Quote:
Originally Posted by kerry
Initially 10,000 years or so. But Christianity seemed quite compatible with and happy to accept Aristotelian science in the Middle ages. I think that heliocentrism began to throw a wrench in the works.
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To elaborate on what I mean, I think the conflict between faith and science only begins once humans invent writing and religions embed themselves in written text. As long as religion was oral it was pretty easy to forget that we used to worship the river and changed our allegiance to the mountain god once the volcano went off.
But even with religions embedded in holy written text, there wasn't a widespread conflict between religion and science until the invention of the printing press and the invention of Protestantism. Prior to the printing press, the average believer's knowledge of religion and science was mediated thru the local priest. The only people who had to mitigate the conflict between the content of the written text and new scientific knowledge were the literate elite like Aquinas or Maimonodes. The average believer got their religion with the conflict resolved.
But when everyone started to read the printed copies of the Bible and get their own basic scientific education, the conflict became much more obvious. It is exacerbated by the fact that the conflict between science and science as opposed to between faith and science, is almost completely obscured by current scientific practices. Science departments throw out old textbooks as new developments take places and students never learn the history of science in their particular science classes (like Biology) but only the current state of the field. So science also seems up to date and authoritative as a result of this practice. Religion has never done that. Instead of throwing out the old texts and hiding the conflict between conflicting knowledge in human history, they keep reprinting the old text (with some exceptions as new religions evolve like Mormonism).
Maybe if religion takes a similar quantum leap that it took when culture moved from oral to written and religion becomes internet based where the content of religion is constantly updated, then the conflict between religion and science will once again fade into the background.
On the other hand, if we all had to read a sequence of science texts from the 19th century up to the present when we took science classes we'd be much more aware of the evolution and limited nature of scientific knowledge.