Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), painted ca. 1605-1607 by Domenico Tintoretto
(Wikimedia Commons public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
A passage from N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography<\/em> (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018), 197:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Epicureans held that, though the gods might well exist, they live in a world of their own entirely separate from the human world. \u00a0The world inhabited by humans carries on under its own impetus. \u00a0Its atoms (this view goes back to the fifth-century BC Democritus) move to and fro, \u201cswerving\u201d this way and that and thereby colliding with one another and producing different effects, different evolving life-forms. \u00a0Everything in the world and human life thus has \u201cnatural\u201d causes, and at death the constituent atoms are dispersed beyond recall and the entire human person ceases to exist. \u00a0This worldview remained the opinion of a small minority right up until the eighteenth century. \u00a0Since then, it has become the dominant one in modern Western culture. \u00a0Many imagine it to be a modern \u201cdiscovery.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
A frequent commenter on this blog, an evangelizing atheist, believes that the only genuine kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that religion is nothing more than failed science. \u00a0He is, in other words, a textbook specimen of the weird worldview that I and others call \u201cscientism.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
In any event, these two passages from\u00a0Jordan B. Peterson,\u00a012 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos<\/em>\u00a0(Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018), seem relevant to his position:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
[T]he great myths and religious stories of the past, particularly those derived from an earlier, oral tradition, were moral<\/em> in their intent, rather than descriptive. \u00a0Thus, they did not concern themseles with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act. . . . \u00a0[O]ur ancestors portrayed the world as a stage \u2014 a drama \u2014 instead of a place of objects. . . . \u00a0[I have] come to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things. \u00a0(xxvii)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
[T]hose who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth. \u00a0(34)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I think that what Jordan Peterson says here can easily be pushed too far \u2014 and that he himself has probably pushed it too far \u2014 but there is a very real element of truth to it.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019m reminded of a famous comment from Galileo:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Italian, it reads\u00a0La Bibbia ci insegna la via per andare in cielo, non come il cielo sia fatto,<\/em>\u00a0which should probably be rendered (given the double meaning of cielo<\/em>) as \u201cThe Bible teaches us the path to go to heaven, not how the sky is made.\u201d \u00a0But it has been improved in English to read \u201cThe Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.\u201d<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s quite right.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 A passage from N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018), 197: \u00a0 The Epicureans held that, though the gods might well exist, they live in a world of their own entirely separate from the human world. \u00a0The world inhabited by humans carries on under its own impetus. \u00a0Its atoms (this […]<\/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-69988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Tintoretto's](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/05\/474px-Galileo_Galilei_2.jpg\")
<\/a>