Yes, I'm familiar with Popper and more than conscious that all the conclusions of science are tentative, being based on empiricism and induction.
None of that makes the bible even remotely reliable as a guide to science, other than the science of the respective times and places its books were written.
So that there are many other ancient books which have better claims to being true (in the sense of making accurate statements about reality) than the bible has.
Karl Popper isn't the only knowledgeable person to claim that Judeo/Christianity is the seed-bed for the modern technological revolution. John Wheeler (with many others) posited that when Bishop Berkeley, arguing from scripture, claimed that a chair wasn't technically there when no one was looking at it, he became the impetus for the eventual revelation of quantum physics, which states pretty much what Bishop Berkeley said -----
"How does quantum mechanics today differ from what Bishop George Berkeley told us two centuries ago, `Esse est percipi', to be is to be perceived" (John Wheeler). -----The Oxford Professor Bryan Magee put it this way:
One thing that has always struck me forcefully about this doctrine of Kant's is that it legitimates important components of a belief which he had held since long before he began to philosophize, namely Christian belief. It is a standard part of the traditional Christian faith that time and space and material objects are local characteristics of this human world of ours, but only of this world: they do not characterize reality as such . . . But what he [Kant] did, unmistakably (and unremarked on to an extent that has never ceased to astonish me), is produce rational justification for many aspects of the religious beliefs in which he grew up (Magee 97, p. 249,250).
Distinct from every religion or philosophy ever devised in the mind of man, Jews posited a God who existed in an utterly indeterminant state not subject to the very laws, or world, or reality, he himself created ex nihilo. -----This idea of a God outside of the laws of classical physics, a God not subject to the laws he created, existing outside of the world perceived as all there is, is so great that it could only (that conception) have come from outside the classical physical world inhabited by all of Israel's enemies.
Christianity took it further. It posited that this Jewish God, not subject to the laws he created, kenotically imprisoned himself, freely, of his own freewill, in the world he created, so that he could infuse that world, and the men and women who are themselves consigned to it, with the divine freedom of indeterminancy associated with Jewish monotheism.
Having abolished in his flesh the enmity between God and man, the laws of classical physics, contained in ordinances [the Law], for to make in himself of the two former (classical and indeterminate) one new man, so making peace between God and man, deity and humanity (Ephesians 2:15).
Christian theology, to the fear and frustration of Jews, posited that the indeterminate God of Jewish monotheism imprisoned himself in the flesh of men, formerly locked into the classical world of physics, precisely to infuse them, share with them, the divine power and freedom he had exclusively in Jewish theology. . . Lo and behold, between the two of them, Christians and Jews, theology and Judeo/Christian science, man, men, realized the power of this lawless indeterminancy now known as quantum physics. Using this power, Jews and Christians created the technological revolution that is threatening to return control of the classical world to mankind therein reversing the effect of the Fall in the Garden whereby Adam, the first man, was consigned to the prison of the classical world with seemingly no escape.
Daniel Dennett's book,
Freedom Evolves, attempts to deal, in a non-theological way, with precisely this quantum indeterminancy that has arisen in the thinking of men. He wonders out loud how minds allegedly created through classical physical forces could have transcended the very laws through which the human mind developed, in order to not only transcend those laws, but to literally start re-writing them, in effect taking over evolution by splicing genes, and forcing quantum, indeterminate states, on, into, the classical world the human mind should be imprisoned in:
Human freedom [quantum indeterminancy, freedom from classical laws] is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species, us. The differences between autonomous human agents and the other assemblages of nature are visible not just from an anthropocentric perspective but also from the most objective standpoints (the plural is important) achievable. Human freedom is real---as real as language, music, and money----so it can be studied objectively from a no-nonsense, scientific point of view. But like language, music, money, and other products of society, its persistence is affected by what we believe about it. So it is not surprising that our attempts to study it dispassionately are distorted by anxiety that we will clumsily kill the specimen under the microscope.
Human freedom is younger than the species. Its most important features are only several thousand years old--- an eyeblink in evolutionary history---but in that short time it has transformed the planet in ways that are as salient as such great biological transitions as the creation of an oxygen-rich atmosphere and the creation of multicellular life. Freedom had to evolve like every other feature of the biosphere, and it continues to do so today. Freedom isreal now, in some happy parts of he world, and those who love it love wisely, but it is far from inevitable, far from universal. If we understand better how freedom arose, we can do a better job of preserving it for the future, and protecting it from its many natural enemies.
Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett, p. 305.
Dennett concedes that "freedom" the power to use quantum indeterminancy against the classical physical world, is younger than the species. It evolved first through Judaism, and then climaxed in Christian theology. Throughout the NT, we read dozens of quotations which, translated in modern language, are the source, the seed, from whence this "freedom" came to be. It arose on the cross of Christ when his disciples, against the grain of the classical view that Jesus had died, claimed he rose from the dead as the "firstborn" from the classical world, the classical law, where death reigns lawful and supreme.
When Jesus' disciples preached that Jesus rose from the dead, they were preaching the arrival of quantum indeterminancy in the most virile way: don't fear classical death, and the appearances of it, for Jesus indeed rose from the most powerful law of the natural, classical, world, death.
Albert Einstein preached that the second law of thermodynamics, the source of "death," is the least likely of all natural laws to ever be rescinded. Jesus' disciples exclaimed the victorious revelation that in his resurrection from the dead, from the second law of classical thermodynamics, Jesus had freed all mankind from the most unbreachable of all classical laws: death. ------- I proclaim this victorious proclamation to you blu. Jesus indeed rose from the dead. And for that reason, you have nothing to fear from death, senescence, the rotting of the classical body through the enforcement of the second law. A new world has arrived. As Dennett points out, it wasn't inevitable. And neither will all participate in it. But it's available to all who have ears to here.
John
