God. Real. Right.

The original post about science is here. In that post, there are four sections, all requiring background and filling. The first one is setting:

this opinion is not Luddite. It’s neither anti-science nor anti-technology. Indeed, both science and technology are amazing results of the scientific-empirical or hypothetico-inductive method. The power and practicality of engineers and the acumen and creativity of scientists have changed the world and continue to provide societies which respect individualism with a functional advantage over the rest of the world.

The issue in this post is the one touting science’s strengths and benefits for culture. Once it is acceptable to use reason and nature rather than simply revelation in order to arrive at the “truth” about any particular issue, all bets are off on where the culture will go. In the West that transition took place over a period of about four hundred years, beginning somewhere around Averroes and Aquinas in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, maturing through Occam, and culminating in men like Bacon, Galileo, Newton, and Descartes in the Seventeenth Century.
People do not like change. To change even one significant element of Read the rest of this entry »