Consider a moment the last 1000 years. The changing of the calendar to the new Millennium over a decade plus ago brought a long view to that span. Without question it was the birth of modern science that separated those previous seven-millennium changes. Writing, philosophy and metal had already had a long lineage by 1000 A.D. but start of the scientific revolution still sat 500 years away. The spark I give to Copernicus and the heliocentric paradigm shift that forced a rational mind to accept a new center. In the preceding revolution our place in space and time would get smaller and smaller as our knowledge of the universe around us got larger and larger.
Yes we should acknowledge the logic revolution by the ancient Greeks. But remember that was work on a Tabula Rasa, the thoughts shifted the world’s intellectual expansion because they were the first tremors of their kind. To claim them as the greatest thinkers of humanities arc is to replace the word pioneer with the word deity. Plato and Socrates were profound thinkers but had the advantage of the minimal constraint on what the world was made of and what governed it observable motions.
When the human evolution of collective thought turned to science to asking how instead of why, the tenements of observation, measurement and prediction produced a bedrock of discovery; the fundamentals of the physical world started to unfold. From Copernicus came Kepler and Galileo and suddenly dialectics became just another tool in the box of physical sciences. Yes, argue your point but show your evidence. Reason wins the day when reason is based on the observed and measured.
What mankind discovered in the beginnings of the age of enlightenment reviled that religion was no match to science in understanding the how. Indeed the providence of how IS the domain of science. This went far to discredit religion in the day, especially when religious authorities fought so hard to suppress discovery of such evidence against their dogma. My argument is that religion filled a void until we could fill it by discovery. It was inevitable that the mind of man would take Occam’s razor to the observable world and find better answers. This is the where evidence takes you. One can explain dogma as a cultural need where uncertainty broadens in the absence of evidence.
This is in no way closed the gap between thinking how from the thinking why. Galileo himself understood that the human mind required a higher authority to parse purpose. Only those drunk on discovery thought for a moment that reason could replace God. We weren’t finding out his secrets, merely finding out his methods. The secrets of purpose remains in his domain, it is an answer that would require all the facts of the before and after with emphasis on the after. How seems possible, why seems forever unsolved and therefore always up for debate.
Science produced its own dogmas as well, ones as dangerous as any originated from caliphate or Pope. But it is just as dangerous to assign faith in reason as the cause of Nazi eugenics or Soviet “scientific socialist” as to lay the crusades on the church. How an empire gets its citizens to risk life for expansion of power and influence should not be confused with why. Draw boundaries anywhere and those inside them will long for more land, water or resources. It is our way. These desires are played out in global trade in the new century; in the past its’ methods involved horses and swords.
The last 1000 years have seen the explosion of human knowledge but not neccessiarly understanding. Knowledge is not the same as faith nor is it a threat to it. But finding out how we got here seems both our intellcutal destiny as well as an important step in trying to understand our maker and define some purpose to it. If one is willing not to separate the two then its possible there is a logical leap of faith to take. Perhaps the how is part and parcel to the why.
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