S2 Ep61. The Spiritual Crisis of our Time. Part 4. The Emergence of Science and the Challenge to Religion.

We examine in chronological order:

1. The difficulties with the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages;

2. The Renaissance and its spiritual and imaginative possibilities;

3. Protestantism, religious wars, vast colonial conquest;

4. The rise of the Scientific Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Capitalism has demanded considerable freedoms in order to function including freedom from Church and excessive State intervention. A brief overview of the history of Astronomy is given, followed by the emergence of the life sciences - all based on a materialist-reductionist world view.

God is, at first, the clock-maker, who winds up the cosmic clock and then retires to let it run by its own mechanical laws. Later he is made redundant and then rumoured to be dead. But will he rise from the dead – as the scripture have foretold?