Elephants and turtles: Difference between revisions

To make a whopping great narrative, try this: the Enlightenment slowly suffocated God: Copernicus started it, in the 15th century; it fell to [[Charles Darwin]] to deliver the ''coup de grace'' four centuries later, and {{author|Friedrich Nietzsche}} to announce it to the world.  

Now, “God” is a Big Idea — it answers many questions and tells us how we should behave, and organise, ourselves. Over four millennia, religious scholars generated plenty of auxiliary hypotheses to adapt to our changing circumstances. God saved us a lot of existential angst. When we killed God, we gave quite a lot ''else'' away, too. Quite useful stuff: a settled means of telling right from wrong, for one thing.  

Without God the enlightened western intellectual tradition needed to rebase all these organising principles from scratch: to ditch ''one'' Big Idea, it needed to replace it with ''another''. The New Big Idea was there, waiting to take over, at the moment the old one finally fell back lifeless on Charles Darwin’s specimen table. It was, of course, the enlightenment scientific tradition itself. Now, here is an interesting thing: what if the very idea that there must ''be'' a Big Idea, at all, derives from the ''Old'' Big Idea that just joined the choir invisible. The enlightenment was, in a profound way, utterly bound to the intellectual mores from whose surly bonds it slipped.