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Science Future Glorious;
Religion - Why Bother?
(Daylight Atheism - 5/17/21)
By James A. Haught
In an 1820 letter to Portuguese scholar Correa de Serra, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"Priests of the different religious sects" dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight."
Jefferson saw the clash between religion and science clearly. Ever since his day, science has achieved astounding benefits for humanity, while supernatural faith has provided little.
In Jefferson's time, human life expectancy averaged in the 30s (mostly because of horrible child deaths). Today, life is near 80, thanks chiefly to medical science.
I was born in 1932 in a little Appalachian farm town with no electricity or paved streets. Horse wagons were common. My privileged parents had gaslights and running water - but most farm families had kerosene lamps and outdoor privies. Conditions were little improved from medieval times. Since then, science has sent American life skyrocketing.
Just before World War II, penicillin and antibiotics were developed - and they eventually cut world deaths enormously, saving millions of lives.
In the 1940s, Arthur C. Clarke and a few other science writers saw that, if an object was rocketed into space at just the right speed, 22,000 miles above Earth's equator, it would fall into an orbit exactly matching the planet's rotation, so it would remain "fixed" in the sky, usable to bounce communication waves. Now more than 1,000 such satellites fill the sky.
Discovery of the double-helix DNA molecule in 1953 explained life, evolution, biology, and unleashed new fields of health.
Exploring the solar system has become so common that a private firm does it, and human stations on the moon and Mars seem likely.
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