JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
- 63,590
- 16,756
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So often people say that science and religion are opposed to each other that it is almost considered a fact of the public domain. And yet were it not for the Judeo-Christian faith, science would never have had the influence on society that it has had in Western culture but now that our society is bleaching itself of all its Judeo-Christain values, science is returning to the mystical view that it had prior to the rise of Judeo-Christianity.
In the ancient world, the Atomist school of thought and the great philosophers like Socrates and Plato were viewed by the larger society as merely one more competing set of opinions that were on an equal level as the other competing world views that held the u niverse to be irrational and not subject to discovery through reason. Just because fire produced heat did not mean that something was going on with atoms necessarily, according to most, but was perhaps the product of fire elemental spirits. Spirits were attributed to almost everything from mountains to rivers to animals to the stars. So any materialistic analysis was at best presumptive if not foolish.
When Christianity was made the official religon of the roman Empire this began to change slowly. In Christianity, the universe is presumed to be rational since the Creator who made it was Himself rational and the universe would therefore reflect that rationality. So the views of the Atomists, Socrates and his disciples and the overall view of the universe as being capable of being expressed in human language became the root assumption in Western society.
Along with that change in world view that placed Reason as a tool alongside revelation for discovering Truth, the contention between the Protestants and Catholics caused an explosion of literacy among Westerners as people sought to be able to read the Bible themselves and deetermine what religion they would embrace, and this literacy made the whole public capable of reading of science as well and coming to understand it well enough that for many science replaced religion altogether as the principle source of Truths about our universe.
But today in our post-Christian, post0Modern society, the public is returning to a black-box view of science. Unable to understand any of it themselves, and not encouraged to even try by a growing number of scientists, more and more common is this view that science is just another form of faith system, but instead of priests or shamen, we have men in white coats who call themselves scientists and who are presumed to be oracles of Truth purely on a circular set of assumptions. Lacking this understanding the public is prey to all sorts of charlatans posing as scientists or doctors selling all sorts of snake oil.
Eventually the public will tire of this obedience to the science-priests and stop supporting the scientific exploration of our universe and Reality. Already in this election we have idiots asserting that space exploration and colonizing our moon and the planets of our solar system to be an insane waste of precious resources, and people are no longer alerted by scientific studies that show 'X' to be harmful in any way worse than what we accept on a daily basis anyway. They are becoming inurred to the contributions of science and reason.
The great irony here is that this is all happening just as science is on the cusp of its greatest acheivements and the ushering in of a virtual technological utopia of indefinate lifespans, plentiful resources that obsetes the requirement to labor and puts the knowlege of the universe at the finger-tips of anyone who can afford an occasional connection to the internet.
We need to rebuff this notion that religion, and Christianity in particular, is incompatible with science. Most Christians do NOT believe this to be the case, but that percentage is falling day by day. Science and the rest of society stand to lose the most in a democratic political system from this rebirth of irrational world views.
In the ancient world, the Atomist school of thought and the great philosophers like Socrates and Plato were viewed by the larger society as merely one more competing set of opinions that were on an equal level as the other competing world views that held the u niverse to be irrational and not subject to discovery through reason. Just because fire produced heat did not mean that something was going on with atoms necessarily, according to most, but was perhaps the product of fire elemental spirits. Spirits were attributed to almost everything from mountains to rivers to animals to the stars. So any materialistic analysis was at best presumptive if not foolish.
When Christianity was made the official religon of the roman Empire this began to change slowly. In Christianity, the universe is presumed to be rational since the Creator who made it was Himself rational and the universe would therefore reflect that rationality. So the views of the Atomists, Socrates and his disciples and the overall view of the universe as being capable of being expressed in human language became the root assumption in Western society.
Along with that change in world view that placed Reason as a tool alongside revelation for discovering Truth, the contention between the Protestants and Catholics caused an explosion of literacy among Westerners as people sought to be able to read the Bible themselves and deetermine what religion they would embrace, and this literacy made the whole public capable of reading of science as well and coming to understand it well enough that for many science replaced religion altogether as the principle source of Truths about our universe.
But today in our post-Christian, post0Modern society, the public is returning to a black-box view of science. Unable to understand any of it themselves, and not encouraged to even try by a growing number of scientists, more and more common is this view that science is just another form of faith system, but instead of priests or shamen, we have men in white coats who call themselves scientists and who are presumed to be oracles of Truth purely on a circular set of assumptions. Lacking this understanding the public is prey to all sorts of charlatans posing as scientists or doctors selling all sorts of snake oil.
Eventually the public will tire of this obedience to the science-priests and stop supporting the scientific exploration of our universe and Reality. Already in this election we have idiots asserting that space exploration and colonizing our moon and the planets of our solar system to be an insane waste of precious resources, and people are no longer alerted by scientific studies that show 'X' to be harmful in any way worse than what we accept on a daily basis anyway. They are becoming inurred to the contributions of science and reason.
The great irony here is that this is all happening just as science is on the cusp of its greatest acheivements and the ushering in of a virtual technological utopia of indefinate lifespans, plentiful resources that obsetes the requirement to labor and puts the knowlege of the universe at the finger-tips of anyone who can afford an occasional connection to the internet.
We need to rebuff this notion that religion, and Christianity in particular, is incompatible with science. Most Christians do NOT believe this to be the case, but that percentage is falling day by day. Science and the rest of society stand to lose the most in a democratic political system from this rebirth of irrational world views.
