Science versus anthropocentric faith

The humans life span is less than 100 years, his height up to 2.2 meters, health weight of a healthy adult individual is between 50 to 150 kg, while the realities of universe are in completely different dimensions. The universe, but also planet earth exists billions of years. Its size is in billions of light years. Even the Earth Radius is 6,371 km, Mass: 5.972 × 10^24 kg, Area: 510.1 million km². So the geological or universe dimensions are at entirely different time and space extent than those of humans. Still the anthropocentric belief systems, remained the focus of cultural value systems, even when it became clear to most of the humans on the earth, that not the human beings, and not even the Earth, have any kind of central meaning on the global, whole universe scale of existence.

Culture refers to all human knowledge in all areas of human consciousness that have ever been created and is preserved and will be created in the future. Human consciousness can be individual but also of a social group, acting, feeling and expressing together within their cultural heritage. Culture is common cognitive expression of each individual belonging to certain social group. This expression is perceived differently within the group than out of it. Even if every individual has the capacity of his own cultural expression, it’s cultural expression is in relation to the culture of the social group, to whom he belongs to. Any individual cultural expression can be positive, negative or neutral in relation to the cultural framework norms, in which it was created, and the cultural framework will always be in the background of it.

There are societies, where individual cultural expression of non conformism is accepted and even positively encouraged, and they are social groups with no tolerance to non-conformity, and individual expressions, alien to the norms of the group, and they are unacceptable and repressed, either by political-physical abuse, or by psychological-ideological indoctrination.

Religions, faith in supernatural phenomena, belief systems, at first came to existence, to explain the everyday phenomena, that needed explanation within the human capacity of perception. The stories of creation are all anthropocentric and within framework of human dimension. So the universe was created in six days, stars and planets are within human reach and influencing the personal human destinies (astrology), etc. As the modern sciences, started a process of unwalling one by one events, that appeared to pre-scientific worldview supernatural, as perfectly natural understandable phenomena, it became hard if not impossible to keep this kind of belief system relevant. Still the human need for purposefulness, that can’t be fulfilled by material explanation of reality, continue to give legitimacy to belief in supernatural phenomena a substantial role. So the religion or any other belief systems based on faith in unexplainable phenomena, continue to exist even in the modern age, among those ignorant to the natural reality explained and based on evidence achieved within scientific method. Even more, the faith in supernatural phenomena and transcendental occurrences continue to play central role for human individuals, even if they are aware of scientifically verifiable or refutable findings about natural reality. This denial of scientific explanation of natural reality, is explained by limiting the science to material side of reality, while the spiritual, non-material side of the reality, by its definition is beyond the reach and comprehension within the scientific method. The faith in spiritual phenomena didn’t disappeared, due to the human need for cultural and social belonging and purposefulness. The social framework grouping the individual humans, fulfills a genuine need for identity, that gets satisfaction with all the unique cultural phenomena like symbols, colors, flags, clothes, hair cut, slogans, quotations, tales, stories, theories, conspiracy theories, myths, etc., special and unique for the various social groups. These groups as they come to existence or continue to exist through the ages, create or emerge within the framework of their social group political structures, with defined system of authorities and hierarchies.

This is how national leaders can still continue to speak about uniqueness of their nation or faith, that has meaning far beyond the real time and space reality of the existence of the specific nation, social group, community or even the human species as whole. This is how, in age of sciences, within the cultural context of social community, still is acceptable to nourish ideologies, using terms like eternal time or geographically boundless purposes and uniqueness of the culture of specific community, Our community.

Any argumentation based on scientific rational reasoning or evidence is useless against these ideologies, because scientific rational reasoning always claims to be an universally verifiable phenomenon, and if refuted then it will be always universally refuted, with hope that it will bring new scientific findings, while the refuting evidences will be the starting point of the new scientific theory. Since any faith or belief system is in the center of social-cultural belonging to certain social group, any evidence or argumentation against the Truths that are substantial to the faith, will irritate the members of the social group, and they will react with animosity.

Yet faith in national, above national or subnational cultural group anthropocentric believes, are not the only cultural phenomenon on the social group level. The social grouping with faith in preserving the need to preserve nature, or animal kingdom, or even unique cultural grouping is non anthropocentric ideology.One of such cultural systems is the faith, that the ultimate goal of any socio-economic political system is to preserve human culture with all its diversity and uniqueness. The social group following this faith believe, that the precondition to secure preservation of human culture in all its existing forms and manner similar to what is familiar to us, is to preserve the diverse biologic metabolic systems of life existing on Earth at the most varied level. In the essence of this standpoint stands the understanding, that human culture includes human interaction with nature. If the nature will be diminished or disconnected from the human existence, it will change the cultural approach, leading and fulfilling the purpose of human existence. Such a change, together with the advance of new technologies may create an undesirable world, where humans will lose their position as messengers of higher purpose, than existence of humanity by itself.