The novelist and podcaster Andrew Klavan has published an essay at City Journal making an eloquent defense of the position that, contra Steven Pinker and others, the hyper-rationalism of the Enlightenment is insufficient to sustain our civilization against moral, spiritual and philosophical exhaustion — and so he calls us back to the faith that built it in the first place.
Many of us have come to realize the seriousness of the problem; ten years ago I myself wrote a post arguing that secularism is maladaptive. But even then I still hadn’t fully understood the problem: while I saw clearly enough that secularism placed groups at a competitive disadvantage against religious ones, I hadn’t yet understood how fatally it could weaken a civilization from within, even in the absence of external threats. Even as I later came, quite reluctantly, to a skeptical re-examination of my own atheism, and to the realization that religion is a thing that anyone of a conservative disposition (especially anyone who understands the American Founding) should recognize as good and even necessary, I was nevertheless unable to become a believer myself. My own Enlightenment hyper-rationalism was still in the driver’s seat, you see, as Mr. Klavan explains:
It is the Enlightenment Narrative that creates this worship of reason, not reason itself. In fact, most of the scientific arguments against the existence of God are circular and self-proving. They pit advanced scientific thinkers against simple, literalist religious believers. They dismiss error and mischief committed in the name of science — the Holocaust, atom bombs, climate change — but amberize error and mischief committed in the name of faith — “the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion,” as Pinker has it.
By assuming that the spiritual realm is a fantasy, they irrationally dismiss our experience of it. Our brains perceive the smell of coffee, yet no one argues that coffee isn’t real. But when the same brain perceives the immaterial — morality, the self, or God — it is presumed to be spinning fantasies. Coming from those who worship reason, this is lousy reasoning.
The point of this essay is not to argue the truth of Christianity. I argue only this: the modern intellectual’s difficulty in believing is largely an effect created by the overwhelming dominance of the Enlightenment Narrative, and that narrative is simplistic and incomplete.
This is exactly right: the Enlightenment Narrative is simplistic and incomplete. This is exactly the concern that has been gnawing at me; it is what I described a few weeks ago in this post about my growing dissatisfaction with secular materialism.
In that post I mentioned, among other questions, the puzzle of the fine-tuning of the Universe for life, and the unsatisfactory answer that seems to be the best that secular science can come up with. Klavan looks at the same question, and he isn’t satisfied either:
Did we, for example, escape Christianity into science? From Roger Bacon to Galileo to Newton, the men who sparked the scientific revolution were all believing Christians. Doesn’t this make it seem plausible that — despite the church’s occasional interference — modern science was actually an outgrowth of Christian thought?
And is science still moving away from that Christian outlook, or has its trajectory begun to change? It may have once seemed reasonable to assume that the clockwork world uncovered by Isaac Newton would inexorably lead us to atheism, but those clockwork certainties have themselves dissolved as science advanced. Quantum physics has raised mind-boggling questions about the role of consciousness in the creation of reality. And the virtual impossibility of an accidental universe precisely fine-tuned to the maintenance of life has scientists scrambling for “reasonable” explanations.
Like Pinker, some try to explain these mysteries away. For example, they’ve concocted a wholly unprovable theory that we are in a multiverse. There are infinite universes, they say, and this one just happens to be the one that acts as if it were spoken into being by a gigantic invisible Jew! Others bruit about the idea that we live in a computer simulation — a tacit admission of faith, though it may be faith in a god who looks like the nerd you beat up in high school.
In any case, scientists used to accuse religious people of inventing a “God of the Gaps” — that is, using religion to explain away what science had not yet uncovered. But multiverses and simulations seem very much like a Science of the Gaps, jerry-rigged nothings designed to circumvent the simplest explanation for the reality we know.
A “Science of the Gaps”: just so. Is it worth throwing our civilization away for, and perhaps our souls as well? Read Andrew Klavan’s essay here.
3 Comments
Focusing on science misses an important historical fact. The Enlightenment ended around 1800, and it was replaced by the Romantic Era. Modern science is a product of the Enlightenment, as is the US Constitution, but the Romantics explicitly rejected reason, science, objectivity for intuition, emotion and submersion in an oceanic experience.
Socialism is a product of Romanticism, and it is the dominant socio-political movement today. Some academics argue that Romanticism has been replaced by Modernism or even Post-Modernism, but listen to the rants of the modern-day youth. There is no trace of Enlightenment there, mere wallowing in emotion and feeling.
But Romanticism cannot be a path back to any sort of Christianity. The Enlightenment and its child Science have irreparably killed off religion. Mere wallowing is all that is possible until this civilization ends.
Science, which in its true sense is engineering (the rest being mere theory), hasn’t killed off anything that I can tell.
Who has visited a multiverse and returned? Where is the ex nihilo creation science has wrought?
Robert Sykes,
That’s an interesting comment.
I’d agree that much of the modern Left seems to be driven by emotion, and by a Rousseauian, Romantic antipathy to the rationalism of the Founding. (The influence of this sentimentalism on American politics was also greatly enhanced, in my opinion, by the ratification of the 19th Amendment.) It is also true that Romanticism has as a persistent motif a heroic struggle against nature or the gods, and of the heroic individual as Creator. This very clearly resonates with the radical subjectivity we see all around us, in which every person is expected to create his own reality (while the rest of us are expected to pretend, on pain of increasingly harsh opprobrium, that such jumped-up subjectivities are objectively real!).
But there is also a hyper-rational column in the politics of the Left, exemplified by secular materialists such as Steven Pinker. Clearly there is a deepening tension between these factions. (May it fester.)
You write:
This is in line with what I wrote ten years ago, in the post I linked to above. Back then I said:
This is no longer my position, for (at least) two reasons. The first is that there may be axioms that are so corrosive to the flourishing of human societies that it is not in our best interest to promote them. The second is that I no longer have any confidence that our default position, even under pure rationalism, should be that the metaphysical claims of the theist are false.
I am not nearly as sure as you are that the spiritual exhaustion of Christendom, with its increasingly obvious and malignant consequences and the increasing threat of Islamism, might not give rise to a reawakening of religion in the West, and a rebuilding of its Christian foundation. I would certainly be glad to see it: the alternative is, as you say, that “mere wallowing is all that is possible until civilization this ends.”