One of the persistent themes of these columns, especially over the last couple of years, has been what might be abbreviated to, “Scientism versus Christianity.” It is a way of looking at the postmodern revolution that has swept through all western societies in the last few decades. I say “postmodern” because it is the fulfillment of a much older “modernist” project, going back centuries: to replace the authority of the Christian religion with some “enlightened” human authority.
The paradox here is that the exponents of “enlightenment” have, wherever they have come to power, brought regimes of unmitigated darkness and irrationality. What makes the present special, is that they are triumphing everywhere. Indeed, nothing so vindicates the church’s view of the necessity of Christian government, as what happens when it is removed.
The problem with scientific moral standards is that science has no moral standards. I think this is the key to much that seems chaotic in the endless demands of “progressives” and “activists” on outwardly unrelated fronts. I am increasingly convinced that a wide range of phenomena, from environmentalist hysterias, to assaults on social “stereotypes,” to the retreat before radical Islam, all depend on this peculiar ambition to replace something with nothing.
We have a clash not between civilizations, but within this civilization, between two utterly irreconcilable views of reality. One of them consists in an obfuscatory and morally relativist worship of human science (“scientism,” in a word); the other in the stubborn acknowledgement of God. The sciences themselves – which pursue empirical and practical knowledge – have nothing to say in this conflict. They stand or fall with faith in reason.
Democracy has nothing to do with it, either. The vast majority of Canadian citizens, as Americans and others throughout the West, still declare themselves to be Christians of one kind or another. While many are weak of will and mind, it is inconceivable that anything like a majority could be found for a program to eliminate Christianity from public life. And yet such a program is succeeding, by increments, through the courts and the bureaucracies.
Moreover, among those not Christian, there is a secondary majority of other religious believers – Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc. While some may entertain antagonisms towards the Christian faith, it is again inconceivable that many wish the triumph of an explicitly atheist force, dedicated to the eradication of all traditional religion.
To those who know some history, the modern sciences emerged in an unambiguously Christian milieu. They flourished, over centuries in the West, as the direct result of the Judaeo-Christian teaching that “God does not contradict Himself.” The whole notion of unalterable physical laws, and thus a universal order that will repay inquiry, is the product of a theological position unique to the West. It is a view that has been glimpsed in other civilizations, but could only be doggedly pursued in this one.
By contrast, an atheistical view involves no such dogma; and the prevailing Darwinist scientistic view involves an actual self-contradiction so glaring that it cannot withstand a moment’s review. For it claims to explain order by the chance accumulation of random events. Such a view is itself in revolt against a tradition which found reason in nature and an answering reason in man.
The Christian outlook stood from the beginning on two ancient legs. One was the revelation to the Hebrews, which lights the way to Christ. And the other was our inheritance from the Greeks. For “Western Civ” emerged out of the ancient world as a set of uncannily adequate replies to questions Greek philosophers had raised about time and final causation. Indeed, the rebirth of empirical science in the Christian Middle Ages was a return to Athens and Alexandria, and to the inquiries of, for example, Aristotle and Aristarchus (“the ancient Copernicus”).
A return after what interruption? Not simply the fall of the Roman Empire, but a less appreciated collapse of pagan science that preceded that fall by many centuries.
One of the historical myths of today is that such pseudo-sciences as astrology and alchemy preceded the emergence of true science, which overcame them by its superior predictive powers.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the ancient world of the Mediterranean and Near East, it was the other way around. Astrology, alchemy, and various kinds of sorcery emerged from the decadence of Greek empiricism. The mystery cults that sustained them began to flourish just as that Greek world was crumbling under the might of an expanding Roman power, in the centuries before Christ. The ancient degeneration of science was predicated not on the rise of an “irrational” religious force, but on progressive loss of faith in, and growing cynicism towards, the ancient religious and cosmological order.
And that is what I fear is happening today: the degeneration of science into gnostic mystery cults, as the unifying faith upon which science was built, is hollowed out.
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