Religion
In reply to the discussion: Is the belief that the laws of physics were/can be suspended by a supernatural force... [View all]Deep13
(39,157 posts)Science,including scientific medicine, engineering, and industry, is definitely a product of the modern age.
A lot of good and bad things are entirely modern. The modern perspective is that the world can be understood by humans (a huge realization) and that observing the world is the way to do it and that religious values are somewhat compartmentalized to avoid contradictions. People in the Middle Ages had a lot of good values and qualities, qualities that might serve us better than the values of capitalism which we have internalized. Scientific inquiry, however, was not one of them. Indeed, that there are new things to learn by examining the world or the night sky would never have occurred to them. They thought they understood everything. Religion was not a belief or a theology so much as a set of assumptions that amounted to a constructed reality where Christianity explained everything.
What really makes science incompatible with either modern or medieval Christianity (two very different things, BTW) is that there is a reality beyond our mental constructions. Religion is based on a cultural construction, a narrative of how we see the world and universe. Science insists on disregarding those assumptions and devising tests to find actual facts. So they can never be compatible.