Abandon God, and Science Will Die

The Stream ^ | May 30, 2016 | John Zmirak

[Heartlander]

Abandon God, and Science Will Die

The New Atheists are sawing off the branch on which science is sitting.

By John Zmirak Published on May 30, 2016 •

Every educated person ought to study the ancient world. What we will find in those cultures is extraordinary and fascinating, such that thousands of Western scholars have spent their lifetimes mining the riches of these complex nations, without ever exhausting the richness laid down by ancient philosophers, poets and sages.

There’s one thing that each of these civilizations lacked, which wouldn’t make an appearance until the Christian Middle Ages: experimental science that yields a reliable understanding of the material world and hence technological advancements that better human life. Yes, there were careful and deeply insightful philosophical thinkers, and individual tinkerers whose curiosity drove them to test an invention or theory here and there. But no one ever followed up on the inventions of Archimedes, or systematically experimented to see where Galen had been mistaken.

No schools established laboratories and attracted teams of researchers, laying out hypotheses and training younger scientists to test them. No one set up faculties for the steady advancement of medicine by careful trial and error, or carefully tested the theories of the men who had come before them. Even when seeds of genius popped up in the ancient soil, they found it dry and rocky, with none of what science needed to nurture its steady, predictable growth. Scientist (and priest) Stanley Jaki surveys the weathered ruins of ancient inquiry in his learned book The Savior of Science and shows why the ancient Egyptians, Hindus, Chinese, and Babylonians, for all their genius, never developed anything like science.

Why the West Is Different

Why was this true in so many cultures, but not true in our own? What was it that led to the growth of experimental science with such pioneers as St. Hildgard of Bingen, St. Albert the Great, and the monk Roger Bacon? What elements in our culture laid the groundwork for the theories of Newton, Kepler, Leibniz and (yes) Galileo? What set the Christian West apart?

It was the unique worldview of the Jews, implanted in the rationalism of Greece and Rome, and guaranteed by faith. It is easy for us to miss the distinctive characteristics that set this distinctively Western, Christian mindset apart from its competitors, in the same way that we forget that we are breathing — until something goes wrong, and we choke on a noxious gas. Let us go through these characteristics one by one:

• We believe that God is rational, and that he created an orderly world which mirrors His rationality. So by testing the way the world responds to our activity — via experiments — we can gain reliable knowledge for the future.
• We believe that we are images of God. Therefore the world’s rational structure is transparent to the light of our own God-given reason, such that we can gradually come to know it better than our ancestors did.
• We believe that the world did not always exist, and won’t disappear then reappear in an endless loop of meaningless cosmic cycles.
• We believe that the world was created “good,” is sharply distinct from God Himself, and subject to us as its “stewards.” So it is legitimate and good for us to engage it and try to improve it.
• We believe in a type of (non-utopian) progress, and think that the world can and should become a more humane place, where suffering diminishes and justice prevails more widely.

M.I.T. and NASA Were Made Possible on Mount Sinai

None of these assertions about reality were the fruit of intellectuals brooding about the nature of the universe. Instead, they are the lessons the Jewish people took from God’s revelation to them, spread out through their history and recorded in the Old Testament. Their message is so much more hopeful than anything offered by any pagan philosophy, that by the time of Christ there were thousands of gentile converts to Judaism all over the Roman world — and many more who were deeply attracted to the Jewish revelation, but unable to commit to circumcision, and other rigors of Jewish law. These were the men and women to whom St. Paul opened the door when he championed the cause of gentile converts to Christianity, and convinced the other apostles to let them join the Church without first becoming Jews.

These statements cannot be proven like mathematical theorems. They are what Jacques Maritain called “pre-philosophy,” and in thought about the cosmos they serve the same role as axioms in mathematics. If you accept them, a whole world of new thought and understanding suddenly becomes possible. Reject one or more of them, and you will end up sooner or later in a hopeless cul-de-sac.

The Death of Humanity

That’s precisely where science is heading today, as some of the findings of science are being used to undermine all the tenets of that pre-philosophy: Scientists are sawing off the branch on which they’re sitting. In his profound new book The Death of Humanity, Richard Weikart documents how self-appointed spokesmen for “Science” such as “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins — and thousands who follow his lead — reject the idea of objective morality, free will, and the meaningfulness of life. Instead they blithely insist that everything — every single thing — in human nature can be traced to natural selection and blind variation. Religious impulses, altruism, friendship, love, even scientific curiosity, must all be explained away as the purposeless side-effects of mutations.

Human consciousness itself is a purely chemical, deterministic process entirely driven by the firing of neurons in the brain — which means that it is impossible to describe knowledge as objective, or any statement as really “true.” The perception that each of us has that a proposition is provable, or an experiment is conclusive, is no guarantee of anything in external reality; instead it is the outcome of subatomic dominoes falling in random patterns. How can science continue if even scientists start to believe this about their minds?

The answer is that it cannot. The death of humanity which Weikart describes will also be the death of science. We are already seeing state attorneys general trying to prosecute scientists who question the political orthodoxy of climate activists, federal regulations overriding the medical judgments of doctors treating “transgender” patients, and a dogmatic refusal on part of many well-educated people to admit that a human embryo is living or human, or that physical sex exists.

A few more decades of such irrationalism will undermine completely the foundations of research and truth-seeking in the sciences, and the West will go into the same despairing stasis that haunted ancient Egypt, India, and China. Ironically, the only hope for science now is a rebirth of faith.

[Heartlander]

Excerpt from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1844, p. 464:

As this chapter is written in the early twenty-first century, the hypothesis that the universe reflect intelligent design has provoked a bitter debate in the United States. How very different was the intellectual world of the early nineteenth century! Then, virtually everyone believed in intelligent design. Faith in the rational design of the universe underlay the world-view of the Enlightenment, shared by Isaac Newton, John Locke, and the American Founding Fathers. Even the outspoke critics of Christianity embraced not atheism but deism, that is, belief in an impersonal, remote deity who had created the universe and designed it so perfectly that it ran along of its own accord, following natural laws without need for further divine intervention. The common used expression “the book of nature” referred to the universal practice of viewing nature as a revelation of God’s power and wisdom. Christians were fond of saying that they accepted two divine revelations: the Bible and the book of nature. For desists like Thomas Paine, the book of nature alone sufficed, rendering what he called the “fables” of the Bible superfluous. The desire to demonstrate the glory of God, whether deist or – more commonly – Christian, constituted one of the principal motivations for scientific activity in the early republic, along with national pride, the hope for useful applications, and, of course, the joy of science itself.

***<<<<&>>>>***

"For two millennia, the design argument provided an intellectual foundation for much of Western thought. From classical antiquity through the rise of modern science, leading philosophers, theologians, and scientists. From Plato to Aquinas to Newton, maintained that nature manifests the design of a preexistent mind or intelligence. Moreover, for many Western thinkers, the idea that the physical universe reflected the purpose or design of a preexistent mind, a Creator, served to guarantee humanity's own sense of purpose and meaning. Yet today in nearly every academic discipline from law to literary theory, from behavioral science to biology, a thoroughly materialistic understanding of humanity and its place in the universe has come to dominate. Free will, meaning, purpose, and God have become pejorative terms in the academy. Matter has subsumed mind; cosmos replaced Creator."
- Steven Meyer

[odawg]

“It was the unique worldview of the Jews...”

Strange assertion, since the Jews, in their heydey, as a nation for hundreds of years, never developed science.

[BenLurkin]

[afsnco]

The left, who has controlled academia for decades, rejects science. We need look no further than “global warming” to see this is the case. They claim their models are science which can predict the future 100 years from now, and their models are all wrong.

[sparklite2]

This whole article is “unique.”

The scientific method gives us the civilization we have today, but when it touches on religious beliefs, it’s useless. Right.

[AppyPappy]

Science is based on faith.

[Dick Bachert]

The incessant “progressive” leftist promoted debate about gay marriage isn’t about gay marriage.
The incessant “progressive” leftist promoted debate about homosexuality isn’t about homosexuality.
The incessant “progressive” leftist promoted debate about teen sexuality isn’t about teen sex.
The incessant “progressive” leftist promoted debate about promiscuity and marital infidelity isn’t about promiscuity.
The incessant “progressive” leftist promoted debate about no-fault divorce isn’t about divorce.
The NEW “progressive” leftist promoted debate about transgender bathrooms isn’t about transgender bathrooms.
And the NEW “progressive” leftist promoted debate about adult-child sexuality isn’t about pederasty or pedophilia.
The Utopian “progressive” left seeks to replace God with man (or SOME VERY “SPECIAL” MEN!), and God’s universe with one of man’s design.
The “progressive” left seeks to abolish God’s creation of sex, gender, and sexuality.
In another area, the “progressive” left seeks to convince us that man alone controls the universe. When the left claims that man causes climate change and man causes earthquakes (by fracking, water injection, etc.), the “progressive” left is seeking to eliminate God.
“Progressive” leftists believe, or claim to believe, that a junta of wise men – made so by birth to the “right” parents or educated in the “right” universities – can perfect the world. Think utopia or heaven on earth.
To achieve their goal, the “progressive” left must destroy God in the minds of the men they seek to rule.
Ironically, it was the agnostic, humanist, Darwinist commentator H.L.Mencken who summarized the goal of the “progressive” left in these 16 words:
“The urge to save humanity is most often a false front for the urge to rule.”
Taking their cue from George Orwell, they call themselves “progressives”, hoping that the uninformed and ignorant among us would be fooled by this gaggle of Utopian fools who seek to drag us to another of the command societies that have always failed.
Do you remember back the 2008 “election” when the arch “progressive” Obama declared that he would “transform America”? At the time I and many others asked to what would we wish to “transform” – in other words “PROGRESS” – a nation based on these words?
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
After nearly 8 years of a “progressive” leftist in the White House, we have our answer: We have been transformed BACKWARD (regressed) from the truths of the Declaration and a “Creator” honoring people to a nation of soon to be slaves ruled by elitist Utopians who, by virtue of their “superiority”, know far better how we should live our lives than we do.
The vernacular for that is TOTALITARIANISM!
There is no room for a “Creator” in such a system.
There is also NO ROOM FOR “..LIFE, LIBERTY OR ...HAPPINESS”.

[Albion Wilde]

bump

[Montana_Sam]

It is fun to watch the science-without-God crowd declare that no intelligence was required to create the universe or life, then proceed with an argument that actually contains no intelligence or logic whatever! Hawking and Dawkins both have the ability to gaslight the issue, and do so without shame. Funny.

[Hebrews 11:6]

The author is quite correct but far too briefly so, although of course he tailored his article to a specific need. Still, at a minimum, I’d have liked to see a fleshing out of the OT verses, and there are many, which undergird his premise; moreover, rather than merely lamenting these latest scoffers, a detailed rebuttal to them is needed. Which is just a way of saying that more work is necessary—although one gets the very distinct impression that this is a long inevitable and unstoppable slope that can only culminate in a Great Tribulation.

[Hebrews 11:6]

I know that Hawking certainly knows better and Romans 1, at least, argues that Dawkins does as well.

[NorthMountain]

It was the unique worldview of the Jews, implanted in the rationalism of Greece and Rome, and guaranteed by faith.

It is frequently helpful to read a complete sentence. "Western Civilization" is the product of Jewish revelation meeting Graeco-Roman reason, enlightened by faith in Jesus Christ. Our Lord truly came at the fullness of time.

[odawg]

I did. It didn’t change anything. A better argument could be made, and has been made, that science, individualism, etc. followed the Protestant Reformation. Before then, scholars did not study nature, they studied Aristotle.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I think Zmirak's main points stand:

It was the intellectual culture of Jewish and Christian communities of Europe that made the Scientific Revolution possible. Their conviction that the Universe is governed by Law (since they worshiped God as Lawgiver) and that this Law is intelligible (since we are rational human beings created in God´s image) was not widely or systematically developed in non-Judeo-Christian cultures.

This is not to say that other cultures did not have brilliant individuals and brilliant achievements; however, he Scientific Method and the Scientific Revolution were not among them.

The same Catholic University constellation which in one era saw some scholars "stuck" on Aristotle, in that same era developed the scientific breakthroughs that went beyond Aristotle.

While glad to give credit where credit is due to great Protestant thinkers, scientific progress started under Catholic auspices way before the Reformation. Historians of science such as Pierre Duhem credit medieval Catholic mathematicians and philosophers such as

• John Buridan - 13th century priest/logician who developed the theory of "Impetus" (inertia)
• Nicole Oresme - 14th century theologian/mathematician who hypothesized the rotation of the earth on its axis, and
• Roger Bacon - 13th century Franciscan monk and advocate of the empirical method

as the founders of modern science.

`

God as Geometer, medieval, ca. 1260 AD)

`

[Mrs. Don-o]

Odawg, I would say the Jews developed a culture of rationality: a large number of literate people, revering scholarly achievement and intellectual discipline, and highly trained in abstract and analytical thought. From this culture emerged the post-Haskala Jews, who, to a disproportionate degree, have made such phenomenal scientific and technical contributions.

Don't underestimate the belief in a rational, lawfully-constituted Universe as a prerequisite for true empirical thinking. Many brilliant people lived in cultures which thought of material reality as Maya (illusion) or as unworthy of sustained investigation. Whatever wonderful things they developed, they did not develop scientific minds.

[odawg]

I don’t know what your point is, but modern scientific research developed in Christian Europe after the Protestant Reformation and especially Francis Bacon.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I'm first in line to applaud Francis Bacon, but my point was that the intellectual beginnings of the modern scientific endeavor began well before Francis Bacon.

For a truly fascinating history, let me recommend for your pleasure "The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution" by James Hannam, physicist and historian (LINK).

Rocked my world.