysics regarded the variational process of the real world as the self-unfolding of absolute spirit and transformed the dualistic worldview into absolute idealism. The dualistic worldview was eventually discarded and Christian theological beliefs were evanesced in Hegel’s system. Thus, reason won the advantage over faith and the scientistic worldview instead of the theological dualistic worldview became the dominant ideology of Western European.

The rise of modern science could not begin until the traditional dualistic worldview was transformed, because weltanschauung is the ultimate understanding of the world or human life of people, which is able to potentially predominate the ultimate attitude toward and activities in life of thinkers, social workers and even the masses in a region. That is, only if the traditional theological worldview was replaced by a new reason-based worldview viz. the scientistic worldview, the rise of modern science could have ultimate assurance. In a word, the origins for the rise of modern science were the collapse of the theological dualistic worldview and the predominance of the scientific worldview.

The conversion from theology to science has both positive and negative impacts on Western history. After walking up on the fast lane of scientific development, the realistic life of Western European was greatly improved, the material civilization was rapidly progressed, the explore of nature and geography was continuously advanced and technology was dramatically reformed. Thence, Western countries made a continuous progress whereas Eastern countries fell far behind. The influence of the conversion from theology to science is unmeasurable, just as historian H. Butterfield pointed out on this problem: “The impact on the world culture of the rise of modern science in the 17th century could only be mentioned in the same breath with the rise of Christianity in the first century.”14 However, it does not mean that this conversion doesn’t have any negative impact on Western European. “Weltanschauung can be thought as a sort of comprehensive experience that most potentially affects the cultural atmosphere e.g. academic ideas, life styles, living attitudes and so on of any country and sociaty.”15 Accordingly, when the weltanschauung of the people in a region undergoes a right-about or fundamental conversion, the academic culture and life attitudes and behaviors will have holistic changes.

Because the traditional dualistic worldview was the dominant ideology from the Aristotle to the late Middle Ages, in which Western European soaked themselves and took it for granted all the time, the spiritual crisis of Western European was coming on the just day the theological worldview collapsed. In the context that the theological worldview nodded to its fall and nihilism was widespread around, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche etc. in 19th century inaugurated the philosophical ideas of existentialism in coincidence to save the spiritual crisis and get back the lost psychic home of Western European.

Danish philosopher Kierkegaard’s existentialistic thought was a critical reaction to Hegel’s rationalism, which rejected Hegel’s neglect of theology and the problem of faith and contended that theological knowledge and Christian beliefs are subjective truth that can not be evanesced in universal objective knowledge. He thought that rationalist Hegel and the like holded the position of the supremacy of reason and reduced the transcendental world into abstract idea, which obliterated the paradoxicality (truth as subjectivity) of theology and the non-rationality (not congruent with reason but with feelings and faith) of the dualistic worldview. Russian novelist Dostoevsky discovered the problem of fate of existence after the collapse of the theological worldview. In his novels from Crime and Punishment to The Brothers Karamazov, he discussed how to seek the spiritual way out after the comedown of faith in God. He implied that except Christian theology and beliefs, Western people could not find a savior for their spiritual crisis. Another initiator of existentialism and also a representative figure of philosophy of Will Nietzsche, though likewise criticizing rationalism, pushed the theological dualistic worldview into collapse at the same time. From the assumption of “God is dead” (Nietzsche really believed that Western European had lost the theological worldview.), he claimed that all traditional morality, philosophies and theologies must be revalued with the collapse of the dualistic worldview. New values and ideals should be established by the Superperson who can harmonize the animal nature with the intellect and keep a balance between Dionysian and Apollonian elements. His theory of the Will to Power is the foundation of his philosophy of the Superperson.16

From the argument above, it is obvious that the conversion from theology to science, though brought high material civilization to the Western world, yet also produced deep spiritual crisis for Western people. The scientistic worldview in the extreme would regard reason as the unique standard to evaluate all values and exclude any other “unscientistic” worldviews, which would further reject the value and meaning of faith and affection and completely alienate people from the consciousness of existence. Furthermore, the development of scientific theories would have stimulated the improvement of productive technologies, which would increasingly enhance the danger of the scientific technicalization. And the maximum danger of the scientific technicalization is to eliminate reason of value by value of instrument and let people to forget the problem of existence of themselves and become the average “massman” or the “common herd” degenerated from the true and individual existence in the mathematically mechanical process. In the context of religious externalization and secularization, the true Christian beliefs disappeared while the theological dualistic worldview lost its original meaning.

It is undoubted that there exist some incompatibilities between theology and science. Science (in narrow sense natural science) is the knowledge of the physical world, which mainly explains phenomena and laws of things; while theology is the knowledge of the immaterial world, which chiefly resolves the problem of faith and the transcendental world (God and heaven). Since the late Middle Ages especially modern times, “the contradiction and conflicts in relations between science and theology have been so serious that people always oppose them with each other that apparently cannot coexist.”17 We do not deny the cruel oppression on science exerted by theology in the Middle Ages and the tremendous impact on theology made by science in modern times, however, science and theology are not always “oil and vinegar” and not capable of being conciliated. In fact, a number of eminent scientists- Isaac Newton, M. Faraday, C. Maxwell, Albert Einstein and many academicians of the Royal Society etc. all have deep faith in Christian belief or interest in theology. Some scientists even consider that science and theology are coherent and they fulfill the same mission through distinct approaches.18 In recent years, the dialogue between science and theology have been paid increasing attention to both by scientists and theologians or philosophers of religion and various theories of the relations between science and theology or religion have been presented successively. Wang Pisheng of Hong Kong Baptist University claims that the dialogue between science and theology in recent years is not a new and rare phenomenon but a long and continuous tradition.19 He also indicated that many top scientists today are aware of the importance to learn from philosophy and theology, not only to have a deeper insight into the significance of the scientific work, but also to seek a breakthrough in their scientific research. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that science and theology have a basis of coexistence and harmonization. If the two both understand their limits and the conjunct significance to human existence, a phase of science and theology in harmony is hopefully to come.

After experiencing the tragedies of the two World Wars and the spread of nihilism and hedonism after the Wars, people in the New Century can still not enjoy the peaceful life from the flying development of science. The threats of the weapons of massive destruction and nuclear warfare and the crime of terrorists who killed the innocent through modern scientific technology, all of these have strengthened the uneasiness, insecurity and anxiety of people directly or indirectly. And that the tsunami aroused by the earthquake on the Indian Ocean devitalized thousands of lives at the end of last year and a trail of disasters-Pakistani earthquake, hurricanes in North America, hog cholera and birds’ flu and so on latter, have made it clear that science is not omnipotent confronted with those fearful disasters; while the global humanitarian succors unprecedented since the beginning of this year have just indicated that faith and affection are the spiritual springs of human peace and solidarity. It gives us a profound revelation: the tensions and conflicts between science and theology are not beneficial to human peace and development while the mutual-complement and reconciliation between them are probably the best salvation to help people above water. Just as Paul Tillich says in his Culture of Theology, “They should not be separated from each other; they should be aware that their isolated existence is dangerous.”20

A. N. Whitehead thinks that religious symbols endow human with the meaning of life; scientific modes endue people with the capability to reform nature. The influences of religion and science are so tremendous that the orientation of human history in the future is decided by how modern people look on the relations between science and religion. It shows clearly that theology and science are both the spiritual pillars indispensable of human development. We need ‘God’, as well as ‘Newton’. Both of them are rooted in the basis of human inner world and point to the ultimate concern for human beings. Been aware of this, conflicts between science and theology would be overcome and science and theology both would rediscover their true existence in the mental life of human and endow man with ultimate meaning, creative wisdom and courage to love.

Note:

1 F. Engels in Dialectic of Nature(zi ran bian zheng fa): “Natural science sent its martyrs to the stake and the prison of Inquisition.” Exactly speaking, it is Christian church that sent scientific martyrs to the stake and jail.

2 Fu Weixun, From Western Philosophy to Zen Buddhism, 1989, p158.

3 As Bertrand Russell says in A History of Western Philosophy: “Plato’s philosophy is based on the distinction between reality and phenomenon.”

4 Sammuel Enoch Stumpf & James Fieser, Socrates to Sartre and Beyond A History of Philosophy, Seventh Edition, 2003, p55.

5 Aristotle believed that God as pure idea, happiness and complete self-actualization is eternal and doesn’t have any purpose that is not fulfilled; contrarily, the sensible world is unperfect, has life and desire, and belongs to the impure idea. The idea as well represents his dualistic outlook.

6 It is asserted in A History of Europe written by 11 European historians that God and heaven were seen as the center of thought in the Middle Ages, but Renaissance drew the attention of people to man and the real world. This conversion had an impact on science. Since then, theology lost its superiority and the interest in human and nature prevailed.

7 Luther says: “Each Christian can interpret the Bible in his own way”, which is against ecclesiastical authority, because only the Church has the power to interpret the Bible and its interpretation is the unique right one.

8 It is claimed in A History of Europe that nature according to its own law of development will result in a perfect world, so the religious and political interventions of human should be minimum…reason requests man to develop in nature, which shows the importance of reason in the research of nature.

9 Wollf comments on Scotus’ theory of “double truth” that it undoubtedly promoted the worldly research enterprise.

10 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, 1988.

11 Samuel Enoch Stumpf & James Fieser, Socrates to Sartre and Beyond A History of Philosophy, 7th Edit., 1966, 2003, p. 185.

12 Fu Weixun, From Western Philsophy to Zen Buddhism, 1989, p.161.

13 idem, p. 162.

14 Wang Pisheng, “Science seeks God: the new phenomena of the dialogue between science and theology”, Report of the Research Center of Chinese Christian Religions, Second Issue, 2002.

15 Said by Fu Weixun.

16 Nietzsche writes, “I regard Christianity as the most fatal and seductive lie that has ever yet existed – as the greatest and most impious lie”, which is a fatal blame on the slavish morality of Christianity.

17 Dong Xiaochuan, “Science and theology: the two pillars of Modern American Civilization”, [http://xueshu.newyouth.beida-online.com/data/data.ph3]

18 idem.

19 Wang Pisheng, “Science seeks God: the new phenomena of the dialogue between science and theology”.

20 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture.