Aether and The Field: The Rise of Materialism(Episode 3)
How the growth of materialistic philosophy was due to materialistic religious theology.
The decline of belief in the 19th century was not just due to the growth of scientific knowledge, but more importantly was driven by latent religious materialism. I believe It is actually religious materialism which took root centuries earlier that has fostered this hard split between science and religion. As a result, many on both sides have viewed belief in either as mutually exclusive or at the very least belonging to completely different spheres of knowledge than science. Many religion’s answer the problem of reconciling the materialistic understandings of science by simply avoiding the intersection of science and religion and relying on ‘faith’ to explain the serious logical and physical problems of their understanding of scripture.
The fruit of this is that Religion, in particular traditional theism, appears to be in full retreat in the broader culture. In my experience, the attacks on theism appear to be growing in the nature of their viciousness, ridicule and derision, spreading beyond the traditional intellectual class and moving down through all levels of society. The antagonism is fueled by disgust at the whole sale murder, tyranny, corruption and the celebration of…