But how has life changed due to science? It has not.
Life expectancy moved from somewhere around 45 in Biblical times (discounting child mortality) to around 46 in 1907, 66 in 1957 and around 76 in 2007. Infant mortality moved from 43% of children dying before the age of 5 in 1800 to around 4.5% in 2015. That's a massive change in our lives, in our communities. Increase life expectancy is changing family structure, our work patterns, economics.
The ubiquity of transport and communication links has changed what it means to have national borders, the significance of geographical boundaries, the extents of labour markets...
Maybe science and technology have made life a little easier and provided conveniences....but the things that are fundamental and of real importance to people...Life and Death... have not been solved.
Life and death are not problems to be solved, they are facets of existence that fashion how we live - when we massively change how many people live, and for how long, we change how we function as people and cultures.
There are only attempts to avoid the issue if anything.
What 'issue'?
And the limitations of science have only become more apparent.
That's a good thing - a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, after all.
Real issues such as happiness, right & wrong, relationships, duties and responsibilities etc. are still more important to people than the size of the universe, the Singularity, Higgs Boson and other such.
Yes, but science isn't just cosmology. Science is weather forecasting, genetically adjusting crops, future-proofing communications networks so that communities can reliably develop economic capacities, providing educational resources to remote places to improve the lot of rural communities, antibiotics. Science might not intrinsically make you happy, but it's a hell of a lot easier to be happy when your children aren't dying before they're adults, when you have food to eat and clean water to drink; it's easier to judge right and wrong when you can see examples of the same situations from other places, read people's accounts of the effects of policies and decisions on them.
Subjective experiences are still far more important and meaningful to each one of us than some 'objective reality' out there.
Perhaps, but what is it that you think you're having a subjective experience of? How much more of it can you experience with the right understanding of it?
Science regards almost all subjective experiences as of no importance at all in understanding life and reality in general.
I suspect you don't know enough science or scientists.
This is a major reason for the divide between science people and the Others.
I wasn't aware, as one of the 'science people' that there was such a divide.
Problem is not with science itself or what it is meant to do. It is the attitude and extreme stance taken by people of science that is the problem.
I can think of very, very few 'scientific extremists'.
Science (in the west particularly) has divided humanity into two groups. The elite and knowledgeable science group 'who know what life really really is all about' .....and the naive and ignorant 'common man'...who does not understand science and is therefore led to believe in such things as spirit, after-life and other such 'silly' things.
What an incredibly ignorant and reductive view. There are any number of religious and/or spiritual scientists, any number of religious and spiritual people with an appreciation for science, and the findings of science. There are some people who aren't interested, at both ends, but they are a representative segment of a spectrum, not binary camps.
It is this divide and scientific snobbery that is the problem. People believe that 'science' has changed everything in recent times and that such things as spirit, after-life etc are pre-science beliefs. The point is that there is nothing that we can call 'pre-science times'.
I think you misunderstand. They aren't seen as 'pre-science' beliefs, they are seen as merely beliefs. There is a growing body for whom 'I believe...' has not importance, just as it seems for you that 'the evidence shows us that...' seems not to mean very much.
Science has always been there from ancient times and people have always been thinking rationally to solve their many problems and have even had some fairly sophisticated ideas of the human body, cosmos and the world.
Sophisticated, though, doesn't necessarily intersect with 'justifiable'. Tolkien's metaphysics, cosmology and history/mythology of middle-Earth is undoubtedly sophisticated, but that's not sufficient basis for thinking that any of it is true.
But there was never this great divide that exists today between the science people and the so called 'ordinary' people. It is an attitude deliberately cultivated in recent decades and centuries.
Where it has been cultivated, it's been cultivated not by scientists, in general, but by social activators: politicians, business interests and the media they buy. Donald Trump doesn't want anyone to understand climate science, he wants an active hostility to 'crooked' climate scientists; Michael Gove wants us to disregard 'experts'. Scientists really, really want you understand, but they don't control the means of communications that science has given us.
This is my point. In the east, science has never (even today) created this divide that is so apparent in the west. Science and scientists have always had their own realm of discovery while the spiritualists have always had their own and there has been no conflict between the two. One never considers the other as wrong or irrelevant. Both gyan and vigyan are paths to discovery.....with the former being considered as more relevant to subjective experiences and therefore of greater value.
And here in the West we have driven science, technology, discovery, economics, learning and social development in recent centuries, as we progressively moved further away from spiritualism towards rationalism.
If centuries ago, the west had been familiar with spirituality in its secular form instead of associating it only with Christianity and Islam....it is possible that science would have taken a more humble and more integrative path which might have been much more productive and meaningful and far less alienating than it is now.
I don't what sort of 'alienation' you're thinking of. I'm not 'alienated' by science or technology at all. We're having a discussion by internet, here, two people who most likely would never have had the chance to even be aware of the existence of the other without science discovering and developing electricity, semi-conductors, electro-magnetism, fluorescence, light-emitting diodes, encryption... Science is neither a gift nor a curse, it's merely a tool, and what determines how 'good' it is, is how people choose to use it.
Typically they use it for medicine, for communication, for economics, for industry, for time-saving, for reliability. If people apply those in the interests of greed, then that greed is likely to me more successful than it would have been in the past, and if people apply them in the interests of co-existence, then that's likely to be more successful. Science has a history of trying to separate and delineate, but that's because people apply science, and people have a much longer history of trying to do the same thing.
Science doesn't make us any better or any worse than we've ever been, but it does give us more opportunity to look at ourselves critically, more opportunity to determine whether we want to be any better or worse, and a better chance of making that desire come true.
O.
