Once upon a time, some 400 years ago, there were no atheists. There were merely people who worshiped some other god than the one you worshipped. Every human being believed in some kind of a supreme being, and took comfort in everlasting life after death, a reward for a life well-led, in accordance to scriptural precepts. [To what extent that belief was instinctive, and to what extent it was taught, is something I shall return to in a later post in this Lenten series.]
Then something changed. In 1687, Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, one of the key texts that was to lead to the Enlightenment. The Principia outlined in detail Newton's laws of motion, a foundation of classical mechanics. Also included were Newton's law of universal gravitation and his laws of planetary motion. Man could now account for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes and other phenomena. Newton proved that the motion of objects on Earth as well as celestial bodies could be accounted for by the same principles, following the same laws.
Newton's thinking did not emerge from a vacuum. It was based on the observations and measurements of Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Plato, then after a pause for the Dark Ages, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Kepler. Hence Newton's quote that he was merely standing on the shoulders of giants.
What Newton did was to devise a conceptual framework, pulling all the strands together, thus creating classical physics, still for most of us the dominant model of how we understand the world.
It took the best part of a century for the implications of the Principia to sink in - it wasn't God who moved the planets about their way - it happened in accordance to a mathematical formula, which can be demonstrated and proven.
Kings and queens who had ruled by Divine Right found their authority undermined by the rising tide of rational science; this came to a head with the French Revolution and the secular state that followed.
And so the scientific method began to displace the hermetic gibberish of alchemy. Scientific proofs, peer review, repeatable experiments, began to push back against God as an answer. Thunder and lightning, volcanoes and earthquakes, eclipses and epidemics could all be explained by natural - as opposed to supernatural - causes.
The pushback against superstition and irrational beliefs was in full force by the early 20th century, as Rutherford delved into the structure of the atom and Einstein defined spacetime. Before long, rational minds believed, the 'God of the Gaps' - the use of divine power to explain the ever-shrinking realms which science couldn't - would finally be squished into oblivion. Rational minds believed they would conquer the Universe with logic and irrefutable proofs. By the 1920s, theoretical physicists were convinced that mankind was years, months even, from an equation that would explain everything.
In a godless universe, matter matters. And so materialism came to supplant beliefs in a higher unknown. Those who remained with organised religion - and it was far harder after the horrors of WW1 and WW2 - more often than not did so for reasons of social cohesion, demonstrating loyalty to the group, rather than because of any deeply harboured spiritual feeling.
We lived through a rat race in an age of conspicuous consumption. "Life's hard and then you die." "You only live once." "You die - that's the end - get over it." Reasons for living are boiled down to biological instinct - to establishing one's place in our mammalian hierarchy. Get money, power, the trappings of power - possessions, material possessions. In our post-Enlightenment rush to acquire the possessions intended to impress our fellow humans, we lost sight of higher aspirations. Even strictly humanist ones, a desire for fairness, a need to help others, and a sense of fulfilling one's human potential have been pushed aside in a life stripped down to its materialist minimum.
But then Newtonian science ran into doubt.
Quantum physics brought into question certainties that had been held for well over a century. Science has yet to resolve the inherent contradictions between the Standard Model of the atom and General Relativity which works on the galactic scale. Physics Beyond the Standard Model has yet to deal with Phenomena Not Explained, with Experimental Results Not Explained and with Theoretical Predictions Not Observed. In other words, physicists today are far less certain of what they really know than what physicists a century ago were almost certain they knew (or felt they soon would know).
It is likely that confusion will grow rather than decline, as competing theories such as supersymmetry, quantum gravity or string theory (none of which are readily understandable by the layperson) slug it out for supremacy. The age of scientific certainty - from the late-17th to the mid-20th century - is waning.
Is God coming back to to fill the gaps?
Certainly not as an Abrahamic God-as-an-old-man-with-beard-in-the-clouds, handing down commandments to Man, steering our daily lives from on high. Organised religions are having a tough time.
Yet mankind's innate spiritual sense has not died out. It is something much deeper than just a need for peace of mind or the wonder of gazing at a cloudless night sky; it is a search for understanding and a desire to be at one with the Universe. As our affluent society takes the edge off hunger and cold, our needs are becoming more sublimated. Experience becomes more important than possessions; quality of life starts to matter more than wealth.
To know where we are going, we need to look into ourselves and, without letting cognitive biases get in the way, ask ourselves what we really feel about God.
Next up: a changing definition of 'God'.
This time three years ago:
From the world of science to the social world
This time five years ago:
Music, mysticism and the human spirit
This time six years ago:
My first Pendolino journey
This time seven years ago:
Poland's universal panacea
This time eight years ago:
Of taxis, deflation, crisis and strikes
This time nine years ago:
Lent starts again
This time ten years ago:
Art Quiz
This time 11 years ago:
A month before Spring Equinox
This time 12 years ago:
The beauty of winter
[still some of my finest winter photos]
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