I'm reading Marilynne Robinson's collection of essays, Absence of Mind. It is taking me some time to finish them, because she is saying so much. In these four essays, she concentrates on the presumptions made, through the filter of science, that diminish us by too often truncating, or dismissing altogether, individual experience and consciousness in favor of the systemic, quantifiable models that science offers. These models are given added weight as threshold events; as such, all prior thinking is re-calibrated, or jettisoned, in favor of the new idea. She makes a persuasive argument that we are impoverished by this type of thinking.
Robinson understands just what's at stake in this divide between the language of science and the language of religion, and how that's played out in our lives. Science claims the ground of the rational, and the logic that naturally flows from the rational. There's a certain blindness to the claim.
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Some quotes:
Each of us lives intensely within herself or himself, continuously assimilating past and present experience to a narrative and vision that are unique in every case yet profoundly communicable, whence the arts. And we all live in a great reef of collective experience, past and present, that we receive and preserve and modify.
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It is a strategy of parascientific argument to strip away culture-making, as if it were a ruse and a concealment within which lurked the imagined primitive who is for them our true nature.
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Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (The Terry Lectures Series) by Marilynne Robinson