In the seventeenth century, the Protestant Reformation used the Galileo Affair to deal a blow to the claims of the papacy. A hundred years later, the secular Enlightenment turned it into a stick to trounce Christianity in general; by the nineteenth century, it had become a battleaxe to shatter all forms of religion. Those who shared this view believed that progress was possible only if the human mind was liberated from the trammels of religious creeds and made to rely exclusively on science, the embodiment of rationality. The notion that science is always and necessarily the motor of progress suffered a blow after the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. The unease that “enlightened” people felt about revealed religion in the eighteenth century gradually shifted to science, whose enormous power became a matter of concern. From the naive assumption that freedom to carry out any scientific experiment would inevitably result in a better world, we have come to question the right of science to tamper with nature. jstor.org/stable/10.1086/501379
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 08:29:49 +0000
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