For all of those Enlightenment thinkers who owed so much to the foundation Descartes laid down for them in the new science – the new science that reduced man to mere matter  — political order or the ontological ranking of things in the world could no longer be natural to man.

According to science, everything in the world begins with the same matter. Whether you call it the Big Bang, the Little Bang, or what have you. This is no surprise. Since Descartes and the mathematization of science, things in the world have been reduced to Symbol, but this symbol is not what we normally think of as symbol. The symbol Descartes constructed represents no real thing in the world. Ultimately, it represents only indistinguishable matter, meaning it treats all matter as identical except that it sustains different quantities.

Of course everyone knows this intuitively after a year or two of elementary algebra. A mathematical formula can never qualify anything; it can only place two or more quantities of absolutely identical matter in proportion one to the other. That is why mathematical physics can only speak to things in the world as if they were “equal” in quality because they cannot be different in that way. It is what one might call “Indiscriminancy.”

So what is the difference between a rock, or let’s say the first matter scientists care to identify in their infinite regress to the source-less source, and man?

The only possible answer a scientist could give as a scientist would be absolutely nothing; there is absolutely no difference beyond the different quantities of matter involved and the consequent complexities of the structure of the matter which is nothing more than the way those quantities are connected one to the other. Thus, the scientist could never venture to say that man — speaking man, thinking man, conscious man — was somehow qualitatively higher or better than a rock. Science simply doesn’t allow for that.

Now, don’t get us wrong. The social sciences, like anthropology and sociology, will jump into this argument sounding very scientific and attempt to suggest that there is indeed some ranking of these things beyond mere quantity. But precisely because of the Science = Certainty/Democracy = Uncertainty Reciprocal I have written of extensively at the SANE Works for US web journal, these social scientists will be the first to concede upon interrogation that these rankings are “tentative.” They are social constructs. Meaning, they are mere “belief” or “suggested rankings.” They are therefore subject to pedestrian votes of the scientific community.

In other words, our scientists will admit (if they are not too embarrassed) that science itself recognizes no such facts as qualitative differences. Even though mankind, certainly prior to the Enlightenment, existed in society and in political order precisely because he ranked things as more virtuous, holier, beloved, faithful, all of these man-made categories are per our modern science NOT REAL! They are fictions devised by man’s wholly quantifiable material brain matter as it has evolved in response to wholly quantifiable environmental influences over the eons (even if too numerous to count or identify).

Thus, psychologists used to maintain that homosexuality was deviance. Now after voting on their uncertain social construct, they have determined it to be perfectly natural, albeit occurring statistically less frequently than say heterosexuality. “Who knows?” They ask. “When man can clone with ease, maybe the homosexual relationship will become the evolutionary favorite and the statistically significant relationship.” Or, one might add, man might evolve to require no relationships at all but exist as separate particles of matter like sand.

Similarly, anthropologists and even biologists used to tell us that there were obvious and clear distinctions between the races. Now, after voting on their previously held social construct, they have determined that no such biological or real distinction exists. It is all a grotesque fiction used by one collection of men to discriminate against another. A figment or uncertain opinion created by our collective imaginations arising from the confluence of evolutionary forces.

So when science cannot quantify something, how is the uncertainty resolved? The sociologists and the anthropologists have answered that, have they not? We vote on it. In a word, democracy. Scientists vote on whether Pluto with size X should be called a planet; we vote on every other uncertainty.

Thus we vote on whether homosexuals should be allowed to marry and have the imprimatur of the nation’s civil and legal blessings. And we vote on whether life exists inside a woman’s womb because she has raised a claimed “right” to destroy it at will. And this makes perfectly good sense now because we see that science cannot answer the question when life begins. That is, science cannot tell the difference between animate objects, except of course by counting things and seeing how they are laid down one next to another.

Indeed, science can’t even tell the difference qualitatively between animate and inanimate things. A dead thing to a scientist is distinguished from a living thing because the living thing continues to reproduce all or some part of its cell structure. Quantities. Or, it no longer produces brain waves or heart beats. Again, mere quantities. But having distinguished between living things and dead things, the scientist qua scientist has no clue if living is better than dying. Is a cancer cell a better organism than a human brain cell? The scientist will tell you that the certainty of science suggests there is absolutely no distinction.

It is only man qua man who makes distinctions of this type. Only man as a conscious being experiencing a world which includes the Divine ground of Being can discriminate between such things and rank them as higher and lower qualitatively along some ontological or moral axis.

But science tells us that it is precisely this Being, this existing in a participatory relationship with the Divine — what amounts to political order in the world (i.e., discriminating between Us and Other; virtuous and corrupt; sacred and secular) — which is wholly uncertain and merely opinion or a social construct. To science, these qualitative distinctions between life and death, good and bad, are mere fables; fictions.

While many scientists will concede that these social constructs are crucial for man to live together in some kind of harmony or peaceful coexistence, they remain artificial and uncertain.

Anyone who has studied political philosophy will immediately recognize the Hobbesian state of nature and even the Lockean social contract theory in this new environment where man no longer exists within the certainty of his being, represented by the Terms of Existence – Self, Society, G-d, and World. For all of those Enlightenment thinkers who owed so much to the foundation Descartes laid down for them in the new science – the new science that reduced man to mere matter  — political order or the ontological ranking of things in the world could no longer be natural to man. Man as mere matter could only exist in political societies, in nations, in a state of uncertainty.

Political order or man’s quite human and necessary ordered or qualitative ranking of things in the world, man’s Truth of Existence, was now uncertain and artificial. Science and its mathematical physics had successfully placed man in a world where the only truth or certainty was that which could be reduced to mathematical formulation. Everything else of human existence – everything else that could not be so reduced to quantifiable matter – was to exist only in a tentative state of radical uncertainty.

Does this not floor you? Do you not see the implications of this? If you don’t, look around you. Look carefully. Tell us what you see.

A cartoonist has captured the next step in the degradation of what it means to be human. He has simply applied the slippery slope argument to the current assault on homosexual marriages. What would have surprised us is if he had indicated that this degradation was the quite natural outcome of a perfectly legal and rational democratic vote to sanction human-canine relationships on par with human marriage.
As a slippery slope, the argument might be funny if not a bit silly. As it turns out — now that we understand that for science to work, for it to hold any certainty, we are confronted with the choice of tyranny simply or democracy as the arbiter of the radical uncertainty of human existence not subject to quantification — it is not so funny after all.