How much of our scientific thinking has an unconscious religious bias?
This is in response to this post, from @headspace-hotel, about campaigns to eradicate Hybrid Cattails as an "Invasive Species," even though both individual species hybridizing themselves are native plants (But I didn't want to muddy a discussion about science with a rant about religion. So: a separate post it is)
I sometimes wonder if our dominant views of "natural vs. unnatural/invasive" were shaped, are shaped, by the particular theologies of Protestant Christianity...
You Know, the theology that teaches / believes:
Our world was created by a single, all-knowing god
Humanity Fell by disobeying that god, and thus tainted the world with Sin (so Humans are now apart from Nature [aka the Garden of Eden])
The Protestant Christians fetishized the North American Continent as an example of what Eden was like "Before the Fall," and the people who were already living here were Noble Savages.*
So now, anything that evolves in response to human influence (such as brackish cattails hybridizing with freshwater cattails), is considered "unnatural," as if it's been tainted by our sin.
I sometimes wonder what our environmental understanding would be like in an alternate universe where the sciences had evolved in a polytheistic culture.** Would we be more generally accepting of the idea of coexisting forces constantly intertwining, and changing, rather than there being a single, fixed, "pure" world, that must be protected from contamination?
[BTW. I've become an atheist in this last third of my life, so I don't think any one religion is "more true" than any other: they're all metaphors that help us frame and understand the actual world we live in; they are very powerful metaphors, and for some, can be helpful and emotionally healthy ... for others, not so much.]
*(even though the abundant environment the colonizers found here was actually deliberately managed and curated by humans -- it's just that it wasn't managed in the form of fenced off square plots, and straight rows of crops).
**If you don't believe scientific thinking can evolve within a polytheistic paradigm, check out (what survives of) the writings of Democritus and Epicurus. Their philosophies weren't following what we now consider the Scientific Method, but they were already drifting in that direction.
