The scientific revolution finds its historic place between the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and will be followed by the "Age of Enlightenment" - the eighteenth - when the scientific knowledge is finally consecrated. Today we struggle to represent how intricate and arduous must have been the path of ideas that led to the primacy of Sciene - in its modern meaning - on all the superstitions, occultisms, ermetisms, alchemy and magic beliefs of the Middle Ages.
We also know that we must add the obscurantist attitude and open hostility of the Catholic Church to all these -isms, which often degenerated into open and arbitrary violence that will never be sufficiently condemned.
I think, sometimes, that an opposite but equally degenerate situation became popular in our time: a blind trust in any information that is simply surrounded by an aura of scientific.
The rigor of the scientific method has said slowly against an ancient priestly conception of knowledge, and this has undoubtedly been one of the main achievements in human history.
Today, however, sometimes I think that faith in magic and the supernatural, which mankind has successfully strained to release, has been replaced by an equally fideistic credit to any assertion that can boast a relationship with science, albeit indirect.
The role of the distortion made by mass media is probably a remarkable one.
I have had a scientific education, then certainly I am not going to condemn scientific methods or undermine the achievements. However I often think that the ideal of "progress", and "scientific progress" in particular, must not lead to a society totally devoted to the achievement of such "progress" as if those achievements are the true nature of being human.
I believe today that there is a need for a new Humanism, bringing man back at the centre of society and replacing the faith in the technical and financial development with the faith in man, the search for progress in the quest for happiness and a worthy human condition. Science should always be instrumental to this condition. The ideal of "progress", with its obvious declinations of "development" (scientific, economic, etc.) and "growth" must be reviewed in the light of a new centrality of man.
We also know that we must add the obscurantist attitude and open hostility of the Catholic Church to all these -isms, which often degenerated into open and arbitrary violence that will never be sufficiently condemned.
I think, sometimes, that an opposite but equally degenerate situation became popular in our time: a blind trust in any information that is simply surrounded by an aura of scientific.
The rigor of the scientific method has said slowly against an ancient priestly conception of knowledge, and this has undoubtedly been one of the main achievements in human history.
Today, however, sometimes I think that faith in magic and the supernatural, which mankind has successfully strained to release, has been replaced by an equally fideistic credit to any assertion that can boast a relationship with science, albeit indirect.
The role of the distortion made by mass media is probably a remarkable one.
I have had a scientific education, then certainly I am not going to condemn scientific methods or undermine the achievements. However I often think that the ideal of "progress", and "scientific progress" in particular, must not lead to a society totally devoted to the achievement of such "progress" as if those achievements are the true nature of being human.
I believe today that there is a need for a new Humanism, bringing man back at the centre of society and replacing the faith in the technical and financial development with the faith in man, the search for progress in the quest for happiness and a worthy human condition. Science should always be instrumental to this condition. The ideal of "progress", with its obvious declinations of "development" (scientific, economic, etc.) and "growth" must be reviewed in the light of a new centrality of man.
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