The Mistrust of Science

[DetlefK]

21. Oh, come on. One could as well make an argument that "white people" invented science.

Of course Newton, Galilei and Pascal were religious. Everybody was religious back then. This was a cultural thing. NOT being religious was absolutely outrageous and ridiculous.

You shouldn't confuse the culture and thinking back then with the thinking of nowadays. Our current approach to science/technology/knowledge is that new things are better than old things.
But up until approximately 17th/18th century, the mindset was that old knowledge is better than new knowledge. The european culture back then was based on an underlying cultural meme from Ancient Europe that the present is merely a poor and imperfect copy of a golden, wise and glorious past.

The mindset was that older sources are more accurate and believable than new sources. That's one reason (in addition to religion) why the Bible was considered so infallible: It was fucking old!
For the same reason, the esoteric "Corpus Hermeticum" became a major driving-power in research and culture because it had been misdated to be many millennia old.
One of the major scholars of the Renaissance (either Ficino or Mirandola, I forgot) had open doubts about all this occult magic described in the Corpus Hermeticum and the rituals how to invoke spirits and daemons, because he was a devout Christian. But he nevertheless continued his work in this area because the "Corpus Hermeticum" was thought to be old and the old sources are always right. So he made up an explanation that there is good magic, related to planets and angels, and evil magic, related to stars and daemons, (this split does not exist in the Corpus Hermeticum) and he had an excuse to continue doing research on good magic.

Galileo's big sin was to doubt the geocentric model of the universe. (I don't remember whether the egyptian or chaldean model was en vogue back then.) This model came from a source from a golden past and was therefore infallible. AND this model fitted to the descriptions in the Bible.
As I said, doubting the wisdom of the past was considered madness and folly.
And while a mere believer has no qualms making compromises between what he believes and what he sees, the Church CANNOT compromise.

"Oh, all the big thinkers were religious! It must have been their religion!"
So what? All the big thinkers were white. With the same confidence, one can claim:
"Oh, all the big thinkers were white! It must have been their white skin-color!"



And even for 20th century researchers, of course some of them were religious. Christianity is everywhere in our culture, our language, our metaphors, our imagery, our philosophy. How could these people NOT think about God when thinking about the universe???