{"id":42139,"date":"2017-05-15T13:13:35","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T19:13:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=42139"},"modified":"2017-05-15T13:13:35","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T19:13:35","slug":"science-world-illusions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2017\/05\/science-world-illusions.html","title":{"rendered":"Science and a World of Illusions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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\"Aswan:<\/a>
The Nile River at Aswan (Wikimedia Commons public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The late anthropologist Loren Eiseley, in his book\u00a0The Firmament of Time<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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\u201cA scientist writing around the turn of the century remarked that all of the past generations of men have lived and died in a world of illusions.\u00a0 The unconscious irony in his observation consists in the fact that this man assumed the progress of science to have been so great that a clear vision of the world without illusion was, by his own time, possible.\u00a0 It is needless to add that he wrote before Einstein, before the spread of Freud\u2019s doctrines, at a time when Mendel was just about to be rediscovered, and before advances in the study of radioactivity had made their impact\u2014of both illumination and confusion\u2014upon this century.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cCertainly science has moved forward.\u00a0 But when science progresses, it often opens vaster mysteries to our gaze.\u00a0 Moreover, science frequently discovers that it must abandon or modify what it once believed.\u00a0 Sometimes it ends by accepting what it has previously scorned.\u00a0 The simplistic idea that science marches undeviatingly down an ever broadening highway can scarcely be sustained by the historian of ideas.\u201d<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Posted from Aswan, Egypt<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 The late anthropologist Loren Eiseley, in his book\u00a0The Firmament of Time: \u00a0 \u201cA scientist writing around the turn of the century remarked that all of the past generations of men have lived and died in a world of illusions.\u00a0 The unconscious irony in his observation consists in the fact that this man assumed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nScience and a World of Illusions<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    The late anthropologist Loren Eiseley, in his book\u00a0The Firmament of Time:   "A scientist writing around the turn of the century\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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