
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Stephens, Mitchell (2014-02-25), Imagine There's No Heaven, Macmillan, Retrieved on 2014-04-21Source Material [books.google.com]
Folksonomies: history Memes
21 APR 2014
Science was Inconvenient for Religion
Science’s contributions to the spread of disbelief is the least controversial segment of the virtuous cycle for which I am arguing in seventeenth-century Europe. For science’s methods are clearly troublesome for religion. The devout, to begin with, are not wont to view their precepts merely as propositions to be controverted or confirmed. The orthodox, as a rule, are used to arguments being settled by authority, not experiment. The hope belief offers does not always stand up well to obser...As scientific knowledge grew it revealed knowledge that conflicted with scripture.
21 APR 2014
God Gets Smaller as Knowledge Grows
“The progress of religion is defined,” writes the early-twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “by the denunciation of gods.” Gods become fewer in number until there is only one—or a Father, Son and Holy Ghost adding up to one. And the qualities of the lonely God that is left are also denounced. He loses His home: God is no longer to be found inside a temple or even, after airplanes, enthroned atop a cloud. He loses His physical form: His beard, His voice, perhaps H...From many to one, from personification to invisible.