Chapter 1 Idolatry
Heads or tails
The telescope probes the far reaches of space, the spectrometer of the molecules of a gas, the microscope, the tissue and its internal processes. But this dying organism, torn from its environment, examined between two glasses under intense light, functions in a very different way than in vivo. Despite the proliferation of expert past observations, the causal interactions between cells remain, at best, highly conceptual. The same is true for most sciences.
Ethology would be defined as the auscultation of cell accumulation by animal species; biology, that of every living cell—plants, animals, fungi—on Earth; sociology, that of the cells of the human species! Therefore, considering a citizen’s cell under a microscope becomes ridiculous to deal with such vast subjects. This is why statistics have been created to look into phenomena so vast that they seem infinite. The microscope allows us to discover the infinitesimal, while statistics reveal the infinite, impossible to isolate and multi-causal.
This logic spreads to finer fields—psychology, worse, social psychology—to theology, which touches on the impossible to estimate: the set of causalities and correlations of all things, including biology. How then can a fish be subjected to an intelligence quotient test, and how many other such impossibilities? From a strictly materialist perspective, morality would only be the cumulative motivation of the cell cluster of an entire society. However, we are far from weighing up the motivation(s) of a single cell. For the university, morality is therefore a matter of pure metaphysics. Yet no notion has more impact on the preservation of each person than it: mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, economics—all bow to it.
If a god had to be given a face, the totality of knowledge would be more appropriate than an icon or a childish caricature. But we would forget that this science is itself heavily speculative: specialists, motivated to corroborate each other, keep silent about their contradictory tests. Few people use these expensive instruments, which come at the top of multiple financial and educational barriers. As a result, access to information is restricted, and case studies are marginalized from their natural environment. Their definition of reality is only refined over generations.