Progress of Science and the Dethronement of God and Man
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Transcript of Progress of Science and the Dethronement of God and Man
His sons can now transplant a kidney from
one person to another
Or
Repair a crushed foot with screws, wires, metal plates and cadaver bones
The boy grew up with these…
Today he lives with these…
He learned to write with this Tod
ay,
he w
ork
s w
ith th
is
Graphite Slate
Michelangelo, Creation of the Sun and Moon
Ptolemaic Universe
The Supreme Maker said of Man:
“I have placed you at the very center of the world,.”Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man. (Chicago: Gateway Edition, 1956), p.7
MichelangeloThe Creation of Adam
1519
Created in God’s image. Genesis 1:26
“The Sun is in the center. The Earth and planets orbit the Sun.”
Nicholas Copernicus, (1500's)Nicholas Copernicus, (1500's)
Julien de La Mettrie(1709 - 1751)
God has abandoned Man
God is indifferent, everything happens according to laws
Man has no responsibility for his thoughts or actions.
The universe is a mechanism - humans are just complex mechanisms. They too are
controlled by physical laws
“We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy,tailed quadruped, probably arboreal” The Descent of Man (Darwin 1871)
“If they are sufficiently
complete to live, they do- if not
they should die.” Herbert Spencer
DARWINISM
CHAMBERLAIN
ROSENBERG
HITLER“Nature is cruel, therefore we too may be
cruel… I have a right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like
vermin
• Subconscious motives and instinctual drives direct human
behavior
Hubble & Einstein
Universe is expanding!Man is far from the center in a vast universeMan is insignificantTruth is relative
Edwin Hubble (1929):
galaxies moving away from us
A Universe without God Man descended from Beasts Man is driven by irrational impulses With Knowledge uncertain and relative
MAN is in despair, feels alone, living a meaningless existence in an absurd universe
Consequently:
Creation of Man, Sistine Chapel, MICHELANGELO
Alberto Giacometti
Giacometti's sculptures are meditation on
the emptiness of modern life. His
figures are lonely and isolated even when arranged together.Giacometti expresses existential angst, modern man's isolation from his fellows, and the impossibility of certainty in our troubled age. ...
Inter Varsity Press review of Francis A. Schaeffer’s, Art & the Bible
The Scream (or The Cry)
Edvard Munch, 1893(Expressionism)
Lonely, alienated
Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923
Piet Mondrian, Composition A, 1923
Rothko – Blue, Orange, Red (1961)Roy Lichtenstein
“God is present as the main Actor in the classic epics of Western Christendom from Dante Alighieri, John Milton to William Blake.”
God begins to fade in Hawthorne, Melville, Emily Dickenson, and God dissolves in Emerson, Walt Whitman and Thoreau
GOD disappeared as the explicit presence among the cast of characters in modern writing.
The reference work: Religion in Contemporary Fiction: Criticism From 1945 to the Present only two articles of 1029 deal with the issue of God.
God is absent in modern Literature J. Killinger, “ The Absence of God in Modern Literature.”
Thomas J. J.
Altizer
“Every existent is born without reason, prologs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.” Roquentin in Nausea
“There is no ultimate meaning or purpose inherent in human life; in this sense life is ‘absurd.’”
“ But you, Daniel shut up the words, and seal the book until the
time of the end, Many shall run to and fro, and
knowledge shall increase”
Dan.12, 4
12 “But where shall wisdom be found?
And where is the place of understanding?
13 Man does not know its worth,and it is not found in the land of the
living...28 And he said to man,
‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom,
and to turn away from evil is understanding.’” Job 28.
