Thoughts XXI - a new rant

On politics.
Invoke science and you gain advantage.  It does not matter if the argument is valid, much less true. Mostly, the arguments are so complex that few can question the findings.

For some interest groups, everything, that is every single thing in life, is political.  Family, industry, and religion issues, all are political. Let me note the very far left believes exactly this.  For them, all is politics.

They say, "We must have faith in our leaders."  This is the mantra of the unthinking servant to the master. This gives the masters license to the excesses of power. The truth is maligned and distorted to the lessons of the masters, toward their control and containment of all thought.

On God.

Can there be a unified theory of religion and science?  This has been debated forever.  What is stunning is that no substantive progress has been made. Let me fill in a few details.

The god debate never ends.  It probably never will.  Partly, this is because the very term is vague. Once the God is clearly specified (defined for scientist-types), i.e. God can do this, can't do that, etc, there becomes a launching point for genuine argument. However, who is positioned to precisely define God?  No one.

From a a scientific viewpoint, God defies the natural positivism in that there cannot on material evidenciary grounds.  From a philosophical viewpoint, the very term falls among the vague, now an active research topic within the subject. Moreover, there is every reason to accept that God can or must be unknowable - a definite philosophical term. (See N. Rescher, "Unknowability: An Inquiry Into the Limits of Knowledge" for basics on both terms) From a logical viewpoint, there are arguments both for and against existence, depending on what you accept as hypotheses.

Remarkably, until just four centuries ago, with the advent of Newtonian mechanics, there was a generally accepted unified theory as suggested in this thread. Even the currently much maligned Christians had accepted an enlightened interpretation of the Bible. This means that literalism of the Bible was out.  In fact, there was mostly a concordance between religion and science.  Witness the deeply religious writings of Isaac Newton himself.  

Only in the late 19th century did fundamentalism revive, mostly from the writings of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, was the so-called "conflict theory" between religion and science created. Their writings comprised aspects of bad history and terrible science. Their work was ultimately debunked, but their conflict theory remains with us, as though it has always been.

Only in the sixth century BCE, were the first alternative models suggested, and these followed by only a few centuries actual theological ideas.  Prior to that, i.e 30th century BCE, we hardly have real evidence of anything, either for or against God, either for or against science.