An Insolent Technician and an Omniscient Blogger Walk into a Post

Just a short one, because 1) I slept late, and 2) I have other things to avoid.

The Bob has spoken: let us call them the Four Ontological Quadrants: horizontally we are always (obviously) situated between past and future, which might as well be infinite, at least from our perspective. 

Vertically speaking we are always situated in the tension between the transcendent beyond and something analogous at the other end, what Voegelin calls the apeirion, this latter also being unlimited, indefinite, and unbounded. Since neither end can be defined, they are more directions or poles than anything we could positively define. 

[For the record, Bob calls these latter poles O and (  ), respectively.]

Oh, BTW, Bob, is this just a dry academic exercise you're engaging in, or is this something you also believe? Are these just Veogelin's ideas recycled through your head, or are you spending so much time on this subject because this is the way things are, period?

To be clear, I only write from the standpoint of Total Cosmic Omniscience. As does any other philosopher, it's just that I am honest about my megalomania. 

If you think about it, any claim about reality, no matter how seemingly trivial, is an extravagant one once you trace out all its a priori assumptions and entailments. It's just that most philosophers never do this, so the claim has a false appearance of modesty.

Example. 

This one is just random but more than adequate to make the point. It's from a talk by Nobel physicist John Clauser on The Crisis of Pseudoscience. Although I agree with most of what he says, he easily descends into what we would call the far more consequential crisis of scientism  (https://brownstone.org/articles/the-crisis-of-pseudoscience-by-john-f-clauser/).

Come to think of it, just why is there a crisis of science? For example, what motivates a man to falsify his results just to gain fame, influence, and tenure? 

The question answers itself. I, on the other hand, would never knowingly mislead my readers, because I must answer to a higher authority, and Petey is trouble enough when he's in a good mood.

To be honest, I didn't even read the whole essay, rather, just rolled my eyes at certain passages and moved along. It's the darn naivete couched in a detached sophistication that does that:

A long time ago, actually my whole life, I have been an experimental physicist. [I've] had the distinct privilege of literally being able to talk to God even though I’m an atheist. In a physics laboratory, I am able to ask carefully posed mathematically-based questions and correspondingly observe universal truth. 

I realize that's a little in-joke between materialistic physicists, but what is universal truth? By virtue of what principle does it exist and permeate our cosmos, and by virtue of what principle is a randomly evolved and contingent animal able to know non-contingent truth?

We'll wait.

Forever.

I didn’t know ahead of time what answer I would get. I just knew I could get an answer. Nonetheless, I found real truth.

You don't say.  

I assert that real truth can only be found by observing natural phenomena. By carefully observing natural phenomena. 

Including that truth?

Who's fooling whom?

Few ideas do not turn pale before a fixed glare.

And

Nothing makes clearer the limits of science than the scientist's opinion about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession.  

Insolence!

The technician speaks to the layman like an insolent sorcer.  

I won't bother reading any further, because that is more than sufficient to make my point about other thinkers and their outrageously extravagant but utterly undefended claims. For truly truly, it is like pronouncing There is no God and I am His prophet. 

Now back to Voegelin, who has no more use for scientism than for any other ideology that collapses the Tension of the Between:

The Beyond and the Beginning, articulating the directions in which divine reality is experienced, have remained the unsurpassably exact expression of the issue to this day. 

And to this day, 49 years later, and to every subsequent day, since the time series is infinite, or certainly indefinite. It may end tomorrow, but the Absolute will always leave a shadow or contrail analogous to time, AKA the moving image of eternity. 

Note the immodest claim: the unsurpassably exact expression. Which calls to mind a perfect aphorism for the occasion:

Properly speaking, the social sciences are not inexact sciences, but sciences of the inexact.

Absurd you say?

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence.

So, checkmate.