Philosophy Daily: “Are scientists involved in a satanic plot to undermine religion?”
Philosophy Daily: “Are scientists involved in a satanic plot to undermine religion?”
By Jonny Thomson | Published: 2024-11-29 15:30:00 | Source: Thinking – Big Think
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He says, “Satan is the deceiver of the whole world” in Revelation 12, and this is verified by noting that the atheists who run science and education have convinced everyone of their lies. How could very smart people not be able to see it?
– Michael, Australia
I’ll admit I had to edit this question a bit. Usually, we just add a little punctuation and some light touches to the submitted posts Everyday philosophybut this question was a little confusing. It was a bit too incoherent to fit our editorial standards. So, here’s an edited version that I hope captures the gist of Michael’s question.
It’s also clear that Michael’s question is a particular kind of question — the kind we encounter a lot at Big Think (and I’m sure any publication does): an angry, paranoid rambling, usually steeped in a harmful form of religion. Normally I delete these types of emails, but something about this one held me back for a while. Michael doesn’t insult me. He doesn’t scream or stick to his hats. It is a question born of a belief, born of his religion. So why not? Let’s examine these claims. Let’s try to be “smart people” and examine the claim that atheists and/or Satan run science and education.
To do this, we will have to put a historical feather in our philosophical hat. We will have to delve into the history of religion and education. Since Michael is a Christian, I will focus on the Christian tradition, and we can divide this question into two parts: First, the historical and theological question – what role has the church played in education so far? Second, the modern claim – is “science” really run by atheists and/or Satan bent on deceiving the world?
Sliding snakes at the ready. We are heading to the Tree of Knowledge.
Religious education
When you talk about the relationship between religion and science, it is only a matter of time before one name comes up: Galileo Galilei. Persecuted Galileo. Galileo gagged. Galileo became the boy who was interested in the debate about science and religion. When Galileo declared that the Earth was not the center of the universe, papal commentators considered this blasphemous. So, he narrowly avoided death and lived his life under house arrest (which was actually a villa in Tuscany, filled with servants, and often visited by friends and cardinals).
It is not difficult to find examples of the Church suppressing or expunging science. But this picture of science-hating Christianity is, at best, simplistic and, at worst, patently false.
You cannot tell the history of education without telling the history of religion. In the ancient, pre-Christian world, philosophers studied the natural world. But Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Galen, and others were all religious people who saw their work as falling within the framework of their religious beliefs. Even the Epicureans – the “first atheists” in history – were actually deists, not atheists at all.
In the medieval period, almost all formal education was organized, financed, and headed by the church. The first universities in France and Italy were designed to create a unified understanding of the world – the ‘universities’ of ‘university’ were intended to create a ‘universal’ education. While I went there to study law or medicine or other disciplines, they all came in second place to theology. Learning was part of the religious understanding of things, a way of understanding God’s creation.
The only sources of education in the European Middle Ages were at the royal court, as an apprentice, or at the university. It is not unfair to say that all of academia and any education for a millennium and a half has been because of the church.
The word “science” has ancient roots, but the way it is used today is relatively modern. For a long time, this simply meant “learning through books,” and usually only in philosophy and theology. By the 17th century, it began to mean “anything not in the arts.” Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did it come to mean the study of the natural phenomena of the world: biology, chemistry, physics.
So, Michael, if we look at history, certainly “science and education” was not a matter of atheism. It was church-led and religiously inculcated. Which, I think, is your point. Looking at history makes today seem even more different.
Satanists’ laboratory
Confession time: When I was writing this article, I had a certain bias. I assumed that modern science, as Michael points out, is dominated by atheists. With prominent intellectuals like neurologist Sam Harris and evolutionist Richard Dawkins leading the “New Atheism” movement, and with Stephen Hawking declaring “There is no God,” you can see why my biases are shaped the way they are.
It is surprisingly difficult to find conclusive data either way on this issue. there He is A great deal Of the evidence that indicates “Scientists“They are more likely to be irreligious than the general public – but how and to what extent this varies depending on when and who you ask. If you compare scientists with any old university-educated member of the general public, the difference becomes much smaller again. So, there is a connection between higher education and non-religiosity, but the claim ‘all scientists are atheists’ is difficult to answer, not least because we don’t have a uniform, widely accepted use of the word “atheist”.
However, I think we can say to Michael that there is enough data to suggest that scientists are more likely to be atheists than any ordinary member of the public in most of the developed world. And so, on to the next part. Does this make science less reputable as a result? Are atheists more likely to lie than believers? Well, no. Of course not. Humans are humans, and most people lie several times a day.
Does it matter?
The implicit assumption in Michael’s question is that because scientists are atheists, they tend to manipulate their data or distort their experiments to prove atheistic conclusions—like Galileo’s heliocentrism or evolutionary theory, perhaps.
It would be naive to say that scientists are immune to bias. It would be wrong to suggest that scientific research is merely cold data, meticulously collected, and presented objectively. As Stuart Ritchie of Science fiction The bulletin puts it:
“Merely compressing a complex process into a few thousand words – with a journal-mandated word limit – is itself a distortion of reality. Every time scientists decide on ‘framing’, ‘emphasis’ or ‘take-home messages’, they risk distorting reality even further, underestimating the reliability of what they report. We all know that many news articles and scientific books are overly simplistic “Poorly worded, stupid.”
But that’s not how science works. It does not depend on some studies or votes. Science involves millions of people over decades, working in hundreds of countries around the world. Some are atheists, some are religious, and most are simply trying to find the truth.
In 2016Dr. David Robert Grimes conducted a study on how long it would take for a conspiracy to emerge based on the number of people involved. The more people involved, the faster the conspiracy collapses. It’s hard to know exactly, But roughly 45,000 people in the United States will earn PhDs in STEM in 2022. And if we extrapolate that out to all PhD-level living scientists around the world, we’re talking millions of scientists. According to Grimes’ law of conspiracies, it only takes a few seconds for the “godless deception” to explode.
So, Michael, here’s the answer: Yes, many scientists are atheists, more so than the general public. And yes, scientists, like all humans, can be deceptive or misled by bias. But is science engaged in a conspiracy of deception inspired by Satan? Maybe not.
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