HHere is a Yahoo article which is a good example of how science today is
effectively a secular religion, and regards real religion as a rival which must
be kept in its place.
I like the bit of double-talk:
"We are not the center of the universe. Everything does not revolve around
us. We just happen to live on the third planet going around a star and there
is nothing really special about our planet," he added. "And then Darwin
comes along and says there is nothing really special about humans. We just
happen to be another kind of animal. So all this seems to be debunking our
own sense of self-importance."
but
"However, science and religion are not mutually exclusive, he said."
Yet the Christian religion says that God took on human flesh and lived on
this planet for 33 years only 2,000 years ago and therefore this planet and
we humans are *very* special. So science's assessment of our importance
in the scheme of thinks is radically at odds with at least one religion's
teaching.
It seems that science and religion are not mutually exclusive, as long as
religion does not make any claims about the real world that science has
already arrogated to itself. But what is *science* doing pontificating about our
importance anyway? My tagline below is apt.
Steve
PS: Unfortunately I have had to give up my idea of a Weekly Web Watch
summary. It was just too time consuming! Apologies to those who wrote
appreciatively about it :-(
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http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991107/sc/millennium_science_3.html
Yahoo! News Science Headlines
Sunday November 7 12:12 AM ET
Science Struggles With Faith, Authority
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In 1500, if you wanted to know something about the world
around you, it was wise to ask the Church -- as Galileo found out to his dismay.
The Catholic Church still ruled most of Europe. While Islamic scholars were busy translating
Greek and Indian texts on mathematics, astronomy and the physical sciences, European
scholars, if they knew what was good for them, looked to the Bible for answers.
Science, as it is understood today, did not exist.
When the current millennium began, Europe was in the throes of the Dark Ages. Islamic
civilization was flourishing, but the heyday of Chinese invention was on the wane.
Religious leaders were pretty sure they knew how and why the world worked, and they did
not take kindly to upstarts telling them otherwise.
"In the so-called Dark Ages, knowledge was preserved in the church among monks and so
forth," Arthur Molella, director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and
Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution, told Reuters.
Even the idea of time revolved around religion, and the division of time into hours first came
about to help monks remember when to pray, around 1330. Clocks were re-invented to help
call people to prayer, as well.
An earlier incarnation came in China, and they were strictly a way for emperors to show off.
For example, in 1090 civil servant Su Sung built an elaborate tower clock that used bells and
gongs to warn of sunset, sunrise and various other times of day.
But, according to historian Daniel Boorstin, the new emperor who followed Su Sung's patron
made his early mark by declaring it faulty and allowed it to be destroyed.
So the clock had to be invented all over again in the West hundreds of years later, said
Stephen Brush, a professor of the history of science at the University of Maryland.
"Whereas things going on in the Islamic world are more influential, because they take over the
legacy of Greek antiquity," he said in a telephone interview.
For instance, Abu Ali Hasan ibn al-Haitham, more commonly known as Alhazen, determined
just at the turn of the millennium that the eye receives light to work.
"Some of the major Greek scientists like Ptolemy and Euclid used to say the way you see is
your eye sends something out," Brush said. "If you read Superman comics it is like his x-ray
vision -- he sends out a beam. Alhazen figured out it was the other way around."
Astronomy Keeps The Subjects In Line
Kings, princes and popes usually cared more about impressing the peasants with their
knowledge of the moon, the stars and the planets, so nearly all societies employed
astronomers. Here is where truly modern science began.
The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, born in 1473, was well aware of which side his
bread was buttered. His 1543 treatise putting forward the idea that the Earth revolved around
the sun was dedicated to Pope Paul III and not published until he was on his deathbed.
Some of the great astronomers who followed, including Denmark's Tycho Brahe and even
Galileo Galilei at first, stuck with the old idea that the Sun revolved around the Earth.
But then Galileo tried a new tool -- a telescope.
He could see the Moon was not smooth, but had mountains like the Earth. He counted stars
no one had seen before. He found four moons circling Jupiter and, most important of all, he
declared that the Sun, and not the Earth, was at the center of the known Universe.
This irritated the Catholic Church no end. He was tried by the Inquisition, and even threatened
with torture. At the age of 70, Galileo gave in. "I abjure, curse and detest the aforesaid errors
and heresies," he told a public audience convened by the Church, which then forbade anyone
to mention Galileo's theories.
Galileo was not rehabilitated by the Church until 1992.
But Brush said Galileo and Copernicus had actually won.
"This is generally believed to sort of kick off the whole scientific revolution by overthrowing,
eventually, the ideas of the ancient Greeks, particularly of Aristotle," Brush said in a telephone
interview.
"Starting with astronomy, it spreads on into physics and later biology, chemistry, medicine.
Mathematics developed along with it."
And Brush said the Church was a big loser. Later work showed that the Earth did indeed
move around the Sun. "The Church seems to have backed the wrong horse and lost a lot of its
intellectual authority. So you no longer turn to the Church on intellectual and scientific
matters," he said.
While astronomers were learning to use the two lenses of a telescope to look at the sky, others
were using similar lenses to see smaller worlds close up.
In 1672 Dutchman Antony van Leeuwenhoek used an early microscope to spot the first
protozoa and bacteria.
The era of discovery had begun.
Social Revolution Drives Scientific Discovery
"The evolution of science is not something separate from the evolution of culture, be it
religious or social notions," Molella said.
"Science is very much embedded in western civilization."
And in the middle of the millennium, civilization started to change. Parliaments started to
challenge the authority of kings, and philosophy led to new ways of seeing the world.
Frenchman Rene Descartes made popular the idea that nature was a kind of mechanism -- that
everything was made up of little invisible particles suspended in "ether." Scientists building on
his work found that those little particles turned out to be molecules and atoms.
Soon after, Sir Isaac Newton started his wide-ranging work in mathematics and physics,
giving the world the theory of gravity "occasioned by the fall of an apple."
On his ideas were built the ideas of Albert Einstein and others, the inventors of modern physics
and cosmology.
Bigger social change followed, with the American and French revolutions. In the middle of
them, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier started what is now known as the Chemical Revolution.
The alchemists had spent centuries looking for the "philosopher's stone" that would turn base
metals into gold, but Lavoisier found that you get out only what goes into the pot and no
more. This idea, the "conservation of matter," is now basic to all physical sciences.
The discoveries of electricity, magnetism and x-rays all changed people's abilities to control
their world.
Some scientific discoveries themselves transformed society. Naturalist Charles Darwin did not
mean to overturn Man's position as top dog in the whole universe, but his theory of natural
selection did just that for many people.
"Some people would put this in a line with Copernicus and say the general overall trend of
these discoveries is to show that humans are no longer as important as we like to think we
are," Brush said.
"We Are Not The Center Of The Universe"
"We are not the center of the universe. Everything does not revolve around us. We just
happen to live on the third planet going around a star and there is nothing really special about
our planet," he added.
"And then Darwin comes along and says there is nothing really special about humans. We just
happen to be another kind of animal. So all this seems to be debunking our own sense of self-
importance."
This revolution gathered the most speed in the 20th century. Genetics and the discovery of
DNA, microbiology and the study of cells, all showed, in part, that we truly are just another
animal.
The physical sciences also challenged old beliefs. "Cosmology and the idea of the expanding
universe and the Big Bang, were all changing our ideas about the origin of the universe,"
Molella said.
Present-day creationists still fight some aspects of science -- particularly evolution and the
geological sciences that support it. However, science and religion are not mutually exclusive,
he said.
"There is a trend among astrophysicists and cosmologists who introduce religious notions
back into the cosmic picture because they simply know so much more about how wondrous
things are and how wonderful things are...and how unlikely things are," he said.
But scientists still look to creation, rather than to a creator, for answers.
Plate tectonics -- the idea that the continents move around on floating plates -- was discovered
only 30 years ago. "Who would have thought the Earth moved?" asked Harvey Leifert, a
spokesman for the Geophysical Union.
Missions to the Moon, to Mars and beyond seek to answer questions about how the Earth
formed -- and whether life is unique to Earth. Astronomers probe the heavens with radio
waves and small spaceships, looking not only for answers about the origin of the universe but
also in the hope of finding someone else out there.
And there is plenty of discovery left here on Earth at the end of the millennium. Strange life
has been found thriving around deep ocean vents, which pour out hot and noxious sulphuric
emissions. "It's possible the origin of life is down there," Leifert said.
The science of genetics is still very young -- the map of the human genome will almost
certainly be finished in the next millennium, not this one. No one has been able to achieve
nuclear fusion at room temperature -- something that might offer future civilizations bountiful,
cheap energy.
Medical science struggles to combat aging, and has yet to conquer ancient scourges such as
infectious disease and cancer. Physicists still seek to take apart the tiniest bits of matter, and
find out more about the basic forces that hold us all together.
[...]
Copyright (c) 1996-1999 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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"Another reason that scientists are so prone to throw the baby out with the
bath water is that science itself, as I have suggested, is a religion. The
neophyte scientist, recently come or converted to the world view of
science, can be every bit as fanatical as a Christian crusader or a soldier of
Allah...Another major reason that scientists are prone to throw the baby
out with the bath water is that they do not see the baby. Many scientists
simply do not look at the evidence of the reality of God. They suffer from a
kind of tunnel vision, a psychologically self-imposed psychological set of
blinders which prevents them from turning their attention to the realm of
the spirit." (Peck M.S, "The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of
Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth", [1978], Arrow: London,
1990, p241)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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