Chapter 1.                 Part F 

         If we just consider these three scientific theories - Galileo's, Darwin's, and Freud's - then, what can we say have been their consequences? Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, for most people, removed the biblical God from their picture of the cosmos. They didn’t need him in their model of the universe. Darwin removed God as the creator of life. He even reduced humans to just one more kind of animal. And Freud made humans look like sick animals, easily deluded by their own aggressive, lustful, self-absorbed thoughts. (Donald Palmer's book articulates this idea well.) (7.)

         Science has not proved that the existence of God is impossible or that a universal moral code is impossible. But over the past four centuries, Science has severely shaken the traditional idea of God and thus, inevitably, the traditional ideas of morality. (The two are deeply intertwined, as we shall see.) However, let me stress again that what does not follow is that there is no God or that every form of theism and every form of moral code are mere wishful thinking. We just need a new understanding of what God is and what the fact of His existence should mean for us in how we live our daily lives, an understanding that incorporates some subtler ideas of God and Science into a single, coherent picture of what we believe is real.

  

         But for now, we can say that Science has almost totally leveled the old, pre-Enlightenment ways of conceiving of these things. And let us make no mistake about what the loss of their belief in God has done to the vast majority of ordinary people. Removing God from Western society’s generally accepted picture of how this world works had the inevitable consequence of removing our society’s confidence in its moral code, our ideas of what right and wrong are and how we should try to act – toward the world in general, but especially toward each other. If the moral rules we're supposed to follow aren’t God’s rules, whose rules are they? Human authorities' rules? Which human authorities? Who are they to be telling me what to do?

         Now the point may seem to most people in the West to be a rather trivial one anyway. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? Explaining in more detail why humans all over, sometimes at deep, subconscious levels, are struggling to cope with this loss, even though they may not be aware of the philosophical names for the thoughts and feelings that they are having, will be the business of the next chapter.

Notes 

 1. Hanawalt, Barbara; “Growing Up in Medieval London”; Oxford University Press; 1993; p. 55.

 2.“Life Expectancy”; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectation 

 3. Descartes, Rene; “The Passions of the Soul”, articles 211, 212;   

     http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfbits/despass3.pdf.

 4. Descartes, Rene; “Meditations on First Philosophy” Meditations 3. and 4.;                                      http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations

 5. Freud, Sigmund; “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis”

    (James Strachey, editor); W.W. Norton and Co.; 1966; p. 353. 

 6. Delude, Catharine; “Researchers show that memories reside in specific brain cells"; 
     http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/conjuring-memories-artificially-0322.

 7. Palmer, Donald; "Does The Center Hold?"; the Mayfield Publishing Company; 1991; p. 56.