I admire the Catholic Creed — a short text that succinctly summarizes the whole structure of revealed truth. We recite it on Sundays during Mass in the form of a prayer, but it can also serve practical purposes, when we explain what our faith is about and want to be sure we don’t omit anything.
In this article I want to try an experiment. I’d like to diagnose where we are as a society in an equally succinct way. Having our current diagnosis expressed like this may help us think about the right next steps to effectively address it:
Science is almost magical in what it has brought mankind over the last few centuries. But it always observes phenomena from the outside, never from the first-person view that forms our lived experience. That lived experience is primary, and it is described by the revealed truths of the Catholic Creed, which tell us what it means to be human. Science, by contrast, tells us how things work; it builds mental models of how to reach this or that state of things.
Science hasn’t discovered any structures beyond space-time. In software terms, we’d say it hasn’t found any global internal state akin to memory in software. When you play a computer game from the first-person view, you can’t find the software’s memory within that virtual world; it lies outside of it. Similarly, science doesn’t see anything outside space-time, so we conclude there is nothing more to this world than space-time — which implies everything is contingent on matter. Yes, there is particle entanglement, which could point to the existence of something ‘non-local,’ but we don’t pursue that path of exploration.
If everything is contingent on matter, then our primary experience must be contingent on matter too. That makes our primary experience a secondary product of matter. In any virtual world one could code into existence, the previous sentence would sound like pure nonsense. But when it comes to our lived reality, we don’t care. Somehow we consider the world as described by science more real than our lived, first-hand, primary experience. Most people don’t even doubt this — that is how much we trust that the current scientific view is accurate and fundamentally complete. The reason is that, scientifically, we haven’t yet found anything to the contrary — or almost anything. It’s remarkable to think we have already discovered everything, but we do.
And indeed, if there is nothing beyond space-time, there is also no room for God, whom Catholic doctrine places beyond space-time. This is how we cancel the revealed truth summarized by the Creed — which means we have to define for ourselves what it means to be human. And that means, in turn, we have no identity until we create one for ourselves.
From here stems the current crisis over what it means to be a man, a woman, a priest (as I explored here). It also implies that we are nothing special — merely one species among many — that we are free to remake ourselves into anything at all, a machine included, and that, should we wish, we might even strive to cure death.
And insofar as we are able, we can go further still — correcting the very view we hold of ourselves, replacing the first-person illusion with reality as it appears from the outside. This is how we become properly objectified. Every bad feeling is now merely a bad hormone level in the brain; every good one, a response properly induced by the right external stimulus. Women become the caretakers of their bodies, reading magazines to learn how to service them correctly and attract men, who supply resources in a mutually beneficial lifespan of pleasure. People are paired (configured) for life by a set of standard numerical measures: the circumferences of selected body parts, a weight, a walking speed and range, in some cases even a rated load-bearing capacity. We synchronize and compare these metrics by uploading the relevant audiovisual documentation of ourselves to social networks, so that the final configuration of society is efficiently and continuously optimized.
To get better results we study psychology, watch motivational speeches, read self-help books — but above all we exercise relentlessly, keeping our weight and circumferences in line so as to stay competitive, much as animals compete in the Darwinian account of evolution.
This is how we cure our “suicidal empathy,” to borrow Elon Musk’s term — “a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
Oh, what a paradise we live in, now that the revealed truth of the Creed no longer matters and God is not missed.