Given that the Big Bang propelled the primordial soup into a
nascent cosmos 13.8 billion years ago, humankind is a temporal newborn.
As the universe expanded and the cosmos gained greater definition, earth took
shape 4.5 billion years ago. Single cell life forms evolved approximately
one billion years into the earth’s existence, but not until 500 million years
ago did evolutionary processes gain momentum that produced botanical organisms
and marine, amphibian, and terrestrial creatures. And not until the
extremely recent juncture at 200,000 years ago did homo sapiens follow hominid
predecessors into existence.
Humanity has only existed for
0.0014 percent of the time that has ensued since the Big Bang and 0.0044
percent of the time since the earth’s formation. The ratio comparing the
temporal existence of homo sapiens to the temporal existence of the universe
when applied to a human life span of 75 years would find a human newborn just
1.5 minutes into her or his earthly sojourn; if the applied ratio were
that of the formation of earth compared to the temporal appearance of homo
sapiens, that newborn would still be just 4.7 minutes old.
Understanding the infancy of
humanity is vital in comprehending the extraordinary ignorance of humankind.
After two hundred thousand years
of hunting and gathering, people first began to farm intentionally just 10,000
years ago. Civilizations featuring writing systems, social
stratification, occupational specialization, and urban centers appeared between
4,000 and 1,500 years ago in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China. The
great civilization of Greek city-states evolved from 1200 BCE, reaching apogee
during the 5th century BCE. Roman expansion, Republic, and Empire spanned
the years 500 BCE to 500 CE; and as largely independent developments were
taking place in North Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, North America,
South America, and the insular regions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, just
four major time periods in Europe succeeded the collapse of the Roman
Empire: the Middle Ages (500-1500 CE), Renaissance (1300-1600 CE),
Enlightenment (1600-1800 CE) and the late modern and contemporary world of
1800-2019.
With the Renaissance, Graeco-Roman
humanism animated European intellectual life. When that humanistic spirit was
applied to great experiments and produced the scientific epiphanies of
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, modernity was born. The Age of
Reason and the Age of Science became appropriate alternative appellations
describing the intellectual character of the Enlightenment.
Note how recently in the temporal
expanses of prehistory and history the Enlightenment occurred. With the
Enlightenment came great faith in the capacity of objective data and human
reason to solve the problems of
and improve the life humankind. But science produced insights at a high
level of objective truth that opposed long-held positions of the Roman Catholic
and Eastern Orthodox churches; and while creating the intellectual
questioning that impelled the Protestant Reformation of the 15th and
16th centuries, those same applications of science and reason
produced objective results that were also at odds with the myriad of Protestant
creeds that formed in the context of Reformation.
At late 18th century,
revolutions in the British colonies of North America and in France seemed to
augur societies built on the political reasoning of Montesquieu, John Locke,
and their acolytes, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Science and
reason were in ascent, but three successive periods of conservative religious
reassertion provided antithesis to the scientific thesis. The tension
between scientific humanists and religious conservatives intensified as Charles
Darwin published his works on natural selection and evolution; Freud conducted his interviews in Vienna that
suggested unconscious and subconscious determinants of human behavior;
Einstein mathematically challenged assumptions about the reality and
relationship of matter, time, and space in the cosmos; and B. F. Skinner
powerfully asserted on the basis of scientific experimentation that human
behavior is shaped exclusively by biological and experiential determinants, so
that human beings only perceive that they have free will.
In the aftermath of these great
insights of the 19th and 20th centuries, the forces of
religious conservatism countered with views engendered by dogma and belief,
rather than science and reason. Failure to resolve the tension between
science and reason, and thus to realize the promise of the Enlightenment, has
stalled the already sluggish trajectory of humankind:
Temporally an infant, humanity
remains intellectually and spiritually infant, as well.
Only when astute thinkers from
each of the world’s great religious traditions congregate to agree on ethical
principles consistent with scientifically observed conditions of nature and
humanity will the ascendant trajectory of humankind ensue.
The thesis and antithesis of
science and religion must gain synthesis, so that people live lives on this one
earthly sojourn that are both rigorously rational and spiritually nourishing.
Failure to gain this synthesis
undergirds all of humankind’s current dilemmas; attainment of the
synthesis for unity of science and religion would impel humanity toward
conditions of life described by abundance, equity, and spiritual satisfaction.
In the succeeding pages I detail
the foundations and consequences of human ignorance and the better life to come
via the astute conciliation of science and religion.
No comments:
Post a Comment