{"id":45,"date":"2019-06-29T13:15:43","date_gmt":"2019-06-29T17:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.6worlds.net\/science-blog\/?page_id=45"},"modified":"2020-08-05T12:58:13","modified_gmt":"2020-08-05T16:58:13","slug":"chapter-4","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.6worlds.net\/science-blog\/science-or-superstition\/chapter-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 4: Matter and Energy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the beginning of the nineteenth century<\/strong> developments in science had little impact on the lives of most people in the world. By the end of the century, however, the world had been completely transformed as scientific understanding of matter and energy enabled the rise of a globalized industrial civilization. This section explores the scientific developments that led to this enormous change in the way we live; how we successfully and unsuccessfully reason on the basis of evidence; and the implications of the mechanistic picture of the universe that came to its culmination in Nineteenth Century physical science. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What kind of stuff is the material world made of and what causes motion and change within the material world? This fundamental question was the concern of some of the first naturalistic philosophers in ancient Greece, although it was not really answered with any degree of precision until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which saw the development of chemistry, the study of electromagnetism and thermodynamics. In this part we take as our historical centerpiece the scientific advances in understanding the stuff of the universe that took place during the nineteenth century. These advances in understanding have had many profound consequences on our lives both in terms of how we live and how we understand our place in the world. They led to the industrial revolution and the development of the modern, urban, consumer lifestyle we all now take for granted. But they also seemed to threaten both religious and philosophical ideas about the significance of our lives since they led many people to explicitly endorse what had hitherto been the heretical concept that the material world of atoms interacting via physical forces is all there is. This was perceived by many supporters of traditional ideas concerning human beings as a threat for obvious reasons — if matter and energy are all that there is, how do concepts such as an immortal soul, a just moral order of the universe, God, human free will make any sense at all?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n