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Progress

Entry 302, on 2006-03-23 at 10:14:12 (Rating 4, Science)

I am still reading Big Bang, by Simon Singh. Unfortunately, I only get a few minutes a day to read, because I'm too busy with various computer projects, so progress is remarkably slow. After reading the introductory section of the book its obvious that progress was also slow for science up to a few hundred years ago. Considering the good start the Greek proto-scientists made almost 3000 years ago, what went wrong? The answer seems to be: religion.

Christianity is primarily responsible for halting the progress of science for nearly 2000 years. In that time people were denied many of the benefits of technology derived from science, simply because religious people, especially the Christian leadership, were too narrow-minded and self-centered to allow anyone to suggest their beliefs were wrong.

A Catholic friend of mine once suggested that we should thank religion because it was monasteries, etc which stored the information from earlier times which was eventually re-discovered in the Renaissance. Well that may have been a factor, but more information came from non-western sources, such as Islamic and Chinese records. And how much credit can we give them for a few records of Greek thinking already 2000 years old and which, in turn, was not allowed to be challenged. For example, challenging the heliocentric beliefs of Aristotle was heresy, and was punishable by death at certain times. Were we any better off?

The history of the world shows us a gradual change from religious beliefs to logical, scientific understanding. There has never been a single instance of a new religious belief replacing an existing scientific theory, but the opposite has happened thousands of times.

Now we have another uprising of religious freaks around the world trying to prevent science from progressing in areas that contradict what they want to believe: evolution, cloning, stem cell research, to name a few. Its time we just laughed at these fools and told them to go and believe their primitive nonsense somewhere else, and leave the rest of us to continue the progress of human civilisation. They have no place in our modern world.

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