How free is science?

Ideally, it enlightens us and frees us from superstition; it helps us know what to expect (so it can get rid of anxiety); it puts the world in perspective, and offers explanations for things we see and experience; it helped us get to the moon; it helps us get better when sick or injured.  The list goes on and on....

It is not the only way to look at things; philosophy and religion give us insights that it can not -- they with their deeper perspective, though dimmer and more difficult to explain.

There is an invasive quality to science.  There is this unspoken goal of some scientists (Professors come to mind) to eradicate religions along with all superstitions.  But if Christianity were such a bad idea, wouldn't it just fade away as people became more enlightened through education, through science?  We have been in the age of enlightenment for about 400 years... are we makin' progress?  Personally, I feel like we are making progress -- I can use an mp3 player to listen to my favorite music (and to listen to the Rosary while walking to dog), and I can use the internet to blog to people like you about science... and its limits.  What I will not do is become a slave to the material world -- maybe we can call this sciencism.  One last idea: who is it who is filled with more anxiety, religious people, or scientists who think science is all that is?

Today I'm going to start something I don't really want to do, because it's just plain, and a little large to fit in my head all at once.

Let's think about how we see the world, and about how we make sense of things.  There are many cultures; I'm American, and we're basically continuing with European traditions.  Let's call this Western Civilization.  Of what does this cultural world-view consist?  I like to see things in threes, so:

Three forces shaping us:

1. Philosophy of the ancient Greeks.

2. Christianity.

3. Science.

Philosophy definitely helped man make sense out of the world -- very intellectual and aesthetic, clear.  Greek philosophy had a few drawbacks.  One was the assumption that to know the good was to do the good; it sounds good on paper, but fallen man does not work this way -- the will does not always follow the intellect.

Christianity was able to help in ways that philosophy could not.  Time to quote someone: "The Christian contribution, directly moral, and religious, deep and dim and tender, slow and far-reaching, immensely costly, infinitely strong; with its discovery and exemplification of the mysterious depth and range and complexity of human personality and freedom, of conscience and of sin; a view profoundly concrete and at bottom libertarian.  The goodwill here first precedes, and then outstrips, and determines the information supplied by the intellect: 'Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.'  And the strength of this position consists in its being primarily not a view, but a life, a spiritual, religious life, requiring, implying, indeed proclaiming, definite doctrines concerning God and man, and their relations to each other, but never exhausted by these doctrines even in their collectivity, inexhaustible though these in their turn are by their union with the life of the spirit, their origin and end."