Back to index

11:2

(In »Syntheism as a radicalisation of atheism – and its dialectical dissolution«)

This historical kinship with the Renaissance and Romanticism should not however be misconstrued as syntheism preferring opacity and musings over logic and precision – quite the opposite. To begin with, syntheism is of course a scientistic pragmatism. It even regards the scientific exercise per se as a holy act (one of the Syntheist Movement’s first known manoeuvres was to declare the research facility CERN in Switzerland sacred ground). Or to express the matter syntheologically: To do science is to play hide-and-seek with God. However, all verbal and literary statements and standpoints throughout history must be treated sceptically based on a fallibilism where every statement, no matter how convincingly it is considered to be proven at any particular point in time, remains always open for revision in the future. This is also the essence of science and the only attitude that is productive: a constant re-evaluation and modification of accepted explanatory models. What was true yesterday may be an obvious delusion today, which becomes clear when new facts are on the table. Fallibilism is the pragmatist conviction that even innumerable verifications of a certain standpoint are no guarantee that a future falsification is impossible. As a consequence of this, it is not a given that previously accepted knowledge takes precedence over culture when the two seem to collide. One must namely keep in mind that culture lies deeper in Man than knowledge. We express this by saying that culture embraces knowledge, while knowledge is completely dependent on culture.