Clash between Magic, science and religion

1. Clash between Magic, science and religion Presented by Woo Jek Jin

2. Magic against religion

3. Magic against religion (contents) • Evolution of magic to religion • Introduction of the salem witch hunts • Severity of the salem witch hunts • How magic contradict religion • Similarities of magic and religion

4. Evolution from magic to religion • Humans started out trying to make sense of natural phenomena, when they failed to, it was all pushed to an external force that was in charge of such natural phenomena. • With time, the collection of such belief and external forces, they grouped it all under the umbrella of religion.

5. What were the salem witch hunts? • A small girl fell sick in 1692. Her “fitts” convulsions, contortions, and outbursts of gibberish—baffled everyone. Other girls soon manifested the same symptoms. Their doctor could suggest but one cause - Witchcraft. That grim diagnosis launched a Puritan inquisition that took 25 lives, filled prisons with innocent people, and frayed the soul of a Massachusetts community called Salem.

6. Severity of the salem witchunts • From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft. Dozens languished in jail for months without trials. Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts ended.

7. Why did this travesty of justice occur? Why did it occur in Salem? Nothing about this tragedy was inevitable. Only an unfortunate combination of an ongoing frontier war, economic conditions, congregational strife, teenage boredom, and personal jealousies can account for the spiraling accusations, trials, and executions that occurred in the spring and summer of 1692.

8. What was really the salem witch hunts? • They were rites that contradicted the Christian belief that invoked the wrath of the Church, in an attempt to “eradicate magic, witch craft”.

9. Christian Belief • In the context of Salem, there was an extremist form of Christianity that included things like – no frivolous activity “the girls were dancing in the woods” • This led to the classification of frivolous activity as forms of magic and witchcraft. • Thus resulting in the Salem Witchhunts

10. Was there really witch craft? • With the understanding that when humans do not understand certain matters, they attribute it to an “external force” and a supernatural feature that cannot be explained. • Thus there was not really witchery but just a lack of understanding.

11. The similarities • There is always the element of belief and faith in the two spheres • It has not been proven by science – the doctrines of magic and religion • Both are integral to society giving society a form of spirituality and belief

12. Religion and Science (contents) • Religion and science – the differences • The age of enlightenment • The role of religion in science • The Copernican Revolution • Evolution VS Law of Creationm • Oppression of the sciences

13. Religion VS Science • Science deals with how questions with explanation given and the element of evidence involved • Religion deals with what questions telling us what we should do and resembles a certain form of superior law with the element of belief involved

14. Religion against Science • The conflict between religion and science is what naturally occurs to our minds when we think of this subject. It seems as though, during the last half-century, the results of science and the beliefs of religion had come into a position of frank disagreement, from which there can be no escape, except by abandoning either the clear teaching of science or the clear teaching of religion. This conclusion has been urged by controversialists on either side. Not by all controversialists, of course, but by those trenchant intellects which every controversy calls out into the open.

15. Religion against science • The distress of sensitive minds, and the zeal for truth, and the sense of the importance of the issues, must command our sincerest sympathy. When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them. We have here the two strongest general forces (apart from the mere impulse of the various senses) which influence men, and they seem to be set one against the other — the force of our religious intuitions, and the force of our impulse to accurate observation and logical deduction.

16. The age of enlightenment • We can call the eighteenth century the age of the enlightenment bcause it was both a culmination and a new beginning. Fresh currents of thought were wearing down institutionalized traditions. New ideas and new approaches to old institutions were setting the stage for great revolutions to come.

17. The age of enlightenment - effects 1. autonomy of reason 2. perfectibility and progress 3. confidence in the ability to discover causality 4. principles governing nature, man and society 5. assault on authority (Church) 6. cosmopolitan solidarity of enlightened intellectuals (literacy rates)

18. The Age of Enlightenment - religion • It was an age of reason based on faith, not an age of faith based on reason. The enlightenment spiritualized the principle of religious authority, humanized theological systems, and emancipated individuals from physical coercion. It was the Enlightenment, not the Reformation or the Renaissance that dislodged the ecclesiastical establishment from central control of cultural and intellectual life. by emancipating science from the trammels of theological tradition the Enlightenment rendered possible the autonomous evolution of modern culture. Diderot said, if you forbid me to speak on religion and government, I have nothing to say. Hence natural science occupied the front of the stage.

19. Natural religion rested on the basic assumption that man is guided by the dictates of reason. Mind is the scene of the uniform play of motive. The motives of man are quantitatively and qualitatively the same at all times and in all places. An empirical study of the nature of man, reveals not an identical set of motives but a confusion of impulses, not an orderly cosmos but chaos. The elemental passion, hopes and fears is the root of religious experience. Religions may be socially convenient but being rooted in sentiment they lack the validity of scientific generalization. A rational religion is a contradiction in terms. It comes close to demolishing the entire rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment--its natural rights, its self-evident truths and its universal and immutable laws of morality.

20. Age of Enlightenment • The central theme of the Enlightenment is the effort to humanize religion

21. Age of Enlightenment • Theology itself exhibits exactly the same character of gradual development, arising from an aspect of conflict between its own proper ideas. This fact is a commonplace to theologians, but is often obscured in the stress of controversy. In the seventeenth century a learned Jesuit, Father Petavius, showed that the theologians of the first three centuries of Christianity made use of phrases and statements which since the fifth century would be condemned as heretical. Also Cardinal Newman devoted a treatise to the discussion of the development of doctrine. He wrote it before he became a great Roman Catholic ecclesiastic, but throughout his life it was never retracted and continually reissued.

22. The Role of Religion in Science • Religion basically forms the morals of society • Science cannot exist without morals and the morals exist to restrict and regulate science, acting as a check and balance against science • Albert Einstein once wrote:  "I do not think that it is necessarily the case that science and religion are natural opposites. In fact, I think that there is a very close connection between the two. Further, I think that science without religion is lame and, conversely, that religion without science is blind. Both are important and should work hand-in-hand." 

23. The Role of Religion in Science • The lack of explanation – “how” created doubt in the hearts of the people, resulting in the further investigation into the field of science, it was religion that pushed science into going against it and furthering the development in the sciences • If there were not religion and the laws of creation, there would not have been the theory of evolution – science and religion are interdependent.

24. The Copernican Revolution • The 16th century finally saw what came to be a watershed in the development of Cosmology. In 1543 Nicolas Copernicus published his treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (The Revolution of Celestial Spheres) where a new view of the world is presented: the heliocentric model.

25. It is hard to underestimate the importance of this work: it challenged the age long views of the way the universe worked and the preponderance of the Earth and, by extension, of human beings. The realization that we, our planet, and indeed our solar system (and even our galaxy) are quite common in the heavens and reproduced by myriads of planetary systems provided a sobering (though unsettling) view of the universe. All the reassurances of the cosmology of the Middle Ages were gone, and a new view of the world, less secure and comfortable, came into being. Despite these ``problems'' and the many critics the model attracted, the system was soon accepted by the best minds of the time such as Galileo

26. Christian Belief – The “Balance” • The Earth hung on a balance

27. The Theory

28. The Theory • His theory was that the Earth was surrounded by different planets and revolving around the Sun • This also included the theory of the motion of the planets • This was further proven when the invention of the telescope (Galileo) came about.

29. Galileo said that the earth moves and that the sun is fixed; the Inquisition said that the earth is fixed and that the sun moves; and Newtonian astronomers, adopting an absolute theory of space, said that both the sun and the earth move. But now we say that any one of these three statements is equally true, provided that you have fixed your sense of 'rest' and 'motion' in the way required by the statement adopted. At the date of Galileo's controversy with the Inquisition, Galileo's' way of stating the facts was, beyond question, the fruitful procedure for the sake of scientific research. But in itself it was not more true than the formulation of the Inquisition. But at that time the modern concepts of relative motion were in nobody's mind, so that the statements were made in ignorance of the qualifications required for their more perfect truth. Yet this question of the motions of the earth and the sun expresses a real fact in the universe, and all sides had got hold of important truths concerning it. But, with the knowledge of those times, the truths appeared to be inconsistent.

30. The Theory of Evolution Yes, we will all become that fat man one day. Its Evolution.

31. http://tccsa.tc/archives/cartoons/ape.html

32. Evolution • The modern theory concerning the evolution of man proposes that humans and apes derive from an apelike ancestor that lived on earth a few million years ago. The theory states that man, through a combination of environmental and genetic factors, emerged as a species to produce the variety of ethnicities seen today, while modern apes evolved on a separate evolutionary pathway. Perhaps the most famous proponent of evolutionary theory is Charles Darwin (1809-82) who authored The Origin of Species (1859) to describe his theory of evolution. It was based largely on observations which he made during his 5-year voyage around the world aboard the HMS Beagle (1831-36). Since then, mankind's origin has generally been explained from an evolutionary perspective. Moreover, the theory of man's evolution has been and continues to be modified as new findings are discovered, revisions to the theory are adopted, and earlier concepts proven incorrect are discarded.

33. Evolution • The currently-accepted theory of the evolution of man rests on three major principles. These principles hinge on the innate ability which all creatures have to pass on their genetic information to their offspring through the reproductive process. An alternative explanation for homology is a common designer. According to this reasoning, the similarities in anatomical features between species point to a blueprint used by a Creator/Designer.

34. 1st Tenet of Evolution • The first tenet is microevolution, the occurrence and build-up of mutations in the genetic sequence of an organism. Mutations are predominantly random and can occur naturally through errors in the reproductive process or through environmental impacts such as chemicals or radiation.

35. 2nd Tenet of Evolution • The second tenet of evolution is natural selection. Natural selection is a natural mechanism by which the fittest members of a species survive to pass on their genetic information, while the weakest are eliminated (die off) because they are unable to compete in the wild. Natural selection is often termed "survival of the fittest" or "elimination of the weakest."

36. 3rd Tenet of Evolution • The third tenet is speciation, which occurs when members of a species mutate to the point where they are no longer able to breed with other members of the same species. The new population becomes a reproductively isolated community that is unable to breed with its former community. Through speciation, the genes of the new population become isolated from the previous group.

37. 6 Days of Creation • Day 1: The heavens, the earth, light and darkness. • Day 2: Heaven • Day 3: Dry land, the seas, and vegetation. • Day 4: The sun, the moon and the stars. • Day 5: Living creatures in the water, birds in the air. • Day 6: Land animals and people. • Day 7: God "rested".

38. Evolution • The most important question asked – Where do we come from - this was the most important clash during the age of enlightenment

39. Oppression of Science • Works of the Age of Enlightenment had not been recognized by the Church until the 1900s and there had been arrests in the name of “God” of scientists • For example, Giordano Bruno, who spent 7 years in the prisons of the Inquisition was burnt alive in 1600 • Works of Galileo had only been acknowledged 1939 which was kept by the Catholic Church

40. Case study: Wilberforce against Huxley( Darwin’s bulldog) • In yours groups, find out more about this incident and present it to the class

41. Some humour • Why you shouldn’t use the bible as a answer generator? • There was a man who was feeling depressed and confused, and he thought he’d look for answers in the Bible. So he opened it up at random, closed his eyes and dropped his finger on the page. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he had selected Matthew 27:5, and he read: • And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. • “Oh dear”, he thought, “that doesn’t sound very encouraging! Let me try it again.” • So he repeated the exercise and this time his finger fell on Luke 10:37, which said: • Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise. • “This really isn’t working very well,” he thought. “But let me give it one more try.” • Again he opened the book and selected a verse at random. Again he looked at where his finger lay, this time on John 13:27, and he read: • Jesus said to him, “What you are going to do, do quickly.”

42. After days of rain, the flood waters started to rise in the town. Eventually, one man was forced to climb onto the roof of his house. • A man in a rowboat appeared, and told him to get in. The man on the roof said, “It’s OK, I have faith in the Lord; the Lord will save me.” So the man in the rowboat went away. The man on the roof prayed for God to save him. • The waters rose over the gutters and crept up the roof, and a speedboat appeared. “Climb in!” shouted the man in the boat. “No,” replied the man on the roof. “I have faith in the Lord; the Lord will save me.” So the man in the speedboat went away. The man on the roof prayed for God to save him. • As the waters continued to rise, the man had to perch on the chimney of his house to stay dry. A helicopter appeared and hovered over him with a rope ladder. “Climb up and I’ll fly you to safety,” said the pilot. The man on the roof waved him away saying, “Don’t worry, the Lord will save me.” So the helicopter went away. • The waters rose higher, and the man on the roof was washed away and drowned. • Arriving in heaven, the man immediately asked God: “Heavenly Father, I had faith in you, I prayed to you to save me, and yet you did nothing. Why?” • God replied: “Well, I sent you two boats and a helicopter…”

43. Conclusion • What have you understood about the clash betweens the most powerful elements that form society’s minds? • WHAT IS YOUR OPINION TO THINGS?

44. Thank you Any Questions?

45. References • spiritualmeanderings.wordpress.com