what is pneumatics?

25.I.1430

Pneumatics is a certain outlook on knowledge that will take it seriously when it is told things like God blows a life giving breath into living things , and other things which to a "pure reason" scientist are fantastical.

It is a believer's "science" or rather epistemology. For its aim or pretension, it seeks to integrate religious beliefs and scientific knowledge, putting either in the context of the other.

Effectively, pneumatics replaces the a priori assumption of atheism or materialism - alias "pure reason" to some - with the a priori assumption/choice of theism and axioms of religious belief.

Returning to the example pneumatics would accept the notions of a spirit in living organisms and even try to account for it in as empirical or analytical a way as possible.

Thus it will note much like scientists - or indeed elementary school pupils - the things that set "life" apart from inanimate things even though both classes are constituted of the same matter. Namely that they are endowed with complexes of autonomous self-regulating mechanisms. It would note this is the most-physical description possible yet of a soul, a sort of ordering or organizing principle endowed by the Divine.

Unlike modern "science", instead of saying spirit cannot be seen therefore it does not exist until proven otherwise, pneumatology (or pneumatics) having accepted its existence as a given , would say that the closest we've come to seeing "soul" is in that it is closely associated with those homeostatic processes unique to life.

In a further sweep we could even say the "fast" homeostatic mechanisms of life - which must be the result of spirit, also belong to a spectrum or processes that also includes those subitted by inanimate matter - paving the way to rationalising another religious belief - that inanimate matter is not so inanimate after all and that it too is endowed with such things as consciousness comfort and discomfort and so on.


We can recall the italicized greek word "biota" indicates a duality perhaps precisely that of the presence of matter and of something else, the soul in living organisms.

In other words, pneumatics is much ado about how and what religion-believing scientists really think, in the privacy of their thoughts, or the security of their home countries' campuses - not in international symposia or western academic campuses.

It would thus have to admit that it is not "science" in the modern academic sense of the word of hard or natural science. Nor it is necessary to call it "pseudoscience". It simply is a paradigm of knowledge , or better, an epistemology (ie, a set of knowledge-defining and knowledge-ordering principles).

Attempting to express religious beliefs and scientific knowledge in terms of each other, and reconcile both in a coherent body of knowledge also leads to such endeavours as reasoned apologetics, eg for ritual and other things, much like the ancient practice of "kalam", but hopefully i ways that are a lot more careful, and knowledgeable.