God Bless The Secular Fundamentalists

DID YOU KNOW that we live in an age when the achievements of science and technology are under attack from religious extremism as never before? Then the Center for Enquiry (CFI) is for you. As CFI’s home page puts it:

Although modern world civilization is based upon the achievements of science and technology, until this time there has been no authoritative and credible voice defending the scientific outlook in examining religion, human values, and the borderlands of science.

Oh dear, writes Father Thomas Berg on NRO. Where do we start? The fact is that religion is not necessarily opposed to science and reason. Catholicism, for instance, is a 2000-year-old effort to develop a reasoned religion. And anyway, Berg writes,

it may come as a surprise to many secularists that their unquestioned faith in the possibility of an objective, “scientific” approach to life, cleansed of “religious ideology”, is itself an ideological hangover from the Enlightenment, one that has been long since de-legitimized by contemporary thinkers as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty.

Secularists miss the big point, and make the fundamental category error of conflating the “Is” and the “Ought.” Science can do wonders illuminating the “Is,” but it has little to tell us about the “Ought.” RMC Chappie F.S.C. Northrop has a whole book devoted to this problem. It is called The Complexity of Legal and Ethical Experience. He was a professor of law and philosophy at Yale who flourished in the mid-twentieth century.

We know, as well as we can know, that we live in an amazing universe, and we know how it works, especially in the realm close to our everyday lives. But the big question is: What does it all mean? And closely allied to that question is: How should we live?

The basic problem is that science cannot provide answers to these questions. To know the answers would be to know the destiny of the human race, to have reduced the universe to a deterministic problem. Hence religion; hence “belief systems.” Berg again:

If secularists want to have a meaningful voice in the public square — and not a preposterous one — then we invite them to be attentive students of history, and with intellectual honesty to recognize that Christianity in particular has a lengthy track record of contributing to the very goals that secularists profess to be seeking: beliefs grounded in reason, an ethics sustained by reasonable moral discourse, advances in human knowledge, and the general betterment of human life.

Of course, monstrous things have been done in the name of religion. But then monstrous things have been done in the name of science and reason.

The basic problem with the secularists is that they are utterly unreflective on the basic articles of their faith. (And yes, they do have a faith.) Their faith is so immediate and obvious to them that they aren’t even aware of their assumptions. They bandy about terms like “medical ethics” and “ethical foreign policy” as if these concepts were fully decided and that all reasonable people agreed upon them.

What do you call a faith like that? How about “secular fundamentalism?”

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Comments:

Posted by: right win guy on 12/13/06 7:27am

Oops, I dropped my thought. I should have wrote for the last sentence: "Maybe in the context of the surging religion of peace, they should reconsider and question aspects of their own faith in the moral superiority of religion." Again, just a thought.

Posted by: Right wing guy on 12/13/06 7:21am

There might be a confusion here between science and scientism. Just a thought. It could just as easily be argued that the murderous regimes of the 20th century, which did indeed promise "super science" to their subjects, were in fact religions in secular disguise. But I have never met or read a religionist who failed to dismiss such a caution out of hand. Maybe in the context of the surging religion of peace, they should.

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

mysql close 0