Abstract

It is generally accepted as a matter of historical fact that science began as a form of religious dissent: A certain group of believers adopted radically different means to pursue the same ends and issues promoted by their religion. However, it is less clear that this fact has been fully accepted - let alone explored - as a matter of philosophy. This is the spirit in which the following essay should be read. It begins by deconstructing three familiar moral rules to reveal their intertwined religious and scientific assumptions about the human condition. This opens into a multi-level discussion of theodicy, the search for divine justice, which has both an aesthetic and an economic dimension that has framed key aspects of the secular scientific worldview. Perhaps more than any other branch of theology, theodicy is fixated on establishing God's point of view, which in turn explains its controversial standing within religion. In modern times, God becomes 'truth' and scientists become its priests. Regimes of 'double truth' and 'post-truth' can be understood as strategies to, respectively, uphold and undermine such truth. After a brief discussion of post-truth, the rest of the essay focuses on double truth, especially the aftermath of the Condemnation of 1277, which effectively enabled two routes to the truth - one conceptual and mathematical and the other empirical and technical - to be pursued independently until they were reunited in what we now call the 'scientific method'. The essay concludes by suggesting that the Condemnation of 1277 marked a triumph for 'open society' thinking, whose downstream effects are reflected in the disruptive character of today's post-truth condition.