--- ## Philosophic Reductionist Argument Any scientific, philosophical, or question born from consciousness ultimately reduces into the interplay of two fundamental blocks, the [[Νὴ τὸν Ἄγνωστος Θεός|known and unknown.]] [[The Nature of Chaos, Order, & Emergence|This is what the Taoists, Hegelians, and others figured out.]] To encounter _“the unknown”_ presupposes the existence of a _“known”_. A defined conscious experience—the subjective organization of sensory, symbolic, and affective inputs—_constructs_ the very conditions by which something can be rendered **“outside”** its frame. Thus, the **unknown is not some ontic wilderness**, but a **negative space** produced by the contours of what is **already ordered** within consciousness. _This draws from phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger)_ If you as consciousness had no bounds, if you knew all, had no unknowns, not only would your perception of time and self become meaningless definitions, “you” would be in form the universe itself:  _Landauer’s Principle, Wolfram’s Computational Irreducibility, laws of thermodynamics, information theory, and the Church-Turing thesis._ Thus to the conscious experience, God is the representation of the unknown, or rather, that which (fundamentally) cannot be known. And yet what comes out of the unknown, the known, follows an underlying order, a logos, gods will. Thus we infer if will exists, so must a creator. Half of this is due to reason, and the other, the narrativization of the unknown, as it seems this is a fundamental contention. We fear unpredictability, hence why we see the animalistic as evil. Religion framed the unknowable **not as chaos**, but as a [[The Nature of Representation, Symbolism & Meaning#Convergent Truth A Definition|source of alignment and orientation.]] It **stabilized [[Mimetic Desire → Rivalry → Crisis → Scapegoat → Sacrifice → Myth → Ritual|mimetic desire]]** by giving the community a shared language of transcendence. This is why Moses "sees god" through the crack in two cliffs [(Exodus 33:18-23).](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2033%3A18-23&version=NIV) Too often we use our human frame to over personify the metaphors being used in these frameworks, which are attempting to describe a logos born literally from what cannot be known. But with science—arising out of the same religious impulse to _know the order of creation_—the **emphasis shifted**: from meaning to mechanism, from Logos to code. *Note: Science was born in an era where there was a lot of religious disagreements between the different sects. Also a sect, the rituals and beliefs, is not the religion / god itself.* Science displaced religions epistemic role, offering reliable tools for modelling the known: • Prediction, • Replication, • Reduction. In doing so it excluded the unknowable, not just methodologically, but metaphysically. It claimed—implicitly—that what cannot be known does not exist. A notion we now know is intellectual hubris. Furthermore, science explains reality. but it does not justify it. It reveals _how_, but remains silent on _why_. This is not a critique of science per se. It is a critique of the sect of **scientism**—the elevation of methodological reductionism into a worldview. Where once **religion grounded the moral order**, now science offers **mechanical precision without orientation**. Hence the modern void: a culture with tools for prediction, but no frame for meaning, living in a universe which in axiomatic definition cannot be predicted at it's fundamentals. I'm fairly confident in saying that the rejection of god is just the deterioration of the common principles we used prior to post-modernist thought to organize our values and vocabulary. It's more about the deterioration of communication, and the gut refusal / denial of our past which causes the inability or refusal to engage in these metaphors. This gut refusal is because we don't want to admit that our ancestors were both intelligent, correct, and committed horrors. Doing so would lead us into contention with [[Moral Code of Modernity|the modern moral code]] of materialism, innate equality, innate progress, and absurdist and nihilist outlook. It's a geist stemming from a deep sense of guilt leading to dissonance. I find it funny, that religion predates agriculture, which predates civilization, yet modern thought has convinced everyone that now, all of a sudden, we are better, more moral, and no longer need the very institutions and frameworks which organized ALL of history. It's not a mistake we live in a time of degradation, or that our global society (in metaphor) idolizes and worships satan (again in metaphor.)