Last time we took a look at the advent of the Scientific Revolution. We looked at the work of Copernicus and how the important advent of a scientific description of reality had with it the consequence that most of our experience—our sensory experience—was questionable as illusory in nature. Galileo also developed the idea of math as the language of reality, and used that with the new experimental method (a method also born out of the idea that most of our cognition is deceptive and biasing in nature) and he used that to discover inertial motion and change the notion of matter into something that exists and resists our will, but that had the effect of killing the universe and making it purposeless in nature.
Thus we become odd islands of meaning and purpose and in a vast ocean of meaningless, purposeless material motion. So all of that is going to have an impact on people’s self understanding, the meaning that they’re using to make sense of their existence. Look what’s happening here: that Aristotelian idea that the structure of your experience and the structure of reality conform has been radically undermined. Now you are trapped within your own mind behind the veils of illusion disconnected from the world and God has become progressively more and more a matter of will.
Episode 20: Death of the Universe