It was Nietzsche who foresaw what was likely to happen. When people gave up their faith in religion, it would not be religion alone that they would lose. They would lose morality, and with it a concern for truth, and then even science would lose its authority. Science, he said, can only function if we bring to it a prior conviction: ‘The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the conviction finds expression: Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it, everything else has only
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