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| Author | Topic: Gods and Ivory Horses |
| mark black |
posted 8/14/08 3:40 PM
Gods and Ivory Horses.About 35,000 years ago, an idea occured to a man, but not any ordinary idea like: 'I eat, I f**k, I hit with stick' - this was one of those ideas that allows things to be seen in a new light. It was in short, conscious recognition of the artifact-artificer relationship.Allow me to explain. Cambridge Professor and Theologian William Paley included the 'Proof of God by Design' in his book 'Natural Theology' (1803). His argument tells of a man, walking on a moor, finding a pocket-watch. Immediately recognizing the watch as an artefact - certain that the watch is not a natural object like a stone, and could not ahve come together by the accidental forces of wind and rain upon natural objects, Paley argues that the man can be equally certain that somewhere in the world there is an artificer - someone who designed and built the watch.Paley then goes on to compare the intricacies of the biology of living organisms to the clockwork of the watch to show that the complexities of nature outwiegh the intricacy of the clockwork by some orders of magnitude - and thus in this design he sees an artifact, and infers from this the existence of an artificer - desiger and Creator of the natural world i.e. God.But this wasn't a new idea when Paley thought of it. The Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero made a similar argument, as did Aristotle, as did Plato in 360 B.C. So how far does this argument go back? Why not all the way? If we think of this as the founding argument it explains a lot.Prepared to make this leap by the struggle to survive in a testing environment, by linking the sounds or footprints of animals with ideas of food or danger, it may have been nothing more than a footprint in the mud that triggered the realization; but however it happened, it happened that man asked: 'Who made this?' - and once that question was asked it could be applied to anything. 'Who made me?' - 'Who made the world?' From the size of the world and the complexity of nature, and with much howling at the moon, man inferred the existence of The Artificer, Creator, the God that made him and the world. It was a genesis and a revelation - the origin of a new conceptual paradigm in the revelation of a concept so enthralling his primitive imagination, he rehearsed the idea ad infinitum - intellectually rehearsing the abstarct relationship inherent to the concept by applying it anew to everything. Thus man began to ask: 'What can I make?' 'If human evolution were an epic, the Upper Paleolithic would be the chapter where the hero comes of age. Suddenly, after millenia of progress so slow it hardly seems like progress at all, human culture appears to take off in what the writer John Phieffer has called a 'creative explosion.'At a German site called Vogelherd someone picked up a piece of ivory 32,000 years ago and carved an exquisite horse in minature - mouth, flared nostrils, jowls, curved haunches and swollen belly, all breathlessly realisitic. Before Vogelherd, there were no representational horses, Before Vogelherd, all horses were horses.'The same abstract conceptualization inherent to the idea of God the Creator - is that which allowed man to hold a mental representation of a horse in his mind while he carved ivory into the shape of a horse. But man made more than Gods and ivory horses - he made societies, and next we will discuss how that occurred. http://markblack.freeblogit.com blog |
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