On Science and Religion

and the Dracula Syndrome


by Didier de Fontaine


They say that Dracula, that fearful vampire, casts no shadow and that his reflection cannot be seen in a mirror. Why should that be? Very simple, Count Dracula is a figment of our imagination, is not really there. But could not our fertile imagination reconstruct shadows and reflections and create a reality just as real as reality itself? No, because to do so would require our mind, unsupported by physical evidence, to reconstruct such visual effects by application of the laws of geometry and of the physics of light rays which the hallucigenic state cannot apprehend. Have you ever seen shadows in your dreams?

In sleep, in a state of trance, our mind is detached from reality and can only pretend that it is embedded in the physical world. It continues to weave tales, to mimic the real world, but it cannot reconstruct it for a very fundamental reason: it is no longer in intimate and continued contact with the world around us. It is severed form that constant feedback of our senses which keeps us attuned to the outside world. In other words, in the dream state, we have lost that all-important reality check which helps us maintain our sanity. It is that reality check, if it is functioning properly, which allows us to exorcise Dracula and other denizens of the terrifying underworld or of the beatific heavenly world. But willy nilly, we are encrusted in Middle Earth, and we had better try to understand it in order to come to terms with the human condition which is neither demonic nor angelic.

But how can we optimize that reality check, how can we rationalize what our waking senses tell us through conscious or subconscious feedback? The answer lies in careful study of the evidence which lies all around us and which is begging us to investigate carefully, dispassionately, honestly, lovingly. That is what science tries to do and has done quite successfully over roughly the last 500 years. In antiquity, even more so in prehistoric times, the scientific method was by and large unknown: the crazy world around us defied explanation and the only realty that seemed to make sense, because regular and predictable, was that of the heavens with its well-behaved movement of planets and stars. Surely only gods could ordain such an structured universe. It followed that the only way for us humans to cope with life, messy as it is, was to "know the mind of God (or gods)", to propitiate the divinities by offerings, sacrifices, prayers, ritual. In early societies, everything was religious, and its members lived in a constant state of quasi hallucination, seeing, hearing, feeling spirits everywhere and living in fear of the capricious will of the gods. Even much later, in mediaeval times, the very first Faculties (today we would say Departments) of newly formed Universities were Faculties of Theology. Again, the way to understand Nature, it was thought, was to read the mind of God. All was written in revelation, and all we have to do is to understand the Word. Hebrew and Greek were taught, not Physics.

Would it not have been more fruitful to interrogate Nature itself rather than God? That came later with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, although classical Greek philosophers had already shown the way two thousand years earlier. Convenient dates to remember are 1543, the year that de Revolutionibus was brought to Copernicus on his deathbed, and 99 years later, 1642, the year of both the death of Galileo and the birth of Newton. We may thus take that latter year as that of "the Watershed", to borrow the expression form Arthur Koestler's the Sleepwalkers, separating the Old knowledge from the New, after which time Science never looked back and never again needed to ask permission from Religion to advance new ideas, even when considered heretical by old world philosophers and theologians.

Symbolically, the year 1642 also marked the divorce of Natural Philosophy from Theist Morality, even though Newton himself and virtually all of his contemporaries could not conceive of a cosmos not created and sub-tended by a personal omnipotent God. Still, the seeds of atheism had been sowed, as the Roman Curia well recognized when they condemned Galileo. Why was Pope Urban VIII, in all his majestic infallibility, so concerned about whether the sun rotated around the earth or the earth around the sun? Perhaps because, in a way dimly perceived then, heliocentrism destroyed the hierarchy of being so neatly ordained by the older geocentrism: the imperfect Earth below our feet, the increasingly perfect worlds as we rise towards Heaven above. Such a polarized Universe appears to make perfect sense both astronomically and theologically. But the vector of Good and Evil, with its arrow pointing skyward and its base buried in the earth, loses its meaning if the sun, not the earth, is central to the Universe of the time. Moral perfection then no longer increases steadily, starting from our messy terrestrial home, to the perfect celestial realm of divine beings above, in pleasing agreement with geocentric cosmology. How then are we going to conduct our lives in an honorable way if we lose our moral bearing, if we lose the arrow of righteousness so dear to our forefathers?

The Copernican revolution was thus a blow to all that was sacred, and its evil influence had to be destroyed. But what of the earlier revolution which took us from a flat earth to a spherical one? With a flat earth, parallels between astronomy and morality are even more convincing. Now the vector of Good and Evil is unique, has only one possible direction, from bottom (Earth) to top (Heaven). With a spherical earth however, the vector in question points in all directions, and the bottom–top polarity is harder to imagine. When did that revolution from flat to spherical take place? In the Hebrew Bible the question simply does not arise; a spherical earth is unthinkable. In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle believed in a spherical earth, but the Presocratic philosophers, such as Leucippus and Democritus, did not, as Aristotle himself tells us. What a terrible warping of space, hence of morality, must sphericity have brought about! This philosophical upheaval is not as well documented as that related to Galileo, yet we know that Anaxagoras was forced to flee Athens precipitously and that Socrates was forced to take his own life, though perhaps not precisely for the cosmological reasons discussed here. Contemporary religion of course neither disputes the sphericity of the earth, nor the notion of a sun-centered system. But Christian morality has its fundamental roots plunging too deeply into Hebrew tradition, the unique arrow of goodness is too firmly anchored in a simply conceived layered cosmology, that it accommodates itself poorly with anything but a flat-earth Universe. Hence Science and Religion had already parted ways around 500 BC, though it is not generally so recognized.

Today, we try to accommodate Religion with Science and Science with Religion, but the two do not readily mix despite the somewhat platitudinous pronouncements of some members of the clergy. A case in point; some years ago a Catholic priest presented his views to me thus: "You scientists are the experts of the material world, we priests are the experts of the spiritual world. You have done a great job on your side of the equation, we have not fared as well on ours, but we're working on it. Of course, the spiritual world is much harder to understand than the material one!" He was such a nice, friendly man that I did not have the heart to disagree, and to tell him that he was dead wrong. The world is ONE, it cannot be conveniently split into spiritual and material. The cosmos as we understand it does not consist of a Biblical layered structure, with matter here below, and spirit in the ether above, though thanks to its intangible nature, spirit can permeate matter if it so desires: the soul can inhabit the body, at least temporarily, and angels can fly down to visit us. But where now is the realm of the Spirit, of the Supreme Divinity, where is the Highest Heaven, in a Universe where the earth orbits the sun, and the sun the center of our solar system; where our galaxy itself is but one in a local cluster, the local cluster part of a larger one, and so on, out to the limits of the observable universe, some 15 billion light years away, one light year being the distance traveled by light in vacuum at a velocity of 300,000 kilometers per second? And what is Matter? Not so long ago we thought that all the matter of the universe was the observable one, the so-called baryonic matter that you and I are made of. Today, scientists are compelled to recognize that ordinary stars and planets now appear to make up but a paltry 5% of the total "matter", with about 30% of it ("Dark Matter") unseen and about 65% of it "Dark Energy", the nature of which is a total mystery, and somewhat whimsically has been called "quintessence" after Plato. Classical philosophers were indeed concerned about the fact that there were five "Platonic" solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron and dodecahedron), but only four elements (air, earth, fire, water). A fifth element (corresponding to the dodecahedron) thus had to invented. But we might as well call quintessence "spirit"; that's how mysterious it is right now!

Such is the (provisional) modern scientific view. How different it is from the ancient view, factually and philosophically. Milton expresses the archaic approach eloquently in Paradise Lost (1667, after the birth of Newton):

Raphael to Adam

Heaven is for thee too high

To know what passeth there; be lowly wise:

Think only of what concerns thee and thy being;

Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there

Live in what state, conditions or degree,

Contented what thus far hath been revealed

Not of Earth only, but of the highest Heaven.


Ours is a Demon-Haunted World, to borrow Carl Sagan's title, with its subtitle Science as a Candle in the Dark. But the Archangel does not allow Adam to light a candle in the hope of testing whether or not Dracula casts a shadow. Milton's humanity, captive of the gods, is condemned to live in a state of semi hallucination, "Contented what so far hath been revealed", aware only of the dance of shadows on the walls of its Platonic cave, at times appealing to Art for solace, painting bisons and reindeer to inhabit its claustrophobic world. The Lascaux cave is a good analogy for early man's mind, partially closed off from the outside world, thus deprived of the constant feedback of reality which maintains sanity in an incomprehensible cosmos.

Religion tried valiantly but vainly to tame the cavernous hosts through dogma and ritual, as religious beliefs, though irrational and often self-contradictory, seemed to be more familiar, more immediately comprehensible than scientific reasoning. Yet it is Science alone which can provide the needed reality checks, despite its counterintuitive propositions, its flights into the immense and the microscopic. With science, all human measure seems to have been left aside, the fireside warmth forsaken, loving words replaced by mathematical expressions, unfamiliar in their abstract symbolism. We may deplore the passing of a more innocent age where man was the measure of all things, at least of all things terrestrial, and where the mysteries of Nature were hidden not within itself but within the realm of the Spirits, beyond our world, beyond our comprehension, now and for always, as Raphael seems to tell us. The vast majority of humanity, still today, even in technological societies, clings to principles which are so antiquated as to be compatible only with an antique Flat-Earth cosmology, with Heaven above and Hell below, aligned with a unique vector-of-good-and-evil. Our society is schizophrenic, enjoys the fruits of classical, relativistic, and quantum mechanics, say with almost every gesture it performs on a daily basis, yet is mired in a belief system that should have been retired 500 years ago, nay 2500 years ago. This dual nature of "modern" society sustains an ever-widening gap between the Two Cultures (C. P. Snow's famous title): irrational beliefs keep us imprisoned partially in dream-like states, in a world which casts no real shadows, while science marches on at ever accelerating pace, leaving behind a terrified humanity, afraid of the gods — "are they still on our side?" -- and afraid of the scientists — "are they going to kill us all?".

But there is hope: do we wish to keep Dracula at bay? Try science; it is better than garlic.

Very interesting

I couldn't agree more

Words of truth falling upon deaf eyes.

Yes I have met people who believe they are vampires. They carry a vial of blood on them and only come out at night. I tell you imagination can really possess a mind at times.

but otherwise I agree he did exist and is considered a hero in Romania for driving out oppossing forces into the country at the time. If I remember correctly it was Hungary and Turkey? A interesting part of history I must add.

The scariest book I have ever read was Brahm Stoker's Count Dracula. Very well written. I wore garlic the entire time I read it.

I have thought about what the Dracula myth is all about and have some ideas.

A look at garlic and its properties and you will find that garlic kills parasites and promotes health. The worst possible parasite I can imagine is a blood sucking creature.

SPIRITUAL:

Other meanings arise. A vampire cannot come into your house unless you invite him. This idea is parallel to idea's of the law of attraction where all things that happens in your life are invited by you via your thoughts and actions.

"Your house" is not your actual living quarters, but represents your psyche or your reality. It could also represents your unified field that surrounds your body.

CREATURES OF LEGEND:

As there are stories of UFO's there are also many stories of blood drinking flesh eating reptilian creatures who live in the underground. These creatures have even been seen by witnesses and recorded in historical pictures and sculpture.

PSYCHIC VAMPIRES:

A psychic vampire bypasses the blood and sucks the life energy from your body at night. This is said to be done on purpose or even unknowingly and unconsciously by people who are terminally ill and grasping on to life.

HUMAN VAMPIRES:

There is a known condition that some people have that causes them to crave blood. It even has a medical name but I don't know what it is.

VAMPIRE BATS:

Vampire bats live off the blood of animals. The animals never feel the bite as the bat's release some sort of substance that numbs the area of the bite.

JB

HUMAN VAMPIRES:

There is a known condition that some people have that causes them to crave blood. It even has a medical name but I don't know what it is.


it is funny that you mention this.

Many interpret it wrong when Jesus indicates at the table drink my blood to cleanse your soul?? I wonder why one would use that as a term in its time. I mean yes because he was holy and sinless maybe and that is why it was mentioned, but couldn't they use something else at the time instead of blood? Just think of how you would have to explain this to a child if you were a Christian?? I am glad I wasn't taught this as a child, but again maybe they say something else to keep it less bloody!

It makes you wonder if in those days any were in lust for blood like a vampire?