Studying the history of Western thoughts is like studying a drowning man trying to cling to a straw in the middle of ocean, and then leaving that straw and cling to the next in perpetual moves of frustration and agony.
The European mind emancipated from the shackles of the Church, but had to fill the void which the Church used to fill in running all aspects of a society: politics, economics, moral and personal transactions.
There was a great demand
for solutions, and any solution as long as it was not coming from Church men.
When Newton put forward some mechanical law to explain how the nature works, the European society took such laws to great distances (which Newton might have never thought of) and started to derive unwarranted implications from these laws only to satisfy inner desire to revenge anything Divine. So, now everything works like a clock and no need for a God to hold the heaven and earth from collapsing one on the other. Everything under this law looks like Absolute
.
It is only many many years later in 1915 that Einstein came to suggest otherwise and say that everything is not absolute rather relative
. Again, immediately European mind shifted gear and moved from one extreme to another and started to feel skeptical about the surrounding and got frustrated and as usual took Einstein’s theories to the realm of moral and ethics and asserted that morality is also relative. This tendency to take an empirical theory or hypothesis to the world of morals, politics, sociology and culture had very adverse effect on the world and had created lots of extremism. Modern Art now rejected any absolute beauty dictated by classical and traditional schools.
Historian Paul Johnson gets it exactly right as he describes the cultural impact of Einstein’s theories:
“Is was as though the spinning globe had been taken off its axis and cast adrift in a universe which no longer conformed to accustomed standards of measurement. At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.” (source).
[35:41] God holds the heavens and the earth, lest they fall apart. And were they to fall apart, there is none to hold them together except He. He is Most Clement, Most Forgiving.
[50:5] But they denied the truth when it has come to them, so they are in a confused state.
Now, that they started an “enlightened” journey without the Scripture, they had to fill the void created by uprooting Church solutions to so many physical and non-physical matters that cover ethics, morals and emotions.
One easy shortcut is to attempt the generalize empirical theories to worlds of ethics, moral, meta-physics and philosophy. So, if