18 SOCIAL SCIENTIST "Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidely) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness —voila the epistemological roots of idealism. And clerical obscurantism (== philosophical idealism) of course has epistemological roots, it is not groundless; it is a sterile flower undoubtedly, but a sterile flower that grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge." 19 The big bang model of the universe is one such sterile flower, for it rules out any investigation of the universe beyond the so-called moment of creation, the singularity 'where all theory breaks down'. It is necessary to go into the roots of the idealistic interpretations of the theory of the origin of the metagalaxy, as also into the idealistic interpretations of the General Theory of Relativity. The universe is infinite and it is infinitely old. All attempts to circumscribe the universe and to limit it to the fragment that is available to cognition at a panicular stage of human history, have their roots in the class interests of the ruling classes. Bruno was burnt at the stake not because he preached that the sun was fixed and the earth was moving; Copernicus did that too. But unlike Copernicus who retained the Aristotelian idea of the finite universe, Bruno preached that the universe was infinite in time and space. This was pagan in the extreme, since it attacked the very idea of creation. A finite universe, like a machine with a finite number of parts, is convenient to the ruling classes, since it gives scope for the Hand that set the whole thing going. Engels once described certain type of bourgeois intellectuals as graduated flunkeys of clericalism. The interpretations of science as evidence for a creator should be seen as an attack on the revolutionary Working class and progressive movement and the outcry during the centenary year should be understood as the loyal declamations by these flunkeys. In this task of exposure the role of dialectical materialism is paramount. 1 Lenin V I, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism", Selected Works, Progress Publishers, 1966, p661. 2 TaylorJH, Fowler L A and McCulloch P M, Nature, Vol 277, February 8, 1979, p437. 3 Lenin V I, Materialism and Empiric-criticism, Moscow, Progress Publishers, p243. 4 Engels F, Anti'Duhring, Moscow, Progress Publisl'ers, 1969. p 111. 5 Lenin V I, op eft, p 289. 6 VasilievAV, Space Time Motion, london, Chatto and Windus, 1924, p 3.