Disciplined imagination

My second try on this post after computer problems.

As I argued in “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, speculative thought is necessary to create the worldviews, or lesser intellectual systems, which make sense of even revealed truths. Good speculative thought is also an imaginative, even spiritual, effort. And modern people are sadly lacking in imagination. Our children are trained to be mere consumers of pseudo-imaginative works produced by exploiters of various sorts.

Many of those pseudo-imaginative works are labeled as ‘science fiction’ but that is really little more than adolescent power fantasies not so much different from the stranger pagan myths of the past. This is part of the trend towards magical thought which I discussed in “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”. Sadly, there are a number of Christians who have fallen into this magical way of thought, often led by the gentler sorts of Manichees such as C.S. Lewis. Lewis and ideologists of science can argue against each other just because they share the same basic assumptions about physical reality. That is, they ignore the basic Christian insight that the universe was created by God as what it is. The universe, as a thing, and all the things it ‘contains’, are true — as St. Thomas Aquinas noted most clearly.

What is needed to understand that physical universe is imaginative efforts, disciplined speculations, applied to solid empirical knowledge — both facts and plausible theories. Few people wish to engage in such efforts and those who have the knowledge to do so are lacking in imagination just because they’ve strayed away from the discipline of ‘what-is’ to make their efforts to control reality, by way of the occultist types of magic preferred by Lewis and others, or by way of the magic which has redirected science from its efforts to understand the universe that science might be used to restructure human societies and human lives to the purposes of the gods of the marketplaces, commercial corporations and nation-states being the most powerful of those gods.