(credit: Wikimedia Commons)

If we consider just these three scientific theories—Galileo’s, Darwin’s, and Freud’s—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. 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)

Despite all this, 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 from these scientific models 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 God’s 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, consistent, coherent picture of what we believe is real.

But for now, we can say that Science has almost levelled the old, pre-Enlightenment ways of thinking 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 one another. 

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? They’re just human, like I am. And all humans make mistakes.  

The point may seem a trivial one to most people. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? Explaining in more detail why humans throughout the world, 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 they are having, will be the business of the next chapter.

Notes

1. Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 55.

2. “Life Expectancy,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed March 29, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.

3. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Articles 211 and 212, ed. Jonathan Bennett. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/descartes1649.pdf.

4. Ibid., Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 3 and 4., trans. John Veitch, 1901. http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations.

5. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1966), p. 353.

6. Cathryn Delude, “Researchers Show That Memories Reside in Specific Brain Cells,” MIT News, March 22, 2012. http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/conjuring-memories-artificially-0322.

7. Donald Palmer, Does the Center Hold? An Introduction to Western Philosophy (California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1st edition, 1991), p. 56.