"At the time and in the country in which the present study was written, it was granted by everyone except backward people that the Jewish faith had not been refuted by science or by history…. [O]ne could grant to science and history everything they seem to teach regarding the age of the world, the origin of man, the impossibility of miracles, the impossibility of the immortality of the soul, and of the resurrection of the body, the Jahvist, the Elohist, the third Isaah, and so on, without abandoning one iota of the substance of the Jewish faith."
-P. 231; from the "Preface" to Leo Strauss’ Spinoza’s Critique of Religion
Part of the problem of modern atheism, as Leo Strauss famously diagnosed, is that it explicitly presents itself as possessing a monopoly on the market of reason and that it’s explanatory scope is perfectly comprehensive. At the heart of modern science’s Cartesian pretense to be a mathesis universalis is the conspiciously unempirical or unscientific presumption that everything that is must be susceptible to scientific description–the ontology science is based upon is not itself scientifically demonstrable and therefore resembles the sort of faith claim it intends to render obsolete, at least in the caricatured form it presents faith.
The essential dogmatism of this presumption really becomes transparent when the substance of scientific hypothesis radically contradicts our ordinary experience. A good example of this would be contemporary neuroscience, which routinely claims to be at the brink of a fully comprehensive theory of all things but also must petition the help of postmodern narrative to soften it’s incredibly counterintutive accounts of human life and consciousness. Here, I argue that this is basically science’s way of acknowledging that if it stubbornly refuses to surrender its claims to be the whole of reason and perfectly comprehensive, it has no choice but to sacrifice the truth of our experience of ourselves, and ironically, turn to the myth-making of modern poetry. Apparently, this is superior to faith because it’s done with one’s eyes fully open–we create myths knowingly and therapeutically versus desperately and ignorantly.
Despite the common refrain from modern atheists’ that religious belief is borne of a benighted and dogmatic refusal to accept the dicates of reason, it is science that has historically resisted revising claims about the scope of its explanatory powers that are now clearly hyperbolic. Christianity, for example, is also a universal account but one that takes seriously the limits of human reason and the catalogue of things that it can properly comprehend.It is comprehensive but not reductionist in that it respects the real heterogeneity of our experience and realist in that it doesn’t reflexively privilege the abstract results of speculative theory over the character of lived experience. Scientific rationality would actually be more reasonable if it admitted its shortcomings and stopped competing with religion to be a complete account of man–despite its protests to the contrary, science has done little to refute religion or to dampen our religious longings.
January 2nd, 2009 | 7:56 pm
I believe you’ve struck the proverbial nail on the head!
January 2nd, 2009 | 8:34 pm
“A good example of this would be contemporary neuroscience, which routinely claims to be at the brink of a fully comprehensive theory of all things but also must petition the help of postmodern narrative to soften it’s incredibly counterintutive accounts of human life and consciousness.”
Speaking as a neuroscientist I can tell you you’ve got it exactly backwards -
We don’t claim to be near a final theory of the mind and brain, in fact, neuroscientists are probably the most skeptical people in this regard becaus we’re the ones confronted with the complexity of the brain every day. I’ve never read anything written by a working, respected neuroscientist which claims that neuroscience is nearing “completion”.
Secondly, neuroscientists *revel* in counter-intuitive findings. Most neuroscientists who care about such things are contemptuous of intuition and see neuroscience as offering a much superior path to understanding the mind. Francis Crick called the idea that the mind & conciousness was reducible to brain function the “Astonishing Hypothesis” and he was pleased to do so – people might be astonished by it, but it was true, so they had better get used to it. Joshua Greene is a neuroscientist-philosopher who has studied moral decision-making and who never misses a chance to say that out moral intuitions are no more than dumb, stone-age reflexes which ought to be ignored in favor of a more rational, consequentialist account.
January 3rd, 2009 | 3:48 am
Fewer syllables and more thought, please.
“Modern atheism … explicitly presents itself as possessing a monopoly on the market of reason and … it’s [sic] explanatory scope is perfectly comprehensive.”
Nonsense.
Primo, there is no one school of modern atheism. PZ Myers is not the doctrinal father of New Atheism. Secundo, to the extent that there is a school of atheism, it exists only to oppose the claims of those who assert the existence of (one or more) gods. The fact that many scientists are atheists is irrelevant to what atheism is.
As many religious people who claim to understand scientific atheism, you conflate scientism (the idea that science can provide insight into morality) with atheism (the idea that the existence of god is irrelevant.)
As a stalwart atheist, amateur scientist and professional lawyer, I understand perfectly well the basis for religious longing. Is this it? What is the meaning of life? Where does love come from? All of these are great existential questions.
But ya know, there is not one single shred of evidence admissible in a court of law for the existence of any god, much less the christian one. In the time of Moses, we had burning bushes. In Christ’s time, he appeared to Doubting Thomas. These day, we get patterns in a grilled cheese sandwich. Come now, why can’t we get one good irrefutable miracle? Why won’t he stop the sun in its course, or spell his name in the stars?
January 3rd, 2009 | 7:10 am
Lawyer Francis: With all respect, I get the sense that you are inquirying into the nature of being and reality. Excellent!
First, let me say that it was Cicero who coined the idea of “religion” in order to protect the symbolism that the classical Greeks created to express the “experience and meditation of the transcendent source of order in reality.” Because of the Enlightenment Project (primarily) the term “religion” is thought of as having no basis in “empirical reality.”
Consequentlyl it may be best to say “spiritual longing” and take our inquiry to a more fundamental level.
Plato addressed this “longing” and much more in his Allegory of the Cave, a work in which I’m sure you’re familiar. My point is that this famous allegory reveals the nature of man’s inquiry into the experience of seeking the “highest knowledge” in terms of the periagoge-a turning around-the moment when being “experiences himself as open towards the transcendent” (the Good, Agathon), and experiences apperception, where being ceases trying to implant its order on the world and surrenders to the order of being (and reality) and accepts its “embeddedness” in the “cosmic order,” which of course being did not create.
This experience, this apperception, does not occur in the immanent world reality nor is it a truely transcendent experience rather it occurs in-between, in a place the Greeks called the metaxy. It acknowledges the intrinsic pull of the Ground and increases the psyche’s ability to “discriminate and differentiate” the truth of reality while offering neither dogma, doctrine, or absoutes. The act of periagoge is merely a beginning into the inquiry of the order of being. It is the beginning of the quest that recognizes that the psyhe, our “sensor of transcendence,” has some inate knowledge, understanding, or perception of the agathon, the Ground.
I think this fundamental yearning to understand our place in the cosmic order best expresses itself through a desire to engage in dialectics, where the truth emerges through diffentiating the question with an interlocutor.
I truly do hope that I have to some degree served that purpose and please feel free to beat me up, verbally that is! You may also be intrigued with the work of Alvin Plantinga, a remarkably kind and considerate scholar of the first rank.
January 3rd, 2009 | 8:15 am
Part of the problem of modern atheism, as Leo Strauss famously diagnosed, is that it explicitly presents itself as possessing a monopoly on the market of reason and that it’s explanatory scope is perfectly comprehensive.
This may be be true of modernist atheism, but then, how do the beliefs of religious fundamentalism differ from that? Not much.
The postmodernist would present himself on the other side of both modernist atheism (as defined above) and “conservative” Christianity: There is no “In the beginning was the Word” — the Logos, the Reason, the foundation of Knowledge.
(Of course, if “Conservative” is meant to include conservative Christianity, then “Postmodern Conservative” is a true oxymoron.)
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