There was a time when the common man thought religion was mysterious. Not like a stone buried beneath the earth’s surface. More like the opposite sex…whether you’re a man or a woman, you can never really understand the other side. And yet the other side is never elusive. Men know what women want, and women know what men want…it’s just that neither can explain it. And we join in an arrangement so that we can better understand the other side (or one particular member of the other side). In this arrangement, we study and study. We come to understand more…but we always understand less.

 

This is how man has always understood God. God is not hidden, yet we cannot see Him. God tells us what He wants, but we don’t always understand. God invites us to contemplate, but His mystery only grows.

The Age of Science

And while man thought God was mysterious, there was a time that he thought science was ominous. Scientists were ridiculed for being inventive. And the trickster took advantage of this. He could fool the common man with mechanical magic, while picking his pockets. Some were hanged as witches and wizards, but most had the last laugh at society, and probably went to their graves remembering how fun it was.

People like St. Thomas Aquinas brought us to a new age, where God and science could co-exist. Even to where we could use science to understand God. Some people think the age of science ended the age of religion…I say it enhanced it. But something DID go wrong. The name of that something is Darwin.

It’s not necessarily the man himself, but the new age of theories based on baseless theories. It’s the mountain of evidence that could easily fin in a 4 X 5 box. This is what destroyed the age of theology. What really happened was that science was introduced as a new religion.

Science Becomes Mysterious

Science, once again, became something the public wasn’t allowed to understand. The theme is ‘Qualification’. And this is how the new religion differed from the old one. God was mysterious, but man was urged by the church to understand Him. Science is mysterious, and man is urged by the scientist to forget about it. Those who want to argue about the origin of man are only taken serious when they have credentials.

It seems the only place for the common man in this scientific age, is to keep throwing money at the scientist. We’ll pay grants to the researchers, and never question their research. We started with questioning the methods before celebrating the discovery. Then we celebrated the discovery without questioning the method. We’ve come to the morbid habit of celebrating the discovery and accepting the method…no matter how abominable it is.

In everyday life, we embrace the use of this technology without ever understanding it…or even wanting to understand it. The farmer (while he made his living by natural means) was always mechanically inclined because that’s what was necessary. He was able to run the plow and fix it when it broke. He was no financial wizard, but he could keep his affairs neatly organized in a ledger. But the specialties have become more specialized. The farmer must hire a diesel mechanic to repair his equipment and an accountant to handle his money.

And all this points to the problem of science getting out of hand. It’s uses are there for us, but the concepts are either too boring or too complicated. Whether this is good or bad, it’s at least damaging. Because once we stopped questioning how, we stopped questioning why and if.

Where science was ominous, it is now mysterious…to the point that we stopped wondering altogether. Where God was mysterious, He soon became ludicrous. And eventually, God went from ludicrous to dangerous.

Man once thought that science threatened theology. The popular myth now is that theology threatens science. Such is the way science became the new god. The first commandment is laughable in modern society because the modern idol snuck in through the back door.