So, last week I started a series on the integration of science and religion and I worked to dissolve some of the New Age tendency to equate science and the modern world with evil. We discovered that the modern industrialized world is basically a prerequisite of, or foundational to, the emergence of a world-centric perspective in any kind of culturally significant way. That doesn’t mean that “science wins” or that pollution or corporate greed is good, it just means that the modern world and it’s conveniences, are in a sense, required for the creation of a social platform that is aware of (and sensitive to) the injustices of cross cultural inequities.
We still have to learn how to treat the ecosystem with care and good stewardship. We still need to work to protect developing nations from exploitation. We just don’t have to abandon science, rationality, logic and modern technology to do it. We must move forward with new and innovative solutions. Like Former NBA player Will Allen, who is growing One Million pounds of organic food each year on just three acres. He is growing food right through the winter . . . in Milwaukee. (see Video Below. . .)
While I wanted to dive into religion this week, I found that there were a couple of important points yet to be made on the subject of science, modern rationality, and the positive impacts and contributions they have made to our social evolution.
Yep, I said evolution. . .
Stick with me here, this is going to get a bit heady. . .
First of all, it is important to understand the immeasurable gains that resulted from the application of the scientific method. There is quite possibly nothing that has come out of the Modern Rational Enlightenment which is more crucially important to the pursuit of truth, than the idea that ideas should be tested by reproducible experiments to ascertain their validity.
This insistence on evidence would free people from unspeakable cruelties like the Spanish Inquisition, but would later go on to deny the existence of any spiritual reality Carte Blanche. The overwhelmingly obvious demonstrability of Newtonian Physics was so powerful that the over-reaching trend towards empiricism was perhaps inevitable.
Empiricism is the idea that only physical objects with measurable location are “real”. This errant world view obviously disqualifies the existence of spirit and consciousness before the scientific method can even be applied, and thus is not good science to begin with. However, this was the backdrop for the stage on which Romanticism, Idealism and eventually post-modern philosophy would play out, all of which aiming (in one way or another) to find room for the meaning, interpretation, morals and the subjective interior of the human experience that Empiricism was trying to do away with.
Next week we will take the rocky road through modern and postmodern philosophy, before showing how the scientific method is actually calling religion into a new and grander version of itself. The long awaited integration of science and religion is on the horizon!
Until next week,
Take care of each other!
Michael SunSpirit.
oh yeah. . . here’s that video of Will Allen and Growing Power
