Why Science Alone Cannot Save the Environment
Galileo was the founder of modern physics in the seventeenth century in two important ways. He established the scientific method and that followed defined the scope of the new science of physics. This station was very small and consisted mainly of matter and motion. Only matter and motion were not stained with subjective factors, personal, according to Galileo, and tthus suitable for treatment and scientific analysis. All the work of Galileo was taken later by Newton, who in the late seventeenth century itself, released his monumental synthesis of natural laws, the Principia Mathematica. These laws, powerful though they were still concerned only matter and motion. The effects of the causes were entirely predictable and the way the world worked came to be seen as a sort of giant mechanical contraption in the late nineteenth century, had been almost totally unexplored.
Soon he was found again. Lord Kelvin, an eminent physicist, expressed the prevailing mood: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, all that remains is the most accurate measurements and more..” God had completely disappeared and the rupture between faith and science was well established and seemed permanent. God and his world were relegated to the realm of faith and belief only. The real world, the world of nature, was the sole competence of science. It should be noted that from the scientific point of view, the realm of faith and belief is our faith and belief, which were therefore the constructions of the human mind. God the Creator had made the creation of creation.
But this huge gulf between science and faith, few people worried, especially in science, when put against the spectacular successes that these laws of physics had generated in its industrial applications. Western Europe, where an area about to be invaded by the Ottoman Turks at the gates of Vienna in the late seventeenth century, they became masters of the world just two centuries later. His empire spanned the globe and controlled, directly or indirectly, about ninety percent of the world. The British empire lasted only a quarter of the planet. This dramatic change in fortune was due exclusively to volcanic impetus provided by new technology in the fields of manufacturing, mining, transportation, and above all the weapons.
While the great empires of Western Europe did not survive in the twentieth century, the technology of the first industrial revolution has steadily spread further to other areas of the world, especially to countries like Russia, China, India and Brazil, all the giants who want to fuck with the developed world as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the nineteenth-century model of advanced new technology is based on dirty energy, non-renewable sources of raw materials, coal first in which oil and natural gas have been added later. The complex manufacturing of high use of these raw materials such as plastics and petrochemical industries, along with the industries of mining and extraction of them and the sectors of power generation and transportation, toxic waste have been so many permanent and degradation of land, sea and air are putting the planet in grave danger. In little more than a hundred years, and even without the full industrialization of developing countries, which are choking on waste poisons and industrial model first.
Naturally, the world has turned to technology to save the situation. The enormous energy exhibited by the technological innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could certainly count on to provide the innovative push to get us out of present danger. And in fact the technology has greatly increased the height. The technology to combat global warming, reduce and eventually eliminate carbon emissions, providing increased crop yields, production design and ever cheaper and more efficient machines for the masses to produce sophisticated self-cleaning water themselves, provide energy and even provide medications to eliminate a whole list of completely preventable diseases. teaching techniques reforestation, improved water management, better land use and better hygiene are all readily available. So we are faithfully applying these new methods and save the planet? There are a number of international meetings of scientists, politicians and aid agencies, where endless scientific papers are read and approved, the money promised and press releases are prepared to give the impression that progress was made. However, the reality is that until now, the problems are still with us. The air is getting dirtier still, the desert is still expanding, the original forest with its price and unique ecosystems are being cleared for thousands of square kilometers a year and half the world is still malnourished. Entire species are disappearing at a rate that the earth and the sea may contain very little natural life in a generation.
Something is clearly not working. How developed the first industrial revolution was never very good, first, when their huge profits hit less than half the world’s population, leaving the other half completely undisturbed. The main reason for this is that the first scientific and industrial revolution, for all its impressive successes, it contained an inherent defect right from the beginning. That does not include an ethical component, which means that its multitude of applications focused exclusively on profit and wealth and power that comes with it. The benefits involve investment protection, which means that it must exclude all the benefits of what they are doing, unless you pay. In this system, of course, the poor must remain poor. Poverty can be addressed only if the profit motive is unknown. That’s where the ethics neglected component of ethics comes into play only with a force behind it is based on religion. In the eighteenth century, humanism tried to apply the principles of ethics without religion proclaiming the ethical advantages of working for the good of humanity. The first forms, idealistic communism and Fabian socialism emerged from this attempt. It was thought that people would work with “inexpressible ardor” for the good of all, that all forms of government or authority imposed wither. After only a few years of the French Revolution to become idealistic terror of crowds and the guillotine, and any doubts about the perfectibility of man by these means were fully confirmed by the blood-soaked century.
But religious ethics is not the pale, more or less humane and rational. Has shown great passion and fervor in the past, even in what is now largely perceived in the wrong ways, such as the Inquisition or the Crusades, undertaken in the name of that love that replaces the one who had heard come to arrest him. So here we have two impulses that have shown great energy in the past, is a science in itself, become the first Western societies and then the rest of the world in 200 years, the other is Christian ethics (speaking of the West), which showed a similar transformative power in society before the age of science.
Can science and ethics join forces so that their combined power could be enough to push the world into action to save the environment? Only if two things happen. First, the gap between science and faith has to go for the idea that these two powerful impulses are irrelevant to each other also disappears. Then we must change our thinking in the application of technology in society. If Christian ethics really become a factor in how we look at the technology, living things could not subjected to untold suffering in the name of efficiency and profit, we could never have battery chicken, pork and beef fattening stockyards, slaughterhouses current style, whaling, seal clubs, mutilated shark fin and another and another, the list is endless. Also we do not poison and pollute our rivers, lakes and oceans, our land and air in the name of profit. We would like to start to learn from nature, which has produced the waste and dead matter for millions of years and yet remained a virgin and bright for the man to enjoy. The new energy? Nature has produced all the energy needed to grow the plants from the sun through photosynthesis, with high efficiency and a total lack of pollution. Today, we still have an old mentality when we think of new clean energy sources like solar, wind, even nuclear. Perhaps if we begin to look at nature differently, not from the outside with (often brutal) methods of exploitation in the name of profit, but from within, slowly learning their wisdom, we can find solutions that are new to our problems.
Of course, such fundamental societal changes take time. But if we have the ultimate goal in mind, we can do much, even in the short term, to save ourselves and our planet. The first industrial revolution will be with us for some time yet, no matter what we do. If we start adding a social conscience of our business models, if we start paying attention to the extreme gravity of the situation before it actually overwhelms us, if we apply what we know to stop the spread of deserts to clean up pollution and so on, we can begin the long process of real change. Not impossible, but it will take enormous will and energy. This brings us back to the need, already mentioned, to cross the chasm between science and faith, so that the energy inherent in both can be united.