CB: Plus, the bourgeoisie have developed science in many theoretical directions and practical uses that result in modes of life and death that make more people insecure, rather than in ways that provide material and thereby spiritual security and comfort. Nuclear weapons being the most aggregious example.
I think there is a way, a la Marx's species-being, to develop meaning for us as individuals out of our human natural history, i.e. out of scientific disciplines. All the human striving and struggles, celebrations and wonderings, from hominids to homo socio, from gatherers to ...computer engineers have been "worth it" !
((((((( Barack Obama/Christianity
Carl Remick :
I believe this was the argument raised in something I read many years ago in college, _The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers_ by historian Carl Becker (1873-1945). One web source sums up that book saying:
"Here Becker advanced the paradox that the philosophes who had undermined the traditional intellectual world in the name of science were themselves dominated by a nonscientific faith in a rational universal order (a secular version of the Heavenly City)." By this argument, today's high-tech world -- for all the material benefits it brings -- is as incomprehensible and terrifying to its denizens as the world of nature was to the cave people. In an eerie approximation of the Tower of Babel myth, even understanding *within* the scientific world seems to be breaking down because of the every more specialized nature of scientific advance. People crave personal understanding that science can't provide them, and they want some assurance that their existence as individuals really matters, something that science definitely can't offer.
If you let that toxic stew simmer for decades, it's really no wonder that holy rollers are running the country now. The electorate will be baying at the moon next.
Carl