Science as salvation

by Mary Midgley

Mary Midgley in this book discusses the high spiritual ambitions which tend to gather around the notion of science, and, in particular, some very odd recent expressions of them. When everyone viewed the world as God's creation, there was no problem about the element of worship involved in studying it, nor about science's function in mapping people's lives. But now these things have grown puzzling. Officially, science claims only the modest function of establishing facts. Yet people still hope for something much vaster and grander from it--the myths by which to shape and support life in an increasingly confusing age. Even in the past, the myths surrounding science were often strange. This book discusses Francis Bacon's bizarre vision of a 'masculine birth of time', in which the seventeenth-century scientists saw themselves as sexual victors over a prostrate Mother Nature. Today, some scientists are again holding up the prize of the conquest of nature, this time through rocketry, genetic