Scepticism regarding the Nature of God

Page 5

It would seem to be generally accepted that the role of imagination in the world of science increases as the area that needs to be transformed into a coherent whole increases. This is simply a consequence of the general principle of inverse proportionality of the 'given' to the intensity of the synthesising activity required in order to attain a higher stratum of the 'given', to 'build it up', to 'find it'.

It is noteworthy that the role of imagination in science is mostly subsumed under the heading 'thinking'. That does not alter the fact that what is called ' to think' , becomes ever more 'free', the less dense the data of the 'given' is in comparison with the experience under consideration.

The more free the thinking is, the more it assumes the character of imagination; what prevents this activity from being termed 'imagining' is that it is systematically being connected to pieces of experience that already count as 'given'. Thus, what this systematic imagining produces is also 'given', warranted by the 'given' elements already present. The imaginative character of scientific activity, however, proceeds towards present reality, independently of the aim and success of the progress of free thinking. This is seen by a corresponding factor of uncertainty in view of the increasing possibility of constructing a number of theories that converge, if not in the sphere of scientifically formulated 'facts', at least in the sphere of facts of pre-scientific experience.

Clearly,the imagining faculty of the mind related to the size of a field of experience will tend to reach its highest point when the amount of 'given' data is at a minimum. This applies most especially in areas of experience where a differentiation between facts and data ceases to count (1), where only certain common features of phenomena are taken into account, e.g. when problems arise about the relationship between the largest segments of wholes of experience, such as mind and matter, organic and inorganic, space and time, etc. Here, the almost unsurmountable difficulty of the questions can be seen as due to a lack of data or, which is the same, to an incorrect order of data, a lack of coherence in the 'given'.

There now remains one further step, one that does not seem to have been taken so far, on account of its adventurous character; it is a methodic consequence of the preceding consideration, a conclusion that must be drawn as we arrive at the utmost, possibly infinite, range of reality. Here, something 'given', 'known experience' ceases almost completely to be available. The widest gulf opens before our knowledge; indeed, this realm of the world, which we would have to call the unknown part of the world, consists, as it were, of nothing but gulf. The infinity, or at least the limitless extension of space, time and matter of the world not known to us and obviously vastly surpassing the part that is known to us, represents, so to speak, an open wilderness of the 'not given', only the borders of which are explored by science. The proportion between the comparative amount of 'given' and the intensity of mental constructing required to conquer the parts and to transform them into 'given' would then reach its maximum point here.

(1)This aspect of reality is not covered properly by the sciences and their wealth of material, because it is situated between the various areas of normal sciences. It concerns the relation between the data of different sciences, which have yet to be examined. Since only 'borderland phenomena' between sciences are noted, the rich store of scientific material is of little use in the case of these problems.