Laszlo Bencze offs a thought on how to survive in a culture that thinks that design in nature is unreasonable but an infinity of flopped universes is reasonable:
In my reading of a very fine book subtitled “How the Christian Middle Ages launched the scientific revolution” I encountered this passage:
Sir Isaac Newton explicitly stated that he was investigating God’s creation, which was a religious duty because nature reflects the creativity of its maker. In 1713, he inserted into the second edition of his greatest work, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, the words:
Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of organisms which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing….And that is enough concerning God, to discourse of whom from the appearances of things does certainly belong to natural philosophy.
It would take Charles Darwin (1809-1882) to prove Newton wrong. —The Genesis of Science, James Hannam, p. 349
Mind you, this book bends over backwards to be sympathetic to Christianity, frequently reminding the reader that the Middle Ages produced much excellent science and that the church was neither frightened of such knowledge nor fought against it. But sympathy has its limits. The flat statement of fact closing this passage certainly represents the standard secular view of science and its relation to Christianity. Darwin made God obsolete. That’s that. Any discussion of evolution which proposes taking God seriously as an actual existing entity is backwards, primitive, outmoded, and, frankly, contemptible. Such is the world view which pervades intellectual society.
I find it fascinating that Hannam does such a good job of explaining the metaphysical controversies of the Middle Ages, some of which were quite subtle, yet manages to miss the elephant in the room of our current discourse. Of course Darwin did not disprove Newton’s statement. His achievement was insignificant in terms of advancing science and negligible as theology. But the problem is that he wrote so beguilingly that his work was accepted as both paradigm changing science and irrefutable theology. The best minds of the past 150 years have generally been conned into both opinions. And those opinions are seemingly unshakable.
Vast human capital gets infested in such theories. Only obituaries help in such cases, unfortunately. Suddenly, the relicts and dependents provided for, it becomes safer to say that it is all rot.