Do words like “Intelligent Design” or “Faith in God” make you condescendingly smile or get your eyes rolling? Read-on.
Checking what happened in the scientific community after Darwin, it would be fair to say that scientists as a whole went from being most probably theists to most probably atheists. Basically, science replaced God or made it obsolete. Why? and why would that make sense? There are only 2 ways I explain that:
1) they had used the bible as a mere natural history book and then no longer (in which case they should have been a bit more careful and the point is moot).
2) they had used the claimed “facts” of the bible as prop for their faith… when that prop was gone, well that faith was also gone and was put in something more reliable: Science.
In the latter case, which is suspect was more probable, faith then, was just a means to quell the disquieting nature of deep unanswered or unanswerable questions and it still is. Science won, not because it was objectively true, but because objectivity provides a sense of satisfaction, and interestingly enough that is exactly what traditional religion provides to whose who believe: Satisfactory answers.
Science also aims at satisfying its believers. Being by definition, a work in progress, what is is true today does not need to be true tomorrow, but scientists have faith that it will eventually provide the right (and satisfactory) answers through application and refinement of the scientific method.
It is not my contention that all scientist worship science. There is a (quantum) difference between trusting a particular process and having faith, meaning religious faith, in it. The way I tell is considering the effect, purpose and result of that trust.
Whenever scientific conclusions are the basis for determining the meaning and/or purpose of life (or lack thereof) it is most definitely an act of “religious” faith. It constitutes ultimate belief in a notion/system in/to which one entrusts one’s own intrinsic value (or lack thereof) with no other guarantee than that faith itself. In that, the scientific method is the opiate of the elites… and science is their God.
Such people are no better or worse than the most naive of the fervent faithful in traditional religions. To that effect I suspect that most skeptics fall in that category of pseudo-religious, having exchanged superstitions, ready-to-consume beliefs and imaginary friends for the more rigorous analysis of hard data paradise or scientific nirvana. To those, one might, while reading their stinging rebuttal and vehement rebuke of biblical or other religious belief, condescendingly smile or roll one’s eyes…
cafeproz 