All cultures and civilizations throughout history have one thing in common: they all have belief systems called “religion.” All peoples regardless of time, location, or race understood the mysterious act of Creation as a consequence of divine inspiration or intervention; either by a Supreme Being or by a pantheon of lesser powers acting co-operatively. No culture or civilization regardless of time, location or race has believed man to be alone or unsupervised in the Cosmos: that was until the present day. Beginning with the Renaissance humanists, west European intellectuals have slowly but inexorably stripped away every authority possessed by organized religion in its claim to be the proper government of society. The attack by science upon the tenets of Christianity, based upon the revealed Word of God and the Church’s claim to be the voice or vehicle of God on earth, was devastating. Very powerful dark spiritual forces energized the intellects of the Enlightenment to initiate a devastating attack on the ancient belief in a divine being that was God. That is, an age-old belief in a Prime Mover and Creator, that had existed eternally and of necessity, who is the Cause of Himself and whose Essence is to exist: who is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good, and who is the First Cause of everything.
The burgeoning rational capacity, then taking hold of the human psyche, was directed to destroy the Christian conception of God the Unmoved Mover who takes a personal interest in His Creation, who had become a person, in flesh and blood, in the figure of Jesus Christ. Moreover, that in the person of Jesus Christ, God bridged the otherwise impassable barrier between the phenomenal and transcendental world of our belief. The humanists did this by proceeding to “prove” that God, in fact, did not exist and therefore, by inference, religion was superstitious nonsense. That is, the Renaissance savants sought to describe religious feeling as ghostly residues arising from our primitive past. The humanists achieved this fateful pyrrhic victory by using a rational and logical system of analysis called The Theory of Scientific Method.
This method of analysis was a powerful tool used to great effect by rationalists who employed it diligently in their efforts to extract the secrets of the phenomenal world from Nature. The Scientific Method was used to such effect by the intellectual elite that its results provided wonderful theories of apparent usefulness as well as novel labour saving inventions. Science’s success became a very persuasive argument for a materialistic explanation of reality in direct opposition to the Divine Creation Principle held by all world religions. Yet a great change was required in the human constitution to allow the nurturing of the rational faculty in the psyche of man that would produce the intellectual marvels necessary to transform Nature.
In the tumultuous era commonly called the Renaissance, theologians and men of reason tried valiantly to reconcile the estrangement of Church and Science and produce a new synthesis in the manner of Aquinas. These attempts at reconciliation were heartfelt and at times desperate. However, something profound was happening at this time that irrevocably changed the way in which man viewed the world; and, by necessity, how he saw himself in relation to Nature who was beginning to yield her secrets and was becoming less and less mysterious. Nature was prostrated and subjected to exhaustive mathematical treatment through the activity of measurement by science experimentalis, first promulgated by Roger Bacon (1220-92), whereby laws of nature are determined. That is, knowledge of Nature apprehended by scientific experimentation and quantifiable by figure, laws and formulae. Such scientific laws were conceived as number as function-related, and expressed in the dynamic principle of cause-and-effect. These nature-laws were achieved not from divine revelation but by careful observation and experiment. In short: a world full of causes and effects was posited and understood by reasoned observation and experiment.
The medieval monks and book-men began to intellectually penetrate the secrets of Nature not out of idle interest but with an ultimate aim to extract useful knowledge with practical application. And to serve this great desire for practical solutions and therefore command over Nature, the purpose and function of “theory” was redefined. The Schoolmen understood that any theory they developed was judged not as putative attempts to explain Nature per se but by its utility as a working tool. Thus every theory was from the outset a working hypothesis, and thus it did not have to be “correct” it was only required to be practical. It aims, not at embracing or unveiling the secrets of the world, but at making them serviceable to definite ends. Moreover, “theory” was also understood to be a disposable commodity with only temporary utility. If it provided some truths that were durable or appeared absolutely true then that was fine, these could be incorporated in the new theory but belief in ‘the theory’ never developed into a creed.
Bacon’s scientia experimentalis was an expression of a peculiar mind that perceived Nature as prey to be hunted remorselessly and apprehended by the intellectual hunter using his weapons of rational thought, theory and experiment. The great medieval theorists, using the stratagem of intellectual beasts of prey, “experimentum enim solum certificat” as Albertus Magnus put it, which was nothing less than the interrogation of nature under torture with rack, lever, and screw. The medieval theorists of Europe not only concerned themselves with the task of wresting the enigmatic secrets from Nature, but they also cherished a dream whereby the invention and wit of the researcher would eventually wrest the creative mantle from Nature. Enslaving and harnessing Nature’s very own forces, so as to multiply man’s own strength, would achieve this vaunting ambition. This gargantuan task was conceptualised in the search for “perpetual motion.”
The great philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) understood the character of scientific experimentation and its shallow treatment of Nature. Thus, with regard to the urge to conquer the motion problem he tells us that:
“… for its success would mean the final victory over ”God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura ), a small world of one’s own creation moving like the great world, in virtue of its own forces and obeying the hand of man alone. To build a world oneself, to be oneself God – that is the [Western] inventor’s dream, and from it has sprung all our designing and re-designing of machine to approximate as nearly as possible to the unattainable limit of perpetual motion.“
This Will, possessed by the Western savants, to apprehend Nature by measurement and thus control her is what Spengler called the “passion of the third dimension.”
Past civilisations had attempted some degree of control over the forces of nature but their attempts were concerned with small victories over local problems. Western medieval culture and its burgeoning science concerned itself with the grand victory over the big problems with global possibilities. The rapacity shown by Western scientists in their desire to utterly command Nature, and to regard her (in her entirety, complete with her secret of force) as booty to be hauled away as spoil, is the root cause of the antagonism towards science. Such a mind-set would have shocked the pious natural scientists of antiquity and it is also the reason why the new nature investigators were called heretics by more enlightened contemporaries. The religious pagan saw the scientists’ lust for power and their attempts at humbling the great goddess Nature as nothing less than devilish.
Throughout Renaissance Europe men were formulating a codified system of rational investigation by which they could interrogate Nature and extract her secrets. A new breed of book-men, the intellectual, promulgated this rational methodology, and foremost amongst these was Francis Bacon who dismissed the collective works of the ancients, such as Plato, Aristotle and Homer, as so much “contentious learning.” Bacon taught that fluffy clouds of metaphysical speculation obscure any substantive truths contained in the works of these ancient authors. He thus advocated a revolutionary rational method based upon objective knowledge and experiment thereby avoiding the deficiencies in the Aristotelian Theory of Procedure and from which substantive knowledge of the world can be gained.
Bacon was the leading propagandist of a rational methodology called Objectivism or more popularly the Theory of Scientific Method. The adoption of this powerful rational method by the radical intellects of Europe was the major destabilizing blow aimed at the established Christian Worldview. Another crushing blow to the established order came when the scientific proofs were produced that indicated that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe, as demanded by the Aquinas Synthesis, but merely a very small and apparently insignificant planet orbiting a relatively obscure star. Although the Church responded savagely to this theory the work of rationalists such as Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe and Kepler eventually dissolved the Medieval Christian Worldview as a coherent and comprehensible whole. Geocentricism, which was central to both Aristotelian doctrine and Scripture, was ridiculed by the heretical heliocentric theory.
The promotion of the heliocentric theory created a severe intellectual dilemma. Not only was it a staggering blow to theological dogma and that it also rejected the common-sense view that the heavens seemed to revolve around the Earth, more importantly, it also confounded the spiritual-sense that each individual was the centre of his universe. And the simple statement made by Melancthon in 1549 that “the eyes are witness that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty-four hours” no longer appeared to hold true. Henceforth, the great divide thus created between the intellect and spirit created a void in the soul of European Man. The dichotomy between religion based on unquestioning faith and the natural philosophy of the Baroque geniuses offered an opportunity for the free thinking radicals, with their skeptical Humanist Agenda, to finally break away from the intellectually stultifying influence of the Church. Rationalists exploited this opportunity and eagerly replaced, one by one, Church doctrines and dogmas with their own freethinking, practical reproducible proofs.
God suffered attack in the Renaissance, the Baroque and early Victorian periods from three sorts of critic:
- Those who hated the Theistic proofs and argued that there were no good reasons for believing God exist.
- Exponents of the problem of Evil who argued that there were no good reasons for believing that God does not exist.
- Positivists who claimed it equally meaningless to assert or to deny the existence of God.
The rationalists and humanists that were part of this conspiracy to immolate God from rational discourse and civil society and replace him with human constructs did not yet have the temerity to declare Him dead. This was for a later time: when Darwinism had arrived, when foolish and wicked men worked to remove God from the field of human endeavor and public concern. And when a man, the son of a Protestant minister and the grandson of two, who with eloquent anti-Christian polemics, a man who was eventually driven insane by his inner demons, declared: “God is dead.” Of course God is not dead, but foolish people wriggling out of their obligation to their Creator would do and believe anything that absolved them from this sacred duty. Wicked evil people who knew better used such formulations to attack the God they hated. And the powerful secret cabal of evil men who control the temporal affairs of this world give support and succor to this pernicious philosophy. For, this secret cabal of men are the human agents of Evil that are part of the Great Conspiracy against God, which is orchestrated by the Dark Gods who are Ahriman and Lucifer and who are the truly Overlords of Chaos.
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