Science makes the world emptier in so many ways. This is a fairly obvious point by now. And as science has triumphed over all other things in the modern world, over the last century or so, the world has become emptier and more hopeless than ever.
One of the strangest things about science is how it prizes rationality, but is in fact very irrational in key ways. One of the things that modern science, and its evangelists like Richard Dawkins, prides itself on, is that it explained away the gods from nature—for most of recorded history, natural phenomena were explained in terms of divine influence. But modern science created a way to clear the gods out of nature—and this was viewed as some kind of great improvement.
The theosophical1 writer Helena Blavatsky, in her essay “Plato and Platonism,” connects Plato to the more mystical thinking of Pythagoras, and to hermetic philosophy in general. She points out that this tradition—deeply in the origins of science and math—had a more mystical view of nature than modern science does. But this does not necessarily mean it was more primitive and irrational. She says that, to follow the ancient mystical-scientific thinkers, and to be theosophical: “…we must consider the celestial bodies as the images of gods; as partaking of the divine powers in their substance; and though they are not immortal in their soul-entity, their agency in the economy of the universe is entitled to divine honors, such as we pay to minor gods.” What she is saying is that the ancient mystical thinkers who established science/math, like Pythagoras, believed that celestial objects—especially the planets—had a kind of intermediate divine status that was greater than mere natural objects in our own world, but lower than the status of full gods. She continues: “The idea is plain, and one must be malevolent indeed to misrepresent it. If the author of Epinomis places these fiery gods [celestial objects] higher than the animals, plants, and even mankind, all of which, as earthly creatures, are assigned by him a lower place, who can prove him wholly wrong?”
She goes on to say that this perspective “is more rational than our modern scientists, who make between the two extremes [non-divine animal life and fully divine gods] one vast hiatus of being, the playground of blind forces.” She is saying that the modern scientific perspective has all natural phenomena—animals on our planet and everything in outer space and everything in between—as being on one level, lacking all divinity, being wholly, solely matter; and that if there is any space left for divinity or God at all, it is totally separate, as one other extreme as far as possible from natural and material life. This opens up between materiality and divinity “a vast hiatus of being, the playground of blind forces” as she puts it, in a wonderful phrase. This is supposed to be more rational, a massive empty space—where most of existence actually takes place!—between divinity and materiality, that is blind and unknowable.
Theosophy, hermeticism, the ancient mixed root of science and philosophy, is thus more rational than modern science, because it fills the space between divinity and materiality with something, rather than keeping it empty. Rationality should not make the world emptier, colder, and blinder—it should fill the world with meaning. Modern science so often fails at this.
Theosophy is basically a perspective that acknowledges that science, philosophy, and religion should work together instead of being distinct.
yawn, no it's your regarded Neo-Marxism that makes everything empty, ugly, and dark