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 Moody834 rated 7 months ago - In the mid to late 1890s, the founder and first President of Cornell University, and later one of its history professors, A.D. White, had published a work which -- were it more widely known today -- would belong with those on the front lines of the war between science and religion. It is the work of...
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- Moody834 rated 7 months ago
- In the mid to late 1890s, the founder and first President of Cornell University, and later one of its history professors, A.D. White, had published a work which -- were it more widely known today -- would belong with those on the front lines of the war between science and religion. It is the work of a highly intellectual man who, according to Cornellian Elana Beale, "wanted an interdisciplinary institution reminiscent of the great, historical universities of Europe, but free of religious affiliation", and who held "lifelong advocacy for, and fascination with, coeducation" (Beale notes that "his second wife, Helen Magill, was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in America"). In A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, White illustrates at great length the issues facing science and the response of science to those issues, especially where popular religion was seeking to maintain its hold. The link here provided leads to the complete text.
We've come a long way since White's two volume work was published. Over a hundred years have passed. Science has discovered more and more evidence in support of the theory of evolution (and nothing to call into question the fact of it). Science has also learned a great deal more about physics and the way our universe became what it is.
And yet, here in America (and in some other places), there appears to be a resurgence of religious animosity toward science. We are arguing in school board meetings, in courts, in public places, about the "controversy" surrounding the theory of evolution. We are having these debates when, in fact, the only controversy exists in the minds of angry religionists. Same as it ever was. No matter how much has changed, no matter how much science has expanded and refined its understanding of the world, those who cling to their religious world view will not have it. They cannot, because they cannot conceive of anything beyond the supposed authority and bound words of their sacred text. Science, it seems to them, will undo "God" in the heart of humanity by pushing their mythology into the marginalia and footnotes (if not endnotes) of history.
The more fundamentalist adherents of religion conflate education with indoctrination, or so it seems. What they really want is an end to a genuine, real, formal education, which they perceive as a tool of the their "Devil". They sincerely believe that science indoctrinates people into a godless/satanic world view. This is symptomatic of their delusion, and it is sad that they will not see how much they rob themselves of, even as they rob their progeny of it as well.
You do not have to be godless or satanic in order to accept the facts of the world. What you have to do is give up on literal interpretations of so-called sacred texts, you have to give up on certain conceptions of "God". If there is a "God", she/he/it (or they) is much further from our oversimplified understanding than we've realized, and those who came before us were misled by their understandable ignorance. Even a hundred years ago (and, actually, quite a great many more years than that) there were people who understood that much. Science continues, in its non-theistic fashion, to prove the point. So the question is, why are so many people afraid to embrace that fact today? What is really so terrifying about an even greater universe than religions have made?
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