- Thread Author
- #1
Bertrand is a pivotal figure in the new-age scientific movement. Really, you can glimpse into the thought processes of the intellectual elites by tracking key figures in various scientific revolutions. Actually, much of the scientific establishment had a major moral panic around the late 19th century when the universal heat death was first theorized alongside developments in cosmology and thermodynamics; it ushered in a confluence of decadence and moral decay due to the demoralization that the image of a dying universe heralded, during the late Renaissance period when humanity began to relinquish the Christian moral system and trailblazers like Descartes and Euler tried to reconcile monumental advancements in science and mathematics with religious uncertainty. Regardless, Bertrand was the kind of man to be disappointed in humanity, which was a common sentiment after both the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions in science provided a double-whammy knockout to the humans-are-special view of reality held by Christian intellectual juggernauts prior, like Newton.
So you can really start to peer into the mental state of these post-dethronement scientists. Their God-rejection mindset is super-positioned between demoralization and gall; they laud their contemptuous grandeur, as to them they had just surpassed the intellectual megaliths of Ancient Greece after this big long religious 'dark age.' You have to understand that this was pre-Flynn, so rejection of the past perception of disabling dogmas was viewed as a hallmark of intellectualism because, for the longest time, these scientists had egos that they viewed as diametrically castrated to the 'mass religious delusion' and that their unshacklement was symbolically powerful; later this expanded into the hilarious diatribes of Saint Dawkins and his pseudo-doctrine about genes, which are totally hyperbolized and anthropomorphized by materialists that draw completely false conclusions about the role and existence of 'genetics.'
Really, I have been monologuing too long, like the slippery knave I am(!), and I paraphrase a lot of this from 'The Anthropic Cosmological Principle,' written by Frank Tipler, which is an exceptional read in all things teleology. I highly recommend it for a more advanced view of how our self-perception as a human collective evolved over history.
Anyhow, this is an especially important debate; visionaries like Bacon and Russell laid the foundation for modern materialist and anti-religious/anti-establishment ideas that are often parroted today and broadly remain scarce-deconstructed by the layman who simply adopts it as organic. I'm not saying there is nothing valuable in their assertions at all, only that they are dogmatically accepted where scrutiny should be unilaterally adopted with regard to all schools of thought. It's important to know the roots of the idea clusters common in our everyday lives, and by understanding the type of men who professed them, we may also understand how their engagement in the human narrative holds relevance.
