#category errors

As the engineer is to a clock so is ___________ to the natural world?

If You're Gonna Smudge the Borders, Consider Smudging Hard

Magazine Review: Analog June 1967

It was only when the concept of nature altered in the course of the Enlightenment until it encompassed the entire real world (which was linked with the naïve notion that we can understand the whole of reality, or that we will soon get to the bottom of it) that the “supernatural” became a dumping ground for everything otherworldly. Not surprisingly, when “God” was to be found in this company of water sprites, fairies, bogeymen, and fairy-tale creatures, sooner or later He had to be banished from the society of rational, educated people and reserved solely for children, the simpleminded, and occultists. In a typical sentence, Lash declares that “Christians, Jews, Muslims and atheists have this at least in common, that none of them believe in gods.” They don’t believe that such a thing exists, and above all they refuse to worship them. After the Enlightenment, people believed that religion had to do with belief in specific (“supernatural”) entities called gods. Theists were regarded as those who supposed that the class of “gods” had at least one member; “monotheists” were those who maintained that the class had one, and only one member; while atheists were those who were convinced that this class (like the class of unicorns) was actually empty. There are two fatal errors associated with this attitude, Lash maintains. First, the God that that Christians, Jews, and Muslims worship is not a member of any class; indeed, by His very nature He cannot be – otherwise he would be an idol. Second, although gods did indeed belong to the world of people since time immemorial, those gods – if we study that word, which in the beginning was not a substantive – did not constitute a separate class of supernatural beings, but were simply whatever people worshiped. People did not worship gods; what they worshiped became their god or gods. Thus the word “god” did not originally denote any special “supernatural being,” but it had a status similar to the word “treasure.” One cannot go to the market and ask for a loaf of bread, six bananas, two bars of soap, and three treasures. For every individual, “treasure” represents something different; in other words, in its original use the word “god” or “gods” did not denote beings, things, or objects, but a relationship.