This is a short clarifying post that extends my last essay Reading Hypertext: Developing Imperceptibility. In that essay I wrote:

In the modern world, science trumps theology because the scope of science is more massive and more tangible. Hubble’s deep field photographs inspire the sublime just as Bub feels what a Cathredral means not with his eyes but through more complex sensation. This is why science can be confused for theology. Science has tools for grasping the universe of the physical nature of the pot and a large part this universe is simply ungraspable. In my view, the methods of science and the methods of fiction (cannot painting be described as visual fiction?) are similar, but neither alone can build a complete and concrete pot.

The use of the term “trump” in its competitive sense is not a good use of the word in this context (revisions in the future will see some changes). The better approach is to leave religion out altogether and simply offer an observation about how fiction and science relate in terms of their methods: the method does not go to hypothesis/test, but to the scope of inquiry. The scope of fiction focuses on its development and illumination of character and point of view (See Fuentes, A Change of Skin, Moulthrop, Reagan Library, Iñárritu, Babel, and Deemer, Changing Key). In literary hypertext and variants of hypermedia, which can contain all known literary and visual genre–poetry, essay, drama, narrative, photography–the way we see, the way we observe, and the way we manipulate are extended via the link (but not only the link).

What will we learn from this extension? I don’t know where the confluence thesis (the multi-dimentionality of the human lifeworld) will lead (see links above). That’s the fun part.