The Scientific Spirit is Worshipped in the Belief in Progress
The idols of the modern world are plain to see. More than 300 years ago, the French philosopher Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757) described the most important attitude of his time as the "scientific spirit". The only thing that has changed to this day is that the entire Western world, metaphorically speaking, kneels before this idol and worships it. This is exactly what has been called the belief in progress for many years.
1Joh. 5:20-21: 20 We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. 21 Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.
NASB 1995
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The literary culture of the Renaissance revived the old dualism of Hellenism and barbarism in an abstract form, thus introducing for the first time a gap between the facts of social development and the ideals of the educated classes. But this artificial literary ideal was powerfully reinforced in the 18th century by an equally significant philosophical and scientific absolutism that had its origins in the Cartesian movement [the philosophy of René Descartes]. The latter was the mother of modern rationalism, not because of its glorification of reason, which was also characteristic of the Aristotelian tradition. Rather, Descartes' originality lay in the fact that he completely detached the human mind, as a thinking substance, from any dependence, or even apparent relationship, to the body that informs it and to the conditions of physical existence to which it seems bound. Human reason, he believed, was capable of deriving absolutely certain and complete knowledge from the clear and simple truths inherent in its own nature, which it grasps by a direct act of intuition, without the aid of experience or authority.
This is the basis of the Cartesian method of reforming all the sciences.
The whole body of knowledge, religion, and tradition which constituted the heritage of European culture, all the ideas of Christendom, and all the convictions acquired by man through experience, literature, and contact with others, was to be discarded as a polluted and uncertain mixture of truth and error, and replaced by a new knowledge of mathematical certainty derived from the unfailing light of pure reason.
The simple reasoning of an intelligent person was considered more valuable than anything that could be learned from books and schools, because it was based on an immediate, intuitive certainty that could not be deceived.
This philosophy made an extraordinary impression on the way people thought at that time. It gave rise to the abstract ideas of reason, science, progress, and civilization that became the idols of the new age. Fontenelle was the first to speak of the "scientific spirit," and he attributed its emergence to the new way of thinking introduced by Descartes, which was more important than philosophy itself.
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