Richard Lloyd Jones: Welcome to Episode 3 of our Modern Relevance of God podcast series here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. In this episode, let's begin to look at how science turned its back on God. Well, this is a little complicated because obviously there are many scientists in the world who do profess to a belief in God. Louis Pasteur, for one, even declared that the more he studied nature, the more he stood amazed at the work of the creator.
He thought science would bring people nearer to God. But I don't think that's what's happened. I remember a Swedish friend of mine telling me a remarkable story that illustrates that. She was in her grade 11 biology class in Stockholm, and they were discussing Darwin's theory of evolution. And a young woman raised her hand, a Catholic in this principally Protestant country. And she said, but I don't believe in that theory.
I believe in a creator. And my friend said, everyone in the class whirled their heads around, staring at her in disbelief. And then they proceeded to destroy her. You know, that derision that heaps down on you when you're a teenager and you do something uncool. This student was simply cut out of the conversations at school. Persona non grata in any of the social situations, a kind of adolescent shunning, teenage excommunication, if you will.
And I think the same thing is happening in modern science. I was listening to an interview with English biologist Rupert Sheldrake recently, where he alluded to this rejection of dissent in science. The orthodox scientific view, he said, has never been tolerant of dissenting views. It's like the scientific revolution led us from one period of intolerance, the inquisition-like elimination of dissenting views, to another, the scientific dogma we experience today.
Well, let's dig into that a bit in this episode with engineer and inventor Cesar Soós, who's been studying and working closely with Norberto Keppe's new physics for the past 30
years. I was reading a book on metaphysics of science and the author Edwin Burt, he told that René Descartes in 1619, it appeared to be the spirit of truth, showed up in a dream.
And this spirit told Descartes that he had been chosen to lay down the basis of knowledge for the years ahead. And this was to be found in mathematics. And
Richard: what's the significance, Cesar, of having a mathematization of the scientific view?
The problem is that mathematics is just one language of nature. It's not the basis of nature. Nature is much, much, much more than mathematics, even though nature expresses itself in mathematical terms.
What did they exclude when they mathematized science? Science began to be something quantifiable. This was a very big hit against metaphysics, for example, against theology, which exposes values who are much superior than the physical world only. And this helped build up a system of knowledge based on matter, based on senses. What's the
Richard: implication for us of this? The
worst implication of that is the implications we see today.
Materialism that took control over all kinds of knowledge. Our knowledge today, our science today, is based on matter because matter is something that we can mathematize, we can quantify, and that's the worst consequence. And also,
Richard: I think we have the exclusion of the study of the being, the ontology that they would have studied in theological, philosophical schools before this mathematization of science.
And losing the study of the being also causes us to lose the study of ethics, of values, of qualities of being, of ways we should be, of ways we should behave, ways we should treat other
people. Exactly, Richard. Mathematics gives a false idea that you are a god. You are a god-like being. And we are not. We are subjected to universal laws.
Metaphysics deals with the being. And the being is much more than quantifiable qualities. The being especially is love. The being is reason. It's logic. It's everything that science encompasses and much more than that. Intuition, consciousness. Man cannot develop richer a science to understand him if this science does not consider the superior elements he has. For example, how can you develop a science that does not consider intuition, does not consider consciousness, or if it considers, considers under the point of view of a physical reaction, of chemical reactions in your brains?
It seems
Richard: to me then is that that um this this break, if we want to call it, from the more metaphysical world stripped us of the study of universals. And science it seems today wants to avoid that acknowledgement of something pre-existing, something intelligent, something already there. Exactly,
the very idea of evolutionism brought by Darwin and others, but before him, even from Aristotle, you know, this very idea is wrong because it is inserted in time and space.
And time and space, they are inserted in a greater realm, in the transcendental realm. The study of the being lies outside time and space. The being is is not in development, in evolution. And this superior force that created the universe, because the universe didn't come out of nothing, so this force made this outside time and space. We are like in a trap, Richard.
We create theories and these theories according to the scientific method of today must be falsifiable if it is to be a scientific theory. So this means that all theories have to come from the human mind. So the idea of God is impossible for this kind of approach. So they ruled out theology, which is the basis of all knowledge. So we are like in a trap.
How can scientists propose a solution for our problem if they created a system that does not accept the solution?
Richard: Not accepting a solution that doesn't fit their dogmatic view is, I think, what Cesar is saying here. You see what you want to see might be another way of saying that. In this same book that Cesar was referring to, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, the author Edwin Burt makes the point that any modern philosophy that attempted to address the questions of man's place in the universe as being important or central was quickly dismissed by a science bent on reducing the wonders of creation to mere chance meetings of chemicals.
So radical has been this shift in our modern world that philosophy books today are peppered with the considerations of how to live in a temporal and impermanent existence, and this clearly illustrates the dominance of a materialistic scientific view. The consequences of this materialism in science will be the subject of our next episode on the modern relevance of God. That's up next time.
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