V: Birth of a paradox

In this, I propose to explain that it is only very recently that mankind has had scientifically verifiable explanations for things. Every time it has happened, religion has been shaken, because religion (I mean in Europe) was once the source of most explanations for everything--apart from the Greek philosophers, whose texts were lost during the Dark Ages. When they were rediscovered, the Renaissance happened. Plato was OK, his ideas blended easily with Christianity. But Aristotle was a bit difficult. Thomas Aquinas spent his lifetime reconciling his stuff with Christian doctrine, and was sainted for it. The Church was the source of all learning, the gatekeeper at the door of all deep thought.

So for example Galileo's astronomical ideas put him in personal danger because the Catholic Church felt its infallibility and authority threatened.

Then there were great advances in science & technology in the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries, what with Isaac Newton and all sorts of inventions, machines, navigation aids etc. In 17-something, there was the Lisbon earthquake, which shook not only the town but people's faith etc etc. So Voltaire wrote Candide and questioned the authority of the Church, and we had the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with many intellectuals admitting to being atheists without fear of the Inquisition, torture or burning at the stake.

Then in the nineteenth century, we have Darwin (not to mention Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) - all in their own ways providing explanations or in other ways challenging traditional Christian ideas.

But - through all of this, Christianity survived, weakened but still kicking. People still found a use for it.

That's my point, really. If people still find a use for it, let them.

There are parallel developments in the theory and practice and medicine: Galen, Hippocrates and Aristotle (I'd have to check which order they came in), Harvey (function of heart & circulation of the blood), Lister, Pasteur ... Watson & Crick (DNA). Now we have not just antibiotics but all kinds of effective drugs, plus DNA manipulation.

Suddenly, after so many thousand years, there is evidence-based medicine, whose advocates hope, pray and arrogantly demand that all other forms of traditional medicine shrivel and die---quick.

This is regardless of the fact that the new medicine can't fix many of the most wide-ranging ills of modern man: depression & chronic fatigue syndrome for example. Its mind-body model is plain wrong. Bodies are treated as machines.

Why do alternative therapies, like religions, survive, when the study of evidence finds no merit in homoeopathy or prayer? The rationalist explanation, if I am not mistaken, is that people are stupid. This is possibly my main objection to the rationalist train of thought.

For I am one of the people. I don't consider myself stupid. I see certain uses for religion, which I shall enumerate in due course. I respect 'orthodox' medicine, with reservations, but also 'alternative' medicine, at any rate in theory.

There is that in us which wants a clean tidy job, which says that once the enemy is wiped out, there will be peace. This attitude is one of the main reasons why there is not peace.

I find within myself both reason and unreason. I find exactly the same situation in the world, and suspect that we won't get any nearer than this to that mythical thing called Truth (which I for one don't believe in).

What if the victor can never slay the vanquished? What if the opposites can never blend into a hybrid or compromise? What if our imagination is never able to accept the reality we see? What if our instinct yearns for an all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful Father of All, with no evidence, no reality to match our dream?

This is Paradox, where we can map the problem, but probably never solve it.