How would you define the modern dilemma of our times? In this episode we trace the narrative arc of how our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world around us radically transformed via the pursuit of the rational. We delve into the paradox of increasing scientific knowledge and technological power coupled with a diminishing sense of transcendent meaning and discuss its implications and consequences.

Timestamps

• Recap (01:48)
• How do we see ourselves as individuals in modernity? (10:02)
• Sinking into a material world: From Image of God to automatons (16:21)
• The Scientific Revolution: A paradigm shift (23:58)
• Christianity as the basis for the scientific revolution (31:34)
• Fundamental Christian axioms (37:04)
• The Greeks and the emergence of the scientific method (42:52)
• Plato vs Aristotle // Emanation vs Immanation (51:22)
• The Copernican Revolution: Knocked off centre (55:15)
• Theological Shockwave - Impacts of heliocentrism (01:02:08)
• Spiritual & philosophical implications of being decentred (01:10:01)
• Science in the material world: Mechanistic mindsets (01:16:06)
• Darwin, Wallace: Pushed off the pinnacle (01:26:14)
• Freud: Masters of our own thoughts? (01:32:18)
• The pursuit of rationality: Ironies and Consequences (01:38:22)
• The modern dilemma (01:44:05)
• Outro (01:47:54)

Question to ponder over

• In what ways do you see that feeling of whiplash, loss of agency and meaning, being manifest in the world today?

Links to explore

• Awakening from the meaning crisis - John Vervaeke
• Imago Dei
• Throwness - Heidegger 
• Oppenheimer - Encounter 1962
• Polynesian Island Exploration
• Prime Mover
• Axial Age
• Deductive Reasoning 
• Inductive Reasoning  
• Renaissance Humanism 
• Scholasticism 
• Skholē 
• Ptolemaic Geocentric Model 
• Copernican Heliocentric Model 
• Galileo
  • Simplicio and the Pope 
  • "The Assayer" (1623)
    • "[The book of nature] is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it."
• Georges Lemaitre
• Hubble’s Law
• Alfred Russell Wallace 
  • Birds of Paradise description found in ‘The Malay Archipelago’, vol. 2, pp. 252–3
• Charles Darwin
  • On The Origin of Species
  • The Descent of Man
• Freud
  • The Interpretation of Dreams
  • The Ego and the Id
• Primary/Secondary Distinction

Contact 

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