Science is progressive, and it tends toward consensus of necessity. Science discovers, illuminates, and crafts facts, and we rely on these complex facts in practical ways. Unlike religion, science is pretty much the same collection of complex facts in all cultures around the world. These facts are uncovered with considerable effort by peer-reviewed scientific guilds around a multitude of specializations and societies. It is a remarkable global division of labor.
The cumulative result of this detailed and systematic study of nature is something quite remarkable and unexpected -- a grand narrative that unifies knowledge and the many languages of science. All of the facts discovered by scientists working in narrow specializations turn out to be hierarchically organized by chronology, scale and thresholds of emergent complexity. The jumble of disconnected facts you learned in high school and university turns out to be an amazing story -- a history of nature and our species. The physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker called this history of nature "the most important discovery of modern science." We call it Big History.
Big History is the narrative account of the 13.7 billion-year history of our universe, the 4.5 billion-year evolution of our planet, the 7 million-year rise of our species, and the 10,000-year accelerating drama of human civilization. Every time we log on to the Internet or pump 200 million-year-old fossil fuels into our cars, we affirm this story in deed, if not in thought or understanding.
In brief, our omnicentric universe began as something like infinite heat, infinite density, and total symmetry. This universe expanded and evolved into more differentiated and complex structures -- forces, quarks, hydrogen, helium, galaxies, stars, heavier elements and planetary systems. Some 3.5 billion years ago, in a small second- or third-generation solar system, the intricate processes called "life" began on at least one small planet. Animate matter-energy on Earth presented itself as a marvelous new intensification of the creative dynamic at work in the universe. Then some 2 million years ago, as if yesterday in the enormous timescales of the universe, proto-humans emerged on the savanna of Africa with enormously heightened capacities for conscious self-reflection, language, and tool making. Ten thousand years ago, agriculture began, and with it growing populations of humans living in ever larger and more complex societies. This unfolding leads us all the way to today, 7 billion of us collectively transforming the planet and ourselves.
The wonder of it all is that each of us is a collection of transient atoms, recycled stardust become conscious beings, engaged in a global conversation, brought to us by ephemeral electrons cascading through the Internet and bouncing off of satellites.
Religionists and others who deny certain facts of this Big History, who don't understand or accept the scope and some of the important details of this new unity of knowledge, do great damage to our culture and to their own credibility.
Big History, however, does not necessarily authorize a disenchanted universe, as argued by many of the popular oracles of science today. Like any great story, Big History is open to multiple interpretations, so long as one is faithful to the text -- in this case, the "Book of Nature" as progressively discovered by science. The Stoic and existentialist interpretations of science are not the only or even obvious choices.
Other interpretations of Big History, friendly to religious intuitions, are possible, though it would be silly to look for the specifics of science in sacred scriptures. Religionists must first comprehend scientific facts and scientific methods before they can constructively debate scientism and productively engage their own sacred traditions. One should not confuse the content of science with one's own metaphysical prejudices and ideological preferences.
But we must learn to walk, before we can run. We need to humbly put questions about the universe and the universal back at the heart of education, including and especially religious education. We should approach science from the vantage point of Big History, and teach religion in a way that embraces our common scientific origin story.
As the politician and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan once quipped, "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." Big History is the largest compilation of facts that we have about the universe and ourselves. The challenge is to study this new story with eyes that see and ears that hear.
Follow William Grassie on Twitter: www.twitter.com/metanexus
Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D.: Have Scientific Questions? There Are No 'Answers in Genesis'
History of science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Harvard University - The Department of the History of Science
Internet History of Science Sourcebook - Fordham University
The Program in History of Science - The Program in History of ...
Same old tired postmodern attempt to redefine science as a cultural narrative so that religious views might have some standing.
And this is somehow a bad thing, that knowledge increases?
You care clearly clueless about science.
Science is now asking some of these same questions and is finding clues to how and why we are here while in pursuit of describing the 'Big History'. Are we all connected? Is there some larger purpose to our existence? This requires a change in worldview from a perspective of being separate from you environment to a realization that you are an integral part of your environment.
One of the big misconceptions is the pure materialist viewpoint that science only reveals a cold, objective universe. New evidence in the areas of global consciousness studies, mind effects on healing, physiology and quantum particles is revealing that everything we focus on, think and do has local and non-local effects. These studies, reviewed in Spiritual Evolution, suggest a very different landscape and meaning to our existence in this world and the greater universe. It places responsibility squarely back on our shoulders and perhaps suggests a collective consciousness that transcends our own.
Now they have a new bible. They must be happy.
But in one sense I think you are right. Scientists are people who live by reason and logic, and they tend towards being rationalists as a matter of faith, without realizing how ideological and unscientific they really are being. The myth of rational enlightenment is what they live by and it is the source of their privilege.
There's always the finesse.
What science tells us is that "enchantment" is entirely inside the mechanism. As humans we have a drive to rationally deconstruct physical reality to our advantage and that particular motivation impacts the pain/reward center or we wouldn't be doing it. But the physical reality that it reveals has no "enchantment". When you look up at the night sky and go wow that's happening inside you. Physical reality is colorless, odorless, silent, caused, empty, rational and interpreted by your brain as the wonderful meaning-packed emotional noisy smelly colorful conscious experience in which you live, right down to the agent you in your mind, so that the genes can perpetuate. No amount of obfuscation will reconcile physical reality to our immaterial conscious experience (including the body's felt emotional states) and make them both the same world, and we each deal with it the way we do. It's just happening and no particular way is "right" except from inside the mechanism. As the imminent scientists Hawking and Manilow opine, the evidence supports the view that our actions are determined by our brain following the known laws of science, and not by some agent acting outside those laws. And the evidence for that view is modern evolutionary biology (Big History) and neuroscience. Welcome to the disenchanted universe.
Conversely, you can get 'downward causation' or 'mind over matter', where the evidence supports the view that our brains are determined by our mental activities following unknown laws of science. http://www.livescience.com/1488-meditation-sharpens-mind.html
Yes, of course all intelligent folks should know what science has learned. While speculation ought not violate such knowledge, we cannot do without imagination, as every scientific hypothesis testifies. Science operates with statistical results measure by degrees of validity. We humans must make singular decisions, especially on the question, "To be or not to be." Religion's job is to make sure we see the importance of what we decide.
1. You should distinguish between the religions who pronounce "God did it" and the Dharmas which do not.
2. While pronouncing "God did it", whether 6000 or 13.7 billion years ago clearly solves nothing, the dominant materialist paradigm which sees 'inert matter' obeying mechanical laws and sprouting consciousness also fails the fact test. You rightly say though that science crafts facts. It presents another mythology, though filled with objective facts.
This is recognized by keen thinkers: In his 4 volume History of Science, John Desmond Bernal writes, "Science, in one aspect is ordered technique; in another, it is rationalized mythology."
Not just from the religions but also from materialist science, a little humility is in order.
Quit spouting nonsense. You are 'inert matter' obeying mechanical laws and you're conscious.
"Science, in one aspect is ordered technique; in another, it is rationalized mythology."
That's simply false and shows a deep misunderstanding of what science is and does.