Jun 18 2008
Religion and Modernity
The reason why the traditional religious answers no longer satisfy is that they were constructed to suit a world which looked very different from that we find ourselves now living in. The way we understand ourselves, the earth we live on, and our relationship to that earth, have been changing enormously in the last three hundred years. This change has come about largely through three revolutions of thought.
First there was the cosmological revolution, by which the supposedly flat earth on which we lived was displaced from its privileged position at the centre of the universe, to be replaced by the vast space-time universe.
Then came the biological revolution (most effectively promoted by Darwin), by which our understanding of the origins of planetary life, including our own, was changed from one of sudden creation not so long ago to one of slow evolution of species over billions of years.
Third was the anthropological revolution by which we have come to recognize ourselves as psychosomatic organisms whose individual life-span is bounded by conception and death. Lloyd Geering