Fire and Knowledge

When the priests themselves ceased to believe in their Deity and began to believe in astronomy, they changed their name and their dress, and called themselves doctors and men of science. They set up a new religion in which there was no Deity, but only wonders and miracles, with scientific instruments and apparatus as the wonder workers.

Instead of worshipping the greatness and wisdom of the Deity, men gaped foolishly at the million billion miles of space and worshipped the astronomer as infallible and omniscient. They built temples of his telescopes.

Then they looked into their own bodies with microscopes, and found there, not the soul they had formerly believed in, but millions of micro-organisms; so they gaped as foolishly as at the millions of miles, and built microscope temples in which horrible sacrifices were offered. They even gave their own bodies to be sacrificed by the microscope man, who was worshipped, like the astronomer, as infallible and omniscient.

Thus our discoveries, instead of increasing our wisdom, only destroyed the little childish wisdom we had.

–The Elderly Gentleman in Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (Oxford University Press: Revised edition, 1947), p. 147