Science is young

So here's an idea: systems of knowledge will eventually, over tens of thousands of years, converge on a more "accurate" view of reality. The system of knowledge embodied in Catholicism is quite young, and not adaptive – it is set up to be resistant to change, depending on the authority of an old, sex-deprived man who claims to have revelations. [I always think of that line from the film Ladyhawke, which I would love for someone to say to the Pope, "No offense, but I talk to God all the time, and he’s never mentioned you." Though the "he" should be "they" or "it" or "we".] The system of knowledge in Buddhism is only a few thousand years older than Catholicism, though it is set up to change and adapt in response to debate and evidence.

Science is only a few hundred years old, but it is designed to adapt and change in response to evidence, and, however imperfectly it instantiates its ideals, it does set up nature as the ultimate authority, rather than humans. And because it does use that method, humans' central role in the natural world and the universe has been eroded substantially in a few hundred years. Maybe science might be on a "fast growth" path for a system of knowledge. (And a slow growth path for a system of ethics.) Science has changed its view of the world and humans' place in the world tremendously in the last few hundred years, and seems to be gradually converging on something similar to an indigenous worldview: all living things are kin to each other, living things in ecosystems aren't separate entities, but are interdependent; matter and energy are interchangeable at some level; time and space and the fundamental constituents of matter are relative and constantly in flux, flickering in and out of existence on a quantum level, interrelated in ways counterintuitive to Western thought and language, but possibly quite intuitive in the thoughtways of many indigenous languages. Maybe long ago indigenous people already got to the worldview, the particular understanding of the universe, that science is heading towards. Tens of thousands of years of trial and error in the living world might make you pretty realistic – that is, would make you have to understand reality.

The dogmatic, authoritarian era of knowledge is ending. Science converges with indigenous knowledge, and we come to understand our relationship to the living world.