Author: Mark Tiedemann

Recently I engaged in yet another cycle of debate with someone who insists that science is a religion.

This is a tiresome argument on one level because it is one with all sorts of things that fall under the category of “I know it when I see it.”  But on another level, it’s a rather interesting question.  Not that science itself, as practiced by people who understand it or appreciated by those who don’t practice it but at least have a grasp of its nature, is a religion, but certainly people make religions out of all sorts of things.  So the question arises, what are the necessary and sufficient constituent elements of religion? …

A note I jotted to myself sometime in the past.  I don’t recall the circumstances, but the question posed feels universal.

The spiritualists cringe and argue against any description of self-conscious life as mechanism, that any mere machine is necessarily only an accumulation of parts and processes that can never rise above its own origins.  They offer in its place a description that makes of us a vessel to contain an essential self that is gifted from without, a near complete something that a priori transcends the mechanistic.  From where?  Choose your own myth of origin.  But they all presume a Maker.