I think this is the best article you have written that I have read. You give lots of great examples and show why science can never be our foundation for living.
If I may add, one of the great attractions of scientism or the worship of science, is that there is no need to bow the knee to science, and your Idol allows you to continue to do whatever you want, and to still think highly of yourself.
Today is the 250th anniversary of the U.S. I am thankful to live here for all the reasons we can all be thankful about. But 50 years ago, at the time of the 200th anniversary, someone wrote a brief article stating that our real god in America is complete freedom. We believe that we should be able to do whatever we want "as long as it doesn't hurt anyone." But our radical individualism dictated by this Idol leads to pain all around us, because we are not as smart as we think and not as moral as the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount.
Another thing - anthropologist always use to say that religion came after agriculture but now they are changing their tune. Stone age settlements have shown that it was religion first and then agriculture.
Thanks for authoring this. I really appreciate how you combine science and faith in your articles, and how they express both apologetics, a personal anchor in God, and love of science. It's genuinely refreshing to read.
You're sort of ignoring "religion in practice here," as history has shown that christianity, to be generous, has two poles: love and purity, and purity in practice is a very nasty belief at times. Purity is what led Christians to persecute each other over doctrine.
Purity makes it not safe to base society on Christianity to a significant level.
Sarah I know you're wary of ‘fringe science’, so I'll put this as an invitation rather than a pitch: if you want a glimpse of where the next scientific revolution might be coming from, take a close look at Pierre-Marie Robitaille's work on the composition of stars.
Robitaille has analysed thermal emission from hydrogen bonds in water and argues - with experimental support - that Kirchhoff's Law of Thermal Emission is not universal, despite it being assumed so by physicists for over 150 years. Don't take my word for it; his papers are public, and the argument stands or falls on the lab bench.
If he's right, the implications cascade through physics. Kirchhoff's law underpins far more than condensed matter - it's built into our models of stellar composition and our interpretation of the cosmic microwave background. Pull that thread and much of modern cosmology, including the Big Bang and universal expansion, would need rethinking. Notably, this ties in with the JWST observations you mentioned that are already straining the standard model's predictions.
Jesus' summary of God's Law worked not only in the 1st century but in all centuries. There has never been, and will never be, a time in history where "Love the Lord your God with all your heart/mind/soul/strength, and love others as you love yourself." are not easy to remember and everything we need to do. "Do to others as you would have them do to you." "Whatever you do to the least of these, so you do to me." All the *missing* commands, like condemnation for slavery and equal treatment for women, are plainly right here.
Who wants to be beaten for not working in the hot sun from sunrise to sunset? Who wants to have his wife and children sold and taken from him? No one. The tiniest amount of thought leads from the Golden Rule to abolition.
Who wants to be sold by his father and forced into carnal relations by his new owner? No one. (This still happens to girls *and* boys in Afghanistan.) The tiniest amount of thought leads from "whatever you do to the least of these" to being outraged by horny men ***ing God. Sex trafficking is not a small sin that it is okay to just put out of your mind and allow under the false virtue of "respecting culture."
I don't think its too much for God to ask of us that we would receive Jesus simple, short, easy to remember instructions and *apply* them with the most basic uses of reasoning to our real lives and societies.
I think it's interesting that you say what I wrote was cherry-picking, as if that is a bad thing, but then go on to do something similar by mentioning a few specific quotations.
In reply to your first question and quotation, no, Jesus did not say that. You have quoted Leviticus, not may of the Gospels.
In reply to the second quotation, no, Jesus did not say that. You have quoted Exodus.
I think it is an overreach to take Jesus' statement that He is here to fulfill the law and prophets, and argue that means people other than Him should go around fulfilling them. Only Jesus can fulfill the prophecies about Him; so clearly that is not an instructing for us to go fulfill prophecy. Likewise, then, we can expect a parallel meaning from His statement that He will fulfill the law.
This is not an instruction from Jesus to us. A plain and consistent reading recognizes that He is talking about His own actions.
So, your implied point that you stopped short of writing explicitly (allowing it to now be denied) that Jesus has instructed His followers to stone witches does not hold up under analysis--the very level of thought that I argued should be applied to the quotes that I gave earlier.
Given the hostility and sarcasm of your rhetorical writing choices, I understand you are coming from an emotional and not an intellectual mental place. I'm sorry you feel upset, but I don't think it is constructive to tear down arguments that encourage believers to thoughtfully follow a few key teachings and apply them in novel situations that can change from person to person and culture to culture and time to time.
Being a thinking believer enables one to figure out how to live without having it all laid out in specific directives. Isn't it a good thing for Jesus to guide us while also leaving us responsible to think deeply about that guidance as we chose our own actions?
That is true, but honestly what does that have to do with the article? That's like a little kid, when confronted with stealing a candy bar, says, "Yeah but my friend did it too!", as if that somehow makes him look better. It doesn't.
Humans are gonna human, even when they're religious. But Christianity has the best track record in terms of providing a blueprint for a functioning society. Arguably, just about any religion is better than "science" as a basis for society.
This may well be true, but I suspect it’s far more about “humans being human” than religion lacking “paradigm shifts”, or suggesting that consistently interpreted revelation has ever existed within Christianity.
In other words, there’s a strong utilitarian argument to be made: humans are gonna human, and religion has historically had better outcomes for societal control than science. I think it’s also fair to say that science simply hasn’t been around long enough for us to know how good a government it would make.
That said, “functioning” is doing a lot of work in your sentence.
The Papal States are probably the clear winner among true theocracies. The Popes ruled for over 1,000 years, and if you consider them “Christian”, I guess they win.
But what about divine kingship, where the ruler is the religion? Egypt and Japan both outlasted any Christianity-based government. Ancient Egypt managed 3,000 years. The Pharaoh was a living god and there was no secular sphere at all.
Christianity-based societies are at best, a distant third.
As far as I can tell, your argument is based on religion being stable (it doesn't "perpetually shift"), is less vulnerable to corruption ("vulnerable to such mundane corruption", "scientists ... prone to bias and fraud) and with unchanging revelations (religion doesn't have "paradigm shifts").
These are false statements: religion has paradigm shifts all the time (homosexuality, women's ordination); religion is more vulnerable to corruption, bias and fraud than science by any reasonable measurement (the physicists aren't doing healing service fund-raisers) and has constantly changing revelations as each new group re-interprets the base documents in light of their cultural preferences (are we killing the witches or not?).
I would agree there's a utilitarian argument that religion is simply better, or more efficient, at building a lasting society, but that's not the argument you made.
Societies that survive do so because they’ve absorbed hard-won lessons—through painful experience, cultural evolution, and sometimes divine revelation, as in the Bible. These rules and traditions get passed down not just intellectually, but emotionally—the strongest way to make them stick.
So what? "You do it, too." does not establish equality of doing, and the Christian religion in particular has a philosophical grounding that gives standing to arguments against all those human errors.
Sarah,
I think this is the best article you have written that I have read. You give lots of great examples and show why science can never be our foundation for living.
If I may add, one of the great attractions of scientism or the worship of science, is that there is no need to bow the knee to science, and your Idol allows you to continue to do whatever you want, and to still think highly of yourself.
Today is the 250th anniversary of the U.S. I am thankful to live here for all the reasons we can all be thankful about. But 50 years ago, at the time of the 200th anniversary, someone wrote a brief article stating that our real god in America is complete freedom. We believe that we should be able to do whatever we want "as long as it doesn't hurt anyone." But our radical individualism dictated by this Idol leads to pain all around us, because we are not as smart as we think and not as moral as the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount.
Glenn G. Wood, M.D,
That's a good point, Glenn. Science "gives" but asks nothing. I wrote an article about the pitfalls of radical individualism here.
https://schroodle.com/p/freedom-films-and-faith
Another thing - anthropologist always use to say that religion came after agriculture but now they are changing their tune. Stone age settlements have shown that it was religion first and then agriculture.
Interesting! I didn't know that.
https://predictivehistory.com/agriculture-as-religious-practice/
Sarah,
Thanks for authoring this. I really appreciate how you combine science and faith in your articles, and how they express both apologetics, a personal anchor in God, and love of science. It's genuinely refreshing to read.
Tim Stotts (MSc in engineering).
Thank you, Tim. I really appreciate that.
Wonderful article. I agree and I so appreciate your citing the great philosopher A.J.Rimmer. That definitely got my attention!
Great article Sarah.
It is interesting to note that positivism itself cannot abide by and survive it's own standard of truth, its own verification and verifiability.
The problem with the weight of evidence is that the evidence is always heavier when it favors my own preferences.
You're sort of ignoring "religion in practice here," as history has shown that christianity, to be generous, has two poles: love and purity, and purity in practice is a very nasty belief at times. Purity is what led Christians to persecute each other over doctrine.
Purity makes it not safe to base society on Christianity to a significant level.
Can you recommend a civilian-level book on the history of "spectral analysis of distant objects," or astrophysics in general? Article was great!
Sarah I know you're wary of ‘fringe science’, so I'll put this as an invitation rather than a pitch: if you want a glimpse of where the next scientific revolution might be coming from, take a close look at Pierre-Marie Robitaille's work on the composition of stars.
Robitaille has analysed thermal emission from hydrogen bonds in water and argues - with experimental support - that Kirchhoff's Law of Thermal Emission is not universal, despite it being assumed so by physicists for over 150 years. Don't take my word for it; his papers are public, and the argument stands or falls on the lab bench.
Over 60 Papers by Dr Robitaille:
http://vixra.org/author/pierre-marie_robitaille
If he's right, the implications cascade through physics. Kirchhoff's law underpins far more than condensed matter - it's built into our models of stellar composition and our interpretation of the cosmic microwave background. Pull that thread and much of modern cosmology, including the Big Bang and universal expansion, would need rethinking. Notably, this ties in with the JWST observations you mentioned that are already straining the standard model's predictions.
Jesus' summary of God's Law worked not only in the 1st century but in all centuries. There has never been, and will never be, a time in history where "Love the Lord your God with all your heart/mind/soul/strength, and love others as you love yourself." are not easy to remember and everything we need to do. "Do to others as you would have them do to you." "Whatever you do to the least of these, so you do to me." All the *missing* commands, like condemnation for slavery and equal treatment for women, are plainly right here.
Who wants to be beaten for not working in the hot sun from sunrise to sunset? Who wants to have his wife and children sold and taken from him? No one. The tiniest amount of thought leads from the Golden Rule to abolition.
Who wants to be sold by his father and forced into carnal relations by his new owner? No one. (This still happens to girls *and* boys in Afghanistan.) The tiniest amount of thought leads from "whatever you do to the least of these" to being outraged by horny men ***ing God. Sex trafficking is not a small sin that it is okay to just put out of your mind and allow under the false virtue of "respecting culture."
I don't think its too much for God to ask of us that we would receive Jesus simple, short, easy to remember instructions and *apply* them with the most basic uses of reasoning to our real lives and societies.
I think it's interesting that you say what I wrote was cherry-picking, as if that is a bad thing, but then go on to do something similar by mentioning a few specific quotations.
In reply to your first question and quotation, no, Jesus did not say that. You have quoted Leviticus, not may of the Gospels.
In reply to the second quotation, no, Jesus did not say that. You have quoted Exodus.
I think it is an overreach to take Jesus' statement that He is here to fulfill the law and prophets, and argue that means people other than Him should go around fulfilling them. Only Jesus can fulfill the prophecies about Him; so clearly that is not an instructing for us to go fulfill prophecy. Likewise, then, we can expect a parallel meaning from His statement that He will fulfill the law.
This is not an instruction from Jesus to us. A plain and consistent reading recognizes that He is talking about His own actions.
So, your implied point that you stopped short of writing explicitly (allowing it to now be denied) that Jesus has instructed His followers to stone witches does not hold up under analysis--the very level of thought that I argued should be applied to the quotes that I gave earlier.
Given the hostility and sarcasm of your rhetorical writing choices, I understand you are coming from an emotional and not an intellectual mental place. I'm sorry you feel upset, but I don't think it is constructive to tear down arguments that encourage believers to thoughtfully follow a few key teachings and apply them in novel situations that can change from person to person and culture to culture and time to time.
Being a thinking believer enables one to figure out how to live without having it all laid out in specific directives. Isn't it a good thing for Jesus to guide us while also leaving us responsible to think deeply about that guidance as we chose our own actions?
Very well said. Thank you.
Religion, too, still perpetrates violence, division, misunderstanding, contempt, myth, anti-science,
and allegory as a fact.
That is true, but honestly what does that have to do with the article? That's like a little kid, when confronted with stealing a candy bar, says, "Yeah but my friend did it too!", as if that somehow makes him look better. It doesn't.
Humans are gonna human, even when they're religious. But Christianity has the best track record in terms of providing a blueprint for a functioning society. Arguably, just about any religion is better than "science" as a basis for society.
This may well be true, but I suspect it’s far more about “humans being human” than religion lacking “paradigm shifts”, or suggesting that consistently interpreted revelation has ever existed within Christianity.
In other words, there’s a strong utilitarian argument to be made: humans are gonna human, and religion has historically had better outcomes for societal control than science. I think it’s also fair to say that science simply hasn’t been around long enough for us to know how good a government it would make.
That said, “functioning” is doing a lot of work in your sentence.
The Papal States are probably the clear winner among true theocracies. The Popes ruled for over 1,000 years, and if you consider them “Christian”, I guess they win.
But what about divine kingship, where the ruler is the religion? Egypt and Japan both outlasted any Christianity-based government. Ancient Egypt managed 3,000 years. The Pharaoh was a living god and there was no secular sphere at all.
Christianity-based societies are at best, a distant third.
I don't think it's a matter of how long science has been around. By definition, it's not a suitable basis for governing a society.
I'm not arguing for theocracy. I'm saying traditional religion is the best at inculcating reasons to be civilized.
As far as I can tell, your argument is based on religion being stable (it doesn't "perpetually shift"), is less vulnerable to corruption ("vulnerable to such mundane corruption", "scientists ... prone to bias and fraud) and with unchanging revelations (religion doesn't have "paradigm shifts").
These are false statements: religion has paradigm shifts all the time (homosexuality, women's ordination); religion is more vulnerable to corruption, bias and fraud than science by any reasonable measurement (the physicists aren't doing healing service fund-raisers) and has constantly changing revelations as each new group re-interprets the base documents in light of their cultural preferences (are we killing the witches or not?).
I would agree there's a utilitarian argument that religion is simply better, or more efficient, at building a lasting society, but that's not the argument you made.
This is my main thesis:
Societies that survive do so because they’ve absorbed hard-won lessons—through painful experience, cultural evolution, and sometimes divine revelation, as in the Bible. These rules and traditions get passed down not just intellectually, but emotionally—the strongest way to make them stick.
So what? "You do it, too." does not establish equality of doing, and the Christian religion in particular has a philosophical grounding that gives standing to arguments against all those human errors.
I'm not following your statement that Christianity has a "philosophical grounding ... human errors."
Would you explain further?
To you? No. You've chosen to carpet bomb the comment sections here, and I'm not going to indulge that aggression everywhere.