Christian Influences In William Blake's The Ancient Of Days

Lynn White was born in 1907 and died in 1987. She was a professor of medieval history at Princeton and Stanford. She researched the early influences of the environmental crisis.
The Bible asserts man’s dominion over nature and establishes a trend of anthropocentrism. Christianity makes a distinction between man and the rest of creation, which has no soul or reason and is thus inferior. Christianity has rashly insisted that its myth really happened in time and we stand amid the debris of our inherited religion. He concludes that applying more science and technology to the problem won’t help, that it is humanity’s fundamental ideas about nature that must change; we must abandon superior contemptuous attitudes that make us willing to us it for
our slightest whim.
More science occurred than is commonly recognized in medieval times. Beginning in the sixth century northern peasantry created the most advanced agricultural techniques in the world. In the eighth century the Franks revolutionized methods of warfare. Ninth century produced labour-saving techniques and crude, early industrial measures, partially due to Saint Paul’s virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Examples include 1280s invention of eyeglasses and enameling, tinning of iron by immersion, 1100s. Continuous improvements in ship design, and only china competed technologically at this time.
Emergence of the Clock was a product of ritualized need to worship at certain times. Based on the ancient Chinese mariner’s compass and the Hindu concept of perpetual motion. It produced clock-time consciousness, necessary for industrialization and complicated social organization. It was celebrated by the Roman Catholics on and inside churches as a demonstration of God’s consistent, mechanical ordering of the cosmos. It was forbidden inside the more conservative Eastern Orthodox Church and the scale of Gof shoud be contaminated by temperately. It brought precision and exactness into the realm of science. Gave the edge to Occidental science ovet the East.
Triumph of Europe: By 1492, the contest of civilizations was over. Europe had developed an agricultural base, an industrial capacity, a superiority in arms, and a skill in voyaging the ocean which enables it to explore, conquer, loot, and colonize the rest of the globe during the next four centuries and more. Jared Diamond will try to explain just this as well but from a materialist perspective.
Why Europe?
During the time of St. Thomas (1200s), The Scientist – Aristotle - was studied equally in Cairo, Constantinople, and Paris, but only in Paris (Europe) did a new kind of engineering evolve. Western science as activist towards nature. Christianity teaches that God fashioned man in his image, the image (man) then fashions the world. Matter is subordinate to the importance of spirit. Doctrine of creation ex nihilo suggests that pre-” created” nature is empty, nothing. Genesis gives man “dominion over the earth.” We participate in God’s plan by ourselves being good artisans. Christianity is unilinear, using the environment can be justified in the name of progress. Eastern religions tend to be cyclical. By vanquishing fetishism and animism, by seeing the natural world as inert, the spirit in the object no longer needed to be placated. So, Europeans (not the polytheists) were free to use and subdue nature. CF. Lack to technological innovation in pre-Christian Scandinavia until ca. 1000. But this could be due to its comparatively low population. What about the Viking boats? God is understood as the ultimate craftsman or technician. A Creator-God is the model the pious should follow. Christian saints are activists, do-gooders (i.e., creators of good), where as Greek and non-Western religious luminaries are contemplative. Judeo-Christian narrative means action is essential for holiness. Respect for manual labour was lacking in Greco-Roman and other cultures. Aristotle is explicitly skeptical of long-hard work (as it is immoderate). Work six days a week. Monasticism (a purifying reaction to pagan influx/influence of the third century) was characterized by work with hands and a return to primitive (that is Jewish-influenced) Christianity that said work is worship.
William Blake, The Ancient of Days was originally published as the frontispiece to a 1794 work, Europe a Prophecy.
Urizen (Blake’s mythological figure of reason and law) crouching in a circular design with a cloud-like background. His outstretched hand holds a compass over the darker void below.
Christian Influences: Middle age technology was viewed with little suspicion by church doctors. Technology generally demonstrated that man was made in God’s image and God was the ultimate engineer. Political democracy was a result of the Reformation (religious democracy). A more democratic society meant more educated, i.e., more who would innovate and contribute the scientific forum.
The Eadwine Psalter: Illustration of Psalm 63 (64) showing evildoers content to use the primitive whetstone. The Godly use the new and more advanced
grindstone.
Semitization of Ancient Europe: Represented the “most drastic” change in worldview that “has ever been experienced by a major culture.” As well, the Koran confirms the “Jewish views of the nature of time, the cosmos and destiny, which has been spread to all levels of society by Christianity, Judaism’s daughter” “Aggression is the normal Western Christian attitude toward nature.”
Garrett Hardin:
THE TRAGEDY OF FREEDOM IN THE COMMONS: The eighteenth-century commons (public lands) were degraded because it was in the personal interest of every herdsman to maximize his gain. One additional sheep in the commons would mean a net utility benefit of +1, I get all the profits. One additional sheep in the commons would mean a net utility negative of much less than 1, I share the loss. The “remorseless” logic of the commons then locks in. Each social actor is required by the law self-interest to increasingly deplete the commons. Consequently, exhausting resources and polluting is built into the game of survival. Morality is “system sensitive”, meaning that reckless polluting does not harm the public, when there is no public (commons is empty), it is unbearable in the city. Scarcity is the activating mechanism for the “tragedy”, “war of all against all”.
Overpopulation: Accelerates the Tragedy by committing us to a race to the bottom of the supply of resources because more consumers means less supplies, i.e., greater scarcity.
Conscience/Guilt as Naïve and Unfair: Self-restricting measures are doomed to fail.
1. An individual asked to volunteer will be fighting the innate compulsion to preserve his own interests, creating inner conflict.
2. Voluntary measure will always lose out in the extreme situations of survival.
3. Given the measures are voluntary, those that don’t participate stand to gain even more - thus rewarding the selfish and punishing the generous. This incentive system creates the opposite results of what we would like. Escalates inequality.

Solution is to be privatization. For many issues of justice, we do not make these actions purely ethical or voluntary considerations. We make the actions illegal. We make the regulation exterior, not interior. It is illegal to rob a bank (a kind of commons); illegal to cheat on taxes, etc. Overpopulation (another serious infringements of the commons) needs coercive governing. Privatizing the commons, like regulating it, means that one there is one central authority (Sovereign?) of the resource who has a personal interest in its sustainability. Usually, it would be against the self-interest of this authority to deplete the resource. Privatization, however, by its own logic does not account the public good, which regulation addresses.
Daniel C. Dennett, b. 1943
Research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. Referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Proponent of Materialism: The world is fundamentally substance, including its apparent immaterial effects, i.e., light, consciousness, etc. The belief that the only way material can be explained in through material explanation.
What is life?
We are fascinated by life as is evidence in the wonder about where life came from and in wondering if there is life on other planets, and even in believing that there may be life after death. But what is life coming from and in wondering if there is out life on other planets, and even in believing that there may be life after death. But what is life other than what Aristotle told us – that which moves of its own volition. Does life or anything movie of its own volition? No, under the principle of causation nothing can move of its own volition. Life is better understood as the casual movements that are hidden from us and attributed to volition. Life is but carbon-based matter whose motion is obscure. This the chemicalization of life. Life is reduced to a phenomenal product chemical (material) interactions. Life is nothing more than “matter in motion.
Good and Bad Ground for Skepticism: Are robots with consciousness in out future? In theory, there is no reason to think this is not feasible, since we are just complicated thinking machines who, thus, produce consciousness. In practice, we should not expect these conscious robots anytime soon since the costs would be prohibitive, and benefits are not obvious, and the morality is questionable.
Reasons that might be put forth that conscious robots are impossible.
1. Robots are material things, consciousness is immaterial. Every other so-called immaterial phenomenon has been explained in terms of natural causes. It is naiive to think that mind would for some reason be different.
2. Robots are inorganic, minds are organic. Biochemistry has shown that the powers of organic compounds are reducible to mechanical physics. Polymers that mimic organic tissue or organic tissue itself should still be considered material composites.
3. Artifacts cannot exhibit consciousness, only natural born beings can. Orgin chauvinism, a perfectly reproduced work of art is of lesser value than the original philosophically, not in any practical sense.
4.
Robots will always be too simple to be conscious. Average human being has 37.2 trillion cells. But if it only a matter of quantity that makes the mind a special quality that it only suggests that achieving such complexity will take a long time.
Simple does not mean ineffective. In fact, we can overcome complexity with simplicity for example – the artificial heart valve or artificial hip easily containing billons of cells has been replicated with simple plastics and alloys.
The Cog Project: A Humanoid Robot
Robot that’s interesting independent of whether or not it is conscious. Cog is a life-sized robot underway at MIT.
“Growing Up” into consciousness? It was based on the hypothesis that human-level intelligence requires gaining experience from interacting with humans, life human infants do. Example? Language. It might be vastly easier to make an initially unconscious or non-conscious infant robot and let it grow up.
Sensing the environment – Path to Consciousness. It contained many sensory feedbacks to encourage learning through it sense, through empirical reality. There is clearly an importance of having a body. For example: pain avoidance system, heat sensors, current sensors, funny bones, and sensitive membrane on fingertips – send signals to control
system.
Real World versus Disembodied Al: Practical. Tend to overlook underestimate, or misconstrue the deepest problems of design.
So, Robot Evolution?
1. Multigenerational Series;
2. Speed-up Evolution;
3. Team of People who can make advances, unlike the natural situation.