[TrisakAminawn]

I wrote this post on Monday and then got whipped off to a hotel in the Adirondacks for pre-graduation bonding, so it's out of date. I'll get back to Wolven-kun later. No, actually, I'll modify this post to reflect those comments. Didn't table anything new.

Mnnn...in a perfect sense, science derives from and abides by observable natural laws. Religion derives from and dictates moral and spiritual law. There are soft sciences like psych that blur into the social realm, but that's not the kind Edward meant, so we can safely ignore them for the moment. The missing piece in alchemy, the part that makes it magical, isn't 'energy,' though. Ed mentions that about four hundred years ago the equation for using the energy of tectonic motion was worked out, so that's what they think they're using. (Might really be trapped souls, based on what Mei says about a feeling like writhing people under the ground and the fact that Father came to Amestris about four hundred years ago, but that's not important for now.) The missing element is 'force.' By what means alchemists shift this energy to transform this matter, even if they are using precise equations to ascertain the nature of all the involved elements, is untouched by reason.

All the hard and soft sciences define the forces which affect any change, like gravity and supply/demand, but the 'force' of Amestrian alchemy is the human will. You think the thing, with the right understanding of the materials and energies involved, and the thing shall be. In that sense, it is magical. This is why Ed says alchemists are close to God, because by their will and knowledge they can instantly change reality; but he calls it a science because to him it is a thing completely concerned with the experiential world, and relies on the measurable and human. He's fooling himself a little, there, because there was some severe mysticism in their training, but he likes to think of himself as a practical person. Come to that, alchemy is a religion. It has tenets and spiritual presumptions a holy symbol (circle) and moral demands and heresies. (Kimbly the consumate heretic points out that last one.) You don't actually need a god for a religion, though people often like to have one.

Ninya, atheism and agnosticism are not 'technically' the same thing. Agnostics accept the general possibility of the premise of a thing like 'God'; atheists reject it. This is a monumental difference. Kind of like saying 'questioning sexuality' and 'gay' are the same thing, see? Not polite.

Met God? Well, the third name that that thing says humans give it is 'God,' but as the list includes 'the universe,' 'true knowledge,' and 'you,' it's either an expression of omnitheism (like the Hindu Brahman; some modern Christians and pagans use this, too) or of the idea that God is a kind of idea humans have made out of the unknown. The fact that it is an immense force bound up with the inner workings of the universe and has a consciousness is pretty wild, but although it uses that name it shows no sign of acting as a 'God.' Its function is rather more like Satan: if you manage to call it forth, it will give you knowledge and grant your wish, for a terrible, terrible price, and then it is amused by your suffering. This is something you might get out of many old-fashioned 'gods,' but not 'God.' Am I wrong? ((Turned out to be with Wolven on this one.))

Wolven-kun, it is certainly true that all experimental data are inevitably contaminated, even in a lab situation where all is isolated and precise and a single natural function is put to the test, but you are being extremely unclear. At first you said that the experimenter was adopting the position of God by controlling and driving the experiment, and thus predetermining the result and voiding data, but then you said science was flawed precisely because all elements could not be controlled. Your...deer-population conspiracy theory is lovely, but it does not successfully undermine the fact that if the deer are counted, you will know how many deer are there each year. On its own, regarding the one clearing, this is not splendidly useful data, but an expanded version of if could be. And the experimenter does nothing to the deer to make them be there. Neither does he force a pair of chemicals to combine against natural law. 'Forcing the hand of nature' is possible only within natural law, and it is with what is possible within natural law that science concerns itself, so I do not understand what you mean by predetermining the reaction. If you know what is going to happen when you do a thing, and arrange all elements so that that thing will happen, you are not performing an experiment; you are manipulating your environment. This is not the experimental aspect of human life.

What your friend did was stage a performance, which was fake and ridiculous, though possibly enjoyable; this is nothing to do with creditable lab work. (That would be, very roughly, if he had tried weird ways of attacking you to see which unconventional weirdness could get around your guard better, or something like that. Well, that's not lab, but it's experiment.) I am not myself particularly enamoured of the cult of science, but I know what appropriate scientific practices are, and really thought you did, too. What have you studied? An (honest) experimenter is only like God if you are presuming that God designed the physical world along strict, unbreakable rules to form the controlled environment, and then arranged in some manner for life to develop different levels of consciousness and let it do as it liked, to see what happened. This is something close to the God my mother believes in, I think, and as Gods go it's quite inoffensive. As long as I didn't take being experimental data personally, you could even get fond of a god like that.

But I digress. Science starts with what we know and builds upward from there. Religion starts with what we wish to believe or cannot help believing, and builds outward from there. They eventually infinge on one another, when religion explains the observable by the anthro-centric mystic and science explains the spiritual by the materialist pragmatic, and they commit heresies against one another. This is unfortunate, but inevitable.

The things everyone is 'forced' to agree on that Ninya pointed out are where science begins; its true products are the things which can be infered from the laws established based on these irrefutables, and those inferences and theories cannot be immediately proven. Proving the structure of atoms takes convincing someone of so much physics that they will believe that the precise refraction of an invisible particle means something of a particular infinitesmal mass is there, and has a positive charge, and so much chemistry that they'll believe something even more infinitesmal is being exchanged when substances combine. So much, I say, that you're better off indoctrinating them firmly in he existence of the atom while they're young, which is what we do. Atoms are so extenuatedly brilliant that in the short form they're just a really stupid idea. (Which is not to say I disbelieve in atoms, particularly.) A cult is a cult. Humans have exactly the knowledge and resource of humans, absent divine intervention, and know precisely what they have had the opportunity to learn. The predictions of science (like the Titanic never sinking) are not to be completely trusted, but it is clear, and when it is wrong it can reassess the situation and explain why, and not be wrong next time. Cult-science does not admit this possibility of ambiguity, and is as flawed a medium of truth as cult-religion. (Religion that does not behave like a cult is personalized spirituality and another species.)

By the way, science never said the world was flat. Common sense said that, and mathmeticians several thousand years ago worked out, by means of detailed observation, that it was not so. People with scientific knowledge have been generally cognizant that the world was spherical for quite a long time. This includes all the people who wouldn't give Christopher Columbus money.

Wolven, I'm sorry, you're still assuming God is there in everyone's mind to be 'replaced.' God is not the automatic existence. Even 'Daddy' isn't an automatic existence, all right? Even 'Mommy' isn't, if she isn't there at the beginning and no one tells the kid she should be. So God definitely isn't. Ed is not inevitably replacing God, he is merely filling the space in which you have got God. Not everyone has God there. It is not the reserved-God VIP seat. It is just a generally present need for 'meaning,' or at least 'justification.' I was gratified that you agreed, but I guess you didn't understand all of what I meant.

Ah, I'd forgotten Ling said that, or I would have referenced it somewhere in my last monster post. Well, Ed, Al, and Izumi Curtis happen to be the only alchemists alive who put their hands together like that before transmuting, so most alchemy lacks that perticular religious garnish, but good spotting.

Heh, see, you'd have trouble out-overdoing the rest of us, Ninya. I look forward to your overdoing it again. By the way, we've hit chapter eighty-three on Onemanga, if you didn't know. I think they stopped updating Manga Viewer almost a year ago, whoever was doing that, so I stopped using it.