Then, it is reasoned, if we are created in His image (which pertains to dominion and not logic), and in His likeness (which pertains to His ability to love and not power), we believe that we have the power and the mind to unlock all the mysteries of the world through reason.
The Age of Reason ushered the notion that man can solve everything. In doing so, man was deified (humanism), and God was correspondingly humanized.
But God reminds us that His thoughts are not our thouths and His ways are not our ways. Which is a neat way of saying that we will not figure out God's mysteries by our ways and our thoughts! But many will be mislead in trying because in effect the Age of Reason worships man, not God.
Hello kosta50! Yes; but of course this is an illusion. The only way one can get to the notion that man can solve everything is by "reducing" the universe to the "size" of his tools (so to speak). Put another way, the tools are designed for investigations into finite nature -- that which is in space and time and subject to observation via direct sense perception (as extended technologically). Man has become the measure here -- or even, man's tools have become the measure here. What the measure can't reach is assumed to be not really existing.
The irony is that no physicist has ever seen, say, an atom! That is, atoms are not direct observables; so the "satellite model" that hosepipe recently referred to was constructed so that the mind could image this thing called atom.... As early as the 1920s physicists realized that the satellite model had no foundation in fact. It was simply an attempt to visualize the unvisualizeable. But in so doing, we falsify actual nature: This is what we mean by a "reduction of reality."
The Enlightenment philosophes were a huge part of our modern problem, as you note. LaPlace and Comte instantly come to mind. LaPlace so reduced reality that he could imagine it as something he could stand entirely outside of -- which is of course impossible. But in order for the observer to see the universe "whole," in the manner of a discrete entity that can be made an object of investigation, he is required to stand outside of it. He reduces the world to an object within his powers and subject to his control. Or rather, the illusion of control....
Consistent with this process of "objectifying the universe," of reducing it to a size that it is tractable for his observational tools, LaPlace also systematically replaced the Christian theological virtues of faith, hope, and love by moving them into a context of deterministic mathematics. Now we Christians all know that the theological virtues cannot be regarded as something amenable to scientific or mathematical investigation: How are they in any way discrete "observables" such that the scientific method could have anything to do with them? That question is not answered. But LaPlace helpfully writes, "The reason I am [doing] this is that people are believing things that they ought not to believe [!!!! sez he], and I'm going to give you a calculus that's going to structure your believing." In other words, LaPlace insists that you believe what he believes -- he is the self-selected "representative man" and the [totalizing] authority for all the rest of us. To give you an idea of what such reductions look like, LaPlace reduces hope to the formula "What should you bet on? What's a reasonable bet, and what's not?" In other words, hope must be made relentlessly "reasonable."
Darwinism -- quite aside from whatever merit it has as science -- has also played a tremendous role in "reducing" the universe, and in revolutionizing the idea of man. As Eric Voegelin notes [in "The Drama of Humanity," 1967, in Vol. 33 of his collected works], Darwinist evolution theory makes man into a function of nature. That's all. But he's the "top of the heap," evolutionally speaking.
Voegelin writes:
“Beyond the things that exist in time and space, there is not, in addition, a world that exists in a further time and space. The world, the expression ‘world,’ is an idea. The world does not exist…. If you have the world as an absolute, instead of the former realities [e.g., a transcendent God and an immanent world [immanent in the sense of “inside” 4D spacetime], man becomes a function of the world, and God becomes a function of man….Recently we've been inquiring into the nature of time. Voegelin has some useful advice on this subject: “…one has to develop a conception of time that is not a floating dimension, empty, but, as in modern physics, a parameter of something that exists. But it is consciousness that exists, and consciousness has a peculiar parameter that is called the timeless in time.”“When we say man is a function of the world, we may think specifically of the role that the theory of evolution has [played in making] man into a function of the world. Because the theory of evolution – not as a scientific [theory] but in the broader ideological sense, in which we usually speak of evolution – reduces man to the hitherto last outgrowth of a natural evolution, beginning from some beginnings and, through the chain of organic being, ultimately culminating in man. Man is a function of that nature which is in evolution, the last product of it….
“Kant has given the reason why a theory of evolution cannot serve to make man a function of nature and of this world…. If you put man as the last item in a chain of evolution, you can…trace back, in some way, to life in its simplest forms, [to] organic, or animal matter. You can then demonstrate that this organic life may have its origin in a chain of vegetative life going back [further in time]. You may then say that vegetative life has its origin in a chain of various forms of inorganic [matter], until you come to the last element of atomic physics, or something like that. That is, you do not have a beginning of man. You cannot explain man by arbitrarily putting a beginning somewhere within that chain. But if you take evolution seriously, you always have to go back further into the vegetative, into the inorganic part, and so on, [until] you come to the question of the matrix of a matter which potentially contains all evolution.
“But still you are faced with the question, Where does that matter come from, [who] devised it, and endowed it with the kind of evolution that led it, in the end, to culminate in man?... a theory of evolution does not furnish an explanation of man, it only shoves it back to an imaginary beginning…. Only when [these] premises are not questioned can the argument of evolution work….
“The next point is that God is a function of man. That point [became acute] in the nineteenth century with Feuerbach’s ‘psychology of projection.’ All religious ideas, especially the idea of God, were conceived by Feuerbach as a projection of contents of the human mind into a beyond…. The psychological explanation of religious ideas is the vehicle by which God and the religious ideas are transformed into functions of the human psyche. Here you have the first spectrum of constructions that are used when the world is erected into an absolute entity. That is, the idea of the world is made into an entity, what Whitehead has called ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.’…
“…Feuerbach still left the matter at the level of the psychology of projections, while Marx more consistently said, ‘Why should we project? Let us pull these projections back into ourselves where they started!’ That means: Let us pull divinity back into our humanity and thereby become gods, or if not gods at least supermen. The expression ‘superman’ was used by Marx to designate the man who has pulled the projection of God back into himself. [Hegel had already done this, in his Phaenomenologie.] The same term was then used by Nietzsche for practically the same purpose…. Therewith, the revolt of man becomes visible as a revolt against God. God is pulled back into man, and divinized man becomes the center of all [reality] as he did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries….
“Marx considered religion to be the opiate of the people, then later, in the formulation of Raymond Aron, Marxism is opium for the intellectual, and now the people take opium straight!”
Just some food for thought! Thank you so much for writing, kosta50!