Sloan

“The result has been that theologians have largely failed to make any radical or effective critique of scientific epistemology, to elucidate the consequences of making the reason the supreme and sole instrument of knowledge, and to explain why this has meant a progressive falsification of our understanding both of ourselves and of the world about us. In view of this failure it is not surprising that so many students of our universities end up with no better ideology than some form of Marxist-Leninism, itself a translation into political terms of some of the most banal aspects of nineteenth century bourgeois scientific theory. When this same hotch-potch of rationalist-materialist constructs is taken over by—or, rather, takes possession of—the masses, then society is turned into a prison-camp in which everything that gives human life its value and dignity is systematically attacked and lacerated.”
― Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science

“Moreover, it is not only our emotional world that is deadened. The world of our creative imagination and intelligence is also impoverished. The most average characterless type of mind is quite sufficient to master and apply the various skills, scientific and other, needed to run our society.At the same time, the objects which we now make or manufacture require little or no imaginative effort on our part; they are all the result of rational planning and design, of technical skill and efficiency, and we produce them—are forced to produce them—with the least possible personal struggle or commitment, entering
into and becoming through producing them part of their objective, impersonal and pitiless nature. For these products—machines, commodities, organizations, programmes—are themselves totally devoid of any Imaginative quality: they mirror nothing which is not material, they are symbols of nothing, they are entirely consumed by their own lifeless and inorganic indifference; and man who must spend his days among them is reduced to a similar state.
Indeed, what goes by the name of work for the vast majority of the members of our society rots the very soul and body. It is work which takes no account whatsoever of the personal qualities of the individuals engaged in it; it has no direct connection with what a particular person really is or with that by virtue which he is himself and not someone else; it is purely external to him and he can exchange it—if there is anything available—for an alternative which is equally impersonal and exterior. In relation to our work, the vast majority of us in our society are equivalent to mere ‘units’, or objects or commodities, and are condemned for all our wokring lives to purely mechanical activites in which nothing properly human exists and whose performance is not in any way consistent with our inner and personal aptitudes and identities.”
― Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science

“Modern science, then, ignoring the sacred aspect of nature as a condition of its own genesis and development, tries to fill the vacuum it has created by producing mathematical schemes whose only function is to help us to manipulate and ‘dominate’ matter on its own plane, which is that of quantity alone. The physical world, regarded as so much dead stuff, becomes the scene of man’s uncurbed exploitation for purely practical, utilitarian or acquisitive ends. It is treated as a de-incarnate world of phenomena that are without interest except in so far as they subserve statistics or fill test-tubes in order to satisfy the curiosity of the scientific mind, or are materially useful to man considered as a two-legged animal with no destiny beyond his earthly existence.”
― Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science

“The world-picture, with man in it, is flattened and neutralized, stripped of all sacred or spiritual qualities, of all hierarchical differentiation, and spread out before the human observer like a blank chart on which nothing can be registered except what is capable of being measured. For Newton, the celestial spheres are a machine, for Descartes, animals are machines, for Hobbes, society is a machine, for La Mettrie, the human body is a machine, eventually for Pavlov and his successors human behaviour is like that of a machine. There is nothing that is not reduced either to phenomenon (fact) or to mathematical hypothesis (or, in less polite language, fiction). The whole physical world is regarded as no more than so much inanimate dead matter whose chemical changes are mechanical processes based upon the so-called law of the conservation of mass. Everything, including the mind of man," is aligned on the model of a machine constructed out of dissections, analyses and calculations.”
― Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science