Science and hate for religion: a personal anecdote

John McCarthy

Since 1995, Internet has become an almost indispensable tool for many people. Our society is increasingly dependent on the global data network, which means that we are increasingly vulnerable. A solar flare, a large meteorite, an overload of energy networks, a major war, can endanger our social structure, making it impossible to use Internet.

In the late 1980s, Internet was just a fledgling network linking together private companies, whatever their hardware and software. In fact, it was one among many networks competing for the new ecological-social niche. One of the most important of these networks was BITNET, which linked all the universities in North America using IBM computers. Later, a parallel network was created in Europe, called EARN, which was soon connected to BITNET.

Science was never a danger for my Catholicism - Part II

Interview with Manuel Alfonseca. Originally published in Spanish in La NuevaRazón

Questioner: Carlos Sordo de la Rubiera

II Part

Q: In your article “Faith in God in the light of science” you say this: "During the 18th and 19th centuries, believers gave ground as new scientific advances forced them to accept that the Earth is not the center of universe and that the human body is the result of a long and complex biological evolution”. But, continuing with said article "as a consequence of the latest advances in Cosmology and the Physico-Chemical sciences, and for the first time in several centuries, atheism has now got on the defensive." Let's stop at this last point. If atheists go on the defensive, it is because they consider that their atheism deserves to be defended. If, as you also affirm, the human being has a wish for immortality and a longing for infinity, and atheism gives a negative answer to that wish and that longing, how is it possible that a person may decide to take an atheist position?

Science was never a danger for my Catholicism - Part I

Interview with Manuel Alfonseca. Originally published in Spanish in La NuevaRazón

Questioner: Carlos Sordo de la Rubiera

I Part

Q: Most scientists are atheists. Myth or Reality?

A: I think this is not true. Since God is obviously not an object of study by science, many scientists, relying solely on science, hold that the correct position is agnosticism. But there are other ways, apart from science, that can make us know something. In general, there are three forms of knowledge: authority, experience, and reasoning. Scientific research is just one type of reasoning; apart from it, we also have, for instance, philosophical or artistic reasoning.

The abolition of man

C.S. Lewis

In 1943, C.S. Lewis wrote a book with the same title as this post. In that year, the second world war was in full swing, but the book is not about the war, but about more fundamental questions, such as the moral degradation of man, which was then quite advanced and is worse today. This is how Lewis explains this degradation:

Let us regard all ideas of what we ought to do simply as an interesting psychological survival: let us step right out of all that and start doing what we like. Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.

Utopias and Dystopias

Utopias, the descriptions of fictitious perfect societies, owe their name to Thomas More's Utopia (1516), a title of Greek origin that literally means nowhere. Before and after More's work there have been many other utopias, each one to the liking of its author, for the question of the perfect society gives a lot of play to the imagination. Examples include Plato's Republic, Tomasso Campanella's The City of the Sun (1602), Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888, see this post), William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933), or Aldous Huxley's Island (1962).

A Canticle for Leibowitz

This novel, one of my favorites in the science-fiction genre, belongs to the catastrophic subgenre, also called post-apocalyptic. This is its summarized argument:

An atomic war has destroyed our civilization. After the catastrophe, the surviving masses hate science and books, considering them responsible for the tragedy. In the same way as after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church collects the remains of knowledge and preserve them for posterity, so they can be used by a new civilization, capable of understanding them, if one day it would arise. But when this happens, history repeats and man self-destructs again.

Science or imagination?

A large part of the "scientific" research currently being developed, rather than being science, is just an exercise of the imagination of "scientists." It seems that we must consider as scientists all those who do mathematical speculations that have little or nothing to do with reality. And naturally, everything a scientist does is “science”. At least, scientific journals and high-profile media consider it as such.