This is Paul. Welcome to the first regular blog post for That's So Second Millennium. For 2019 I'm going to be supplementing the podcast with a series of weekend blog posts.
Let's start out with this question: Can we hope to get a broad enough picture of why so many people in Western cultures think religion and science are unavoidably opposed to do justice to the reality?
----more----People who concern themselves with this question tend to gravitate toward particular answers. These can go to extremes, like "The Bible tells these mythical tales that clearly didn't actually happen, and so that's why people believe science has disproved religion." Or, "Scientists have this conspiracy going where they hide the truth from people." They can be moderate, but still only a slice of the truth of uncertain importance, such as "We just don't do a good enough job of teaching young people what the Catholic Church teaches, or what the Bible actually says." In this, the situation is like that of any widely recognized social phenomenon. Read this, and skip down to the comments: see the tension between the worldviews by the time you've reached just the second comment.
The perceived opposition between science and religion is bound up with other social phenomena, including secularization, the growth of "fundamentalist" strains of Christianity and Islam, and the hollowing out of the old middle ground of Western societies based on what one might call "national identity churches." The old implicit social contract that because we are American, or British, or French, or Spanish, etc. we are this particular type of Christian, we will attach social stigmas to people transgressing these particular families of moral norms and not others... that is gone in Europe and has been evicted from broad swaths of America. A dry but important snapshot of contemporary problems in Catholic America can be found in this report from the McGrath Institute for Church Life.
I doubt I am treading on shaky ground by thinking that the media saturation of our culture sucks up more of our mental bandwidth than it used to, and that in every subculture the effect is to focus us more on the bubble of the present, on secular politics and on the panoply of media franchises. On the whole I suspect we think less about history, less about philosophy, less about mathematics, less about science aside from a sort of froth of surface factoids, and less about religion than we would otherwise.
Yet, as the old saying suggests, our ignorance of our own history in no way eliminates our dependence on it, only our ability to recognize patterns and consciously change them or at least, on an individual basis, cope with them. We humans have been conducting experiments on each other for as long as we have been anything like the creatures we now are, however many tens or hundreds of thousands of years that has been, and we have thousands of years' worth of notes on the results. I think that we would, on average, benefit from far more extensive reading and thought about the ways our ancestors have tried to work out the problems of human existence. I think a terrifying aspect of contemporary secularism is its dismissal of basically the entirety of past human culture as racist, misogynistic, and homophobic, and therefore not worth taking seriously.
In future entries I intend to explore these hypotheses among others:
This is a good juncture to let you know that the podcast and blog are available at both tssm.podbean.com and at paggeology.net/category/tssm, the WordPress blog attached to my business website. You may prefer to follow and leave comments on TSSM at the latter site. We are still feeling our way forward and will probably be making further changes to the platform in the coming months.
The Post Christian meditations address the larger question, "Why do people believe science and the Catholic, Christian faith are mutually contradictory?" by considering the background reasons why people in the modern West desire to punish the faith of their ancestors and deny it credibility, apart from any cogent reasons to reject its actual dogmas and teachings.
Episode 037 - Jill Pasteris: Christian scientist
Bonus Episode - Nicolaus Steno
Episode 036 - Anne Hofmeister on Galactic Rotation, Math, and Glass
Episode 035 - Anne Hofmeister Shakes Up Earth Science
Episode 034 - Stephen Barr on Why to Be a Religious (and Catholic) Scientist
Episode 033 - Stephen Barr on Lemaitre-Hubble Law and the Society of Catholic Scientists
Episode 032 - Science and Saints
Request for Feedback
Episode 031 - Br. Guy Consolmagno: Teaching Science and Human Nature
Episode 030 - Br. Guy Consolmagno: Galileo and Carl Sagan
Episode 029 - Geological Awe
Episode 028 - Absolute Geologic Dating
Episode 027 - Relative Geologic Dating
Episode 026 - The Rejection of Young Earth Creationism in the 19th Century
Episode 025 - Geology after Steno: Catastrophism, Uniformitarianism, and Fideism
Episode 024 - Geology after Steno: Diluvialism, Neptunism, and Vulcanism
Episode 023 - Clericalism, Sex Abuse, Addiction, and Hope
Episode 022 - Nicolaus Steno (Niels Stensen) - The Protogeologist
Episode 021 - Hypocrisy and Geology: Battlegrounds Between Faith and Science
Episode 020 - Bill and Father Spitzer Talk Intellectual Culture and Education
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