THE RANDLE REPORT

THE LEGACY OF SCIENCE

Painting by Sue Randle

Life managed to organise and operate the brains and bodies, the chemicals and the minerals of the Earth for millennia before Galen or William Harvey ‘discovered’ the circulation of the blood.

Dragonflies and pterosaurs could manage the business of flying and landing, navigation and aerodynamics way before the advent of aeronautical science.

Science has done wonders in distilling, explaining and counterfeiting these skills and feats. It can make robots and CGI images that seem to be alive, but it would be a manifest delusion to say that it has actually ‘brought them to life’.

Life, by definition, is the thing that is missing from mechanistic science. Did the full members of that Science  fail to notice it, like the elephant in the room, or did they – do they still – have a positive agenda to deny or disregard it?

The genesis of modern science is a catalogue of tragedy. Ballistics, explosives, weapons of mass destruction, poisons, electro-shock, drugs, torture, fungicide, pesticide and ethnic cleansing – the means, if not the will, for these assaults on the sanctity of life have long been the driving force of Science. They remain so to this day. Bringing death continues to be the most successful achievement of chemistry and physics – not surprisingly, as they have long since fallen into the habit of prostituting themselves to corrupt and bellicose governments in return for funds for their ‘enhancement’.

Fundamentalist mechanistic scientists aren’t really anti-creation, or even anti-god. They just want creation to be mindless and god to be a particle.

Dawkins’s little genes have to be conscious and self-willed in order to be selfish. They also need to cooperate, which is not a signal attribute of selfishness. What’s worse is that they need to know the plan, or they won’t know where to start or when they’ve finished.

Randomness and selfishness, if either could exist without discernment and purpose, would not achieve the replication life has been performing six nights a week and twice on Sundays since the dawn of time, without understanding what it was replicating and when it had done it.

No matter how powerful or mouthy its high priests, mechanistic science is not the things it studies to classify and comprehend. It is, at best, a view of those things – a more or less useful approximation.

It is not pure in its endeavours, not so much because it doesn’t find the elephant in the room, but that it has a policy of denying it.

Remembering that we are defining Science here as an entity, a mass of which many of those who would rightly call themselves scientists would not be representative; this is the Science that has its only real existence in the minds of millions of believers, and, for that reason alone has powers of enchantment and influence far beyond its material form. (Funny, that.)

What we’re looking at then is the amorphous, encyclopædic, all-knowing myth of joined-up Science with a capital ‘S’ – the one that gets on the telly, rather than the plodding, tedious and repetitive observation of things that brings about any actual addition to the store of scientific data.

The big Science that everyone believes in is, by all definitions, another religion. It has its creed, its clergy, its churches, its rallying cries, its believing congregations, its creation myths and even, moving in a highly mysterious way somewhere in the bowels of the Hadron Collider, its particular and particulate god.

For millennium upon millennium, life has worked to make this planet a fit place to live on. In its various forms it has broken down minerals, combined chemicals, fed rivers and seas and assisted its fellows to live and breed. Its ministrations have helped to change atmosphere, land, sea and climate – not ‘man made’ but ‘life made’. If you look around you, almost anywhere on Earth, you will see little that hasn’t been modified by life.

Big Science would have us accept that, not only did the elements combine purposelessly and accidentally, but some such random scattering of matter engendered sentient creatures, which went spontaneously from being clods of earth or lumps of rock to self-replicating, self-willed – maybe even self-ish animated forms.

No religion has a more bonkers and far-fetched creation myth than this, and yet it is an essential ingredient of mechanism, swallowed wholesale by many who think they are too savvy to believe in God the Builder – that nice Mr Attenborough and a whole boiling of celebrity ranters among them.

Gautama, Wesley and Loyola had to schlep from town to town and find their own food and lodgings. The peddlers of this latter-day nonsense – Cox, Roberts, Bonnin et al. – are saved the expense and travel by the gift of television and a generous stipend from the BBC, the collection plate having ‘evolved’ into a tooth-and-claw enforced licence fee.

In truth, almost everything we value, every freedom we enjoy, everything put in place for our benefit or protection, both spiritually and corporeally, came from believers in God and the sanctity of life. By the mid-to-late twentieth century, we in the West enjoyed a comfort and freedom never before experienced by such a cross-section of people, and many movements for good that we still rely on were formed, if not by believers in God the Builder, by those suffused with the Christian ethic and a clear sense that all must thrive for one to be guilt and pain free.

Centuries worth of legal freedoms, hard won from musty and selfish states, reached their peak in the fin de siècle before the ersatz Darwinian faith, with its bigger media guns began to usurp the place of its senior rivals.

Respect, trust and fellow-feeling are immaterial to a mechanistic faith and, since it gained ascendancy, those beacons of civilisation have been snuffed out and stifled at an alarming pace.

Almost all of America’s cherished amendments have been overridden in a few short years and, while giving  lip-service to democracy, western governments have sold their souls to global corporations for part of some pseudo-Darwinian vision of world domination. (Where are Mrs Peel, the man from UNCLE and Maxwell Smart when we really need them?)

The crimes and subterfuges undertaken in this doomed and cynical cause have led to widespread political paranoia, with the result that the NSA and GCHQ have to keep a lunatic vigil for any sign that honest citizens might be about to find them out.

Eugenics and fascism once more burst from their fetid drains and life is set against life in a sad remake of old tribes in conflict. New tribes are born, or come to prominence to propitiate and appease the great machine. Agnostics and atheists, unbelievers in a personified god, become militant fundamentalist don’t-knows, screaming denial of their own essence from the rooftops and shouting down the blasphemers who claim there is more to life than unthinking mechanisms.

Art teachers tell students there are no new ideas; science teachers that there are no ideas at all. Pseudo-Darwinism is preached in the Machine’s faith schools as the Only True Religion, self-gratification as the Only True God.

What was natural has been poisoned and perverted by Darwinian exploitation and scientific genius. Vital bees killed with insecticide, wild flowers shrivelled, whole swathes of the Earth scorched in commercially-driven wars, food and drink rendered indigestible, poisonous fluoride added to drinking water, toxic sweeteners to children’s plastic laden drinks, farm animals tortured and degraded, deprived of light and life, oceans contaminated and denuded of fish and, as a supreme achievement of the great new godless world, women and children destroyed wholesale by the drones, bombs and chemicals of the unhinged and the cowardly.

If global warming, or ‘climate change’ is Man-made, what manner of Man is making it? The fully formed spiritually mature Man, who understands life, who is conscious of his responsibility to himself and others, as well as to the legacy of future generations?

Or is it the Man who denies life, consciousness, the human spirit, creativity, diversity, the lessons of the past and the hope of the future?

Which kind of Man has raped, stolen, burned, murdered, adulterated, subdued and poisoned this Earth that was once so fair?

The one with the belief and the ethics, or the one with the licence to frack?

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depostory