FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE

War, Pestilence, Famine, Death (4 Horsemen of Apocalypse)

These biblical action figures represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the book of Revelation in the Christian testament. They appear at the cataclysmic ending of the world and reign down terror upon its inhabitants according to the biblical narrative.
In our chapter from The Life of Meaning we look at a doctor and chemist, Francis Collins, who having led the mapping of the human genome of 3 billion elements of DNA, states his unequivocal belief in a created life by God, For a project that lasted for more than 13 years, it must have taken some element of faith to stay the course.
Having set his foundation, he also defends the exploration of knowledge of the world as being just as valid as the spiritual pursuits of our humanity. He does not see the two worlds of physical and spiritual as dichotomous but complementary. However, the argument between science and faith is not just between the hard sciences and the scripture. It has also been how regional world views have been impacted by the sciences of psychology, political and cosmological soundings.
For me there are four modern corollaries of apocalyptic horsemen that represent this deconstruction of our older world view. For some, these have become the destroyers of the world "certain."
These four riders of the winds modern are...

C. Darwin

K. Marx

S. Freud

W. Heisenberg (Mr. Uncertain)

 

While three are of familiar celebrity, the fourth, Heisenberg, is not as well known as his physicist contemporaries, Einstein and Neils Bohr. In fact many falsely credit Einstein with making everything "relative" and no longer absolute. In reality all his relative postulations are "calibrated" to a known constant. It was Heisenberg that Einstein regarded as not being correct in his assumptions of the "uncertainty principle" as being that which could not be assigned definitive quanities in all aspects (position of / or momentum of an electron simultaneously) but could only be defined in terms of statistical probability. Heisenberg "did the math" (in fact created the math to explain the theory.) It fit well into the larger quantum theory of the time but also produced a social theory or time we refer to as an "age of uncertainty."
How do we interpret in the light of the four modern horsemen what Collins has to say about our world? What does it say about our human condition? What has all this got to do with doubt?

Walter Morton for Terra Incognita