Claim. Religion (which restores spiritual ignorance through the original mind) and science/economy (which restore physical ignorance through tangible-world activity) progress at different rates and along divergent paths in the Age of the Prolongation; the divergence is structural, not accidental — the providence of re-creation follows the same external-to-internal order that the original creation did, in which God formed the body before imbuing the spirit.
Elaboration. Per Part 2 Ch 5 §7.2.2: humans were created as dual entities — spirit self + physical self — to rule both worlds. After the fall, humans became ignorant of both. God overcomes spiritual ignorance through religion (focusing life on the invisible causal world) and physical ignorance through science (tangible material objects).
Three asymmetries drive separate development:
- Demand: not everyone needs religion immediately (only exceptional individuals attain spiritual knowledge fast; the population spiritual level stays near ancient levels), but everyone needs science (physical-knowledge growth is widespread and rapid).
- Object: religion studies the intangible world of cause; science the tangible world of result. The two are theoretically irreconcilable.
- World-denial: because Satan holds sovereignty over the physical universe, religions teach world-denial; science seeks to improve worldly life. The two cannot easily harmonize while science remains under satanic containment.
The deepest reason is providential-structural: God originally created the body first, then imbued spirit. Re-creation follows the same pattern, external before internal. So religion and science develop at variance, often in conflict.
Religion and economy mirror this; politics is the integrative function — Western politics pioneered the path to harmonize religion with science-driven economy. To grasp providential progress, one must therefore investigate religious, political, and economic history separately.
OT-age history did not show this pattern: science was extremely slow in ancient Israel, the economy was simple, religion was integral to daily life, and the Mosaic-Law system bound politics and religion together. Separate development is a prolongation-age phenomenon.
Significance. Supplies the methodological frame for analyzing Western post-Roman history. The triple-track frame allows DP’s six-period cascade to track religious history (papal Christianity → conciliar → Reformation → democratic Christianity), political history (feudal → monarchic → absolute → democratic), and economic history (manor → capitalism → imperialism → socialism) as separate but providentially-coordinated lines.
See also. dp-providence-develops-society-through-clan-feudal-monarchic-stages · dp-providence-shifted-to-western-europe-after-rome-fell