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However, as time passed, science – scientific thought and
scientific investigations – became more and more ubiquitous,
especially as those once-dark corners of the globe became
enlightened with the hope and promise of Christianity thanks to
Western exploration, trade, missionary work, and colonization.
And according to a common portrait of history, the twilight of
that God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was brought about by the
dawn of the new God of the microscope, the telescope, and the
anatomist’s table. While the West would indeed seem to have
become more “secular,” as Tarnas asserted before, after the
“Scientific Revolution” that spread throughout Europe in the 16 th
and 17 th
centuries and then the “Industrial Revolution” of the
18 th and 19 th centuries in Europe and the United States and, thus,
less and less ruled by that “unchanging doctrinal formulae” of
Christianity, beneath such appearances, however, I believe those
two social and cultural prime movers, Christianity and Science,
were not, in the end, as different as they have been assumed to
be. As Tarnas contends later in his book:
The West had ‘lost its faith’ – and found a new one,
in science and in man. But paradoxically, much of
the Christian world view found continued life, albeit
in often unrecognized forms, in the West’s new
secular outlook. […] The West’s belief in itself as
the most historically significant and favored culture
echoed the Judeo-Christian theme of the Chosen
People. The global expansion of Western culture as
the best and most appropriate for all mankind
represented a secular continuation of the Roman
Catholic Church’s self-concept as the one universal
Church for all humanity. Modern civilization now
replaced Christianity as the cultural norm and ideal
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