responsibilities: to protect and serve men and nature. At the end of his lecture “On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau said:
There will never be a really free and enlightened state, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
Science: The Religion Of Modern Man
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding another pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Isaac Newton
A study of history and literature from earliest recorded time until the last century reveals that when man thought or talked or wrote, he would often make references to his God. Today the theory of evolution has become so interwoven with our culture that we think and talk and write in scientific terms. Science has become the religion of modern man, and scientists have become its priests. And like every institution that has overstayed its welcome, science is guilty of taking itself too seriously. Science needs to learn the humility of Isaac Newton, the great scientist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The history of science is the story of many wrong turns. Today’s scientific truth is often tomorrow’s stepping stone. Many times in the past discoveries have been made that upset the conventional scientific wisdom; there is no reason to believe there are no major upheavals around the corner.
For instance, for hundreds of years educated men said the universe revolved about the earth, and they devised an elaborate scheme to explain the movements of the sun, the moon, and the planets. It took the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, and Kepler in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to knock man off this pedestal.
In the eighteenth century scientists were amused by the French farmers who told them rocks were falling from the sky. Today we call those rocks meteorites. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, some doctors diagnosed illnesses they could not explain as due to too much fluid in the body, and they prescribed bloodletting by the placing of leeches on the patient’s skin.
At the beginning of this century scientists were saying the field of physics was complete except for a little fine tuning. This was before the discovery of the atom and quantum physics. This was before Einstein’s theories of relativity. At the beginning of this century scientists scoffed at the continental drift theory. Now continental drift is being taught to school children. Six years before Sputnik was launched in 1957, a prominent scientist said the idea of an artificial satellite going around the earth was “utter bunk.”
Early in this century astronomers said there was only one galaxy in the universe. Fifty years later astronomers said there were one billion galaxies in the universe and 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Now they want us to believe there are 200 billion galaxies in the universe and 400 billion stars in our galaxy.
A knowledge of the past mistakes of science leads one to ask the obvious question: Why should we trust scientists when they tell us they have the universe figured out now?
A popular scientific theory today is organic evolution, which says: Living things are in savage competition with each other, and those best adapted to their environment will survive and pass their traits onto the next generation, while the characteristics of those not as suited to their environment will vanish from the earth.
All of biology is dependent upon a belief in evolution. The sciences of cosmology and geology have incorporated the concept of evolution into their theories. If evolution were found to be wrong, modern science would be thrown into chaos. That is why scientists defend it with such