We are such slowness.
Before the Religious Age, there was the Tribal Age, and we await the Scientific Age.
In a Tribal Age culture, the moral authority of the laws is ancestors, and a person’s individual merit derives from his having “good” ancestors.
In a Religious Age culture, the moral authority of the laws is God’s will, and a person’s individual merit derives from his being approved by God.
In a Scientific Age culture, the moral authority of the laws will derive from the extent to which they improve overall welfare, and a person’s individual merit will derive from the extent to which he serves that end.
How Dangerous Religion Is explores the essence of religion and a warning about religion’s greatest danger: Since religion is faith in and loyalty to absolute power, it too easily claims to be absolutely without error.
But how dangerous is science?
1974 Noble Prize winner F. A. Hayek warned that our knowledge of the world is at best limited, incomplete, and uncertain.
“… a sum of facts which in their totality cannot be known to the scientific observer, or to any other single brain.
Analysizing Hayek, Philosophy.com points out “the fatal conceit” that is our “undue faith in the power of reason; that human knowledge is intensely personal and irretrievably distributed throughout the population.”
Remember warnings from Thomas Jefferson?
Where are his warnings that power and government can never know where the next idea or the next necessity will spring; that a light touch enables potency and vigor? Jefferson said no authority would have the wit to discover mankind’s pastoral future; that a free and unencumbered populace was the only assurance that we would find our path forward.
Raising brutish authority, religion’s intolerant belief, or the axim of premature science are the dangers most likely to suppress our agriculture of hope.
A greater respect for each other, cutting across rank and aggrandizement, is the charge of our Constitution.
When we argue for a separation of powers or for a humble distribution of rights, we are arguing for enabling our future.