Hypatia's Ghost: Faith v Reason

In Alexandria, in 415 AD, the renowned female mathematician, philosopher and astronomer, Hypatia, was brutally murdered by a Christian mob.  Christian patriarchalism, aggression against pagans (of which she was likely one), faith based suspicion of science and the fraught politics of a rising church and a declining Roman state, combined to doom her.  Her death was a milestone in the passing of the classical age of antiquity and the beginning of a chaotic transitional period.  Much knowledge was lost.  The faculty of reason became chained to theology for the next thirteen to fourteen hundred years, until the rise of cities, nation states, an intellectual renaissance and modern industries technology and science, enabled the reclamation of its independence.

The global rise of religious fundamentalism everywhere in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries parallels the situation in Hypatia’s time; the increasingly strident denial of science that conflicts with religious claims; the re-assertion of values and practices associated with traditional patriarchal religious communities; the increasing militance of religious sensibility; the decline of social governance within consumer and third world societies; and the increasingly unstable, conflicted and unsustainable character of the corporatized global order.

Just as in Hypatia’s time people found the ground beneath their feet starting to shift, so it is with us.

Richard Dawkins, in his recent book ‘The God Delusion’, mounts a spirited attack on the ideological pretensions of Abrahamic monotheism (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).  And while I heartily endorse many of his arguments and conclusions and share his horror at the extent of abandonment of reason amongst the pious, his work does not really confront the real issue. 

Something big is going on and Dawkins et al haven’t put their finger on it.

Rebuttal of ascendant ideas is the lowest form of intervention against them because it has almost no impact on those who are already influenced and does not address what is driving them and giving them traction.  And to suggest, as Dawkins tries to do, that religion can be defined away as a wasteful, but nonetheless advantageous group strategy in the survival-of-the-fittest Darwinian struggle, merely threatens to pit one tendentiously speculative supposition with another.  Social Darwinism has a strong track record of descending into pseudo-science.

Trying to cram the sum of human behavior under the aegis of one theory screams pseudo science, every bit as much as it did when Marx and Engels tried to unify history under the 'scientific' banner of dialectical and historical materialism.  Darwinian theory is best left to paleontologists and biologists.  That is where the bulk of its power, research effort and scientific integrity lies, as does the fear and hate of its enemies.

This is not to say Dawkins’ book isn’t required reading for anyone preparing to fight off an attempt to ram Intelligent Design theory, which is a transparently dishonest misrepresentation and travesty of science, into the local school science curriculum.

However, what is really interesting is not the ideological debate, but why it needs to be revisited at all.  After all, the evidence for Darwinian theory is so overwhelming, and it wasn’t so long ago that we seculars were confidently expecting traditional religion to molder into the cultural landscape until it was finally buried in the grave yard of history.  What happened?  Why the unexpected and aggressive resurgence of faith, irrationality and superstition?

More interesting still is the impression that it is Dawkins and his audience that are the ones in need of bolstering and self re-assurance.  Their faith protagonists seem so overwhelmingly confident and pugnacious.  Why wouldn’t a rational evidence based intellect be shaken by the resurgence of ideas based on little more than fresh air?

They have good reason to fear the consequences of this change in the cultural fabric.  Nonsense can gain cultural and political traction very easily.  Come the crunch, rational debate and evidence based argument can be all too easily suborned, circumvented or bulldozed out of the way.

And it should also be noted that it isn’t just religious fantasists that are doing this.  Anyone following anthropogenic climate change denialism can see exactly the same anti-science tendencies at work amongst threatened industrial lobbies and their social mainstream sympathizers.  Climatologists and the institutions they work in have found themselves under increasingly shrill attack by scientific nobodies with a very limited grasp of the climatological research effort, no record of involvement in its most recent projects, or recent peer reviewed published work in reputable scientific journals.  But they know how to get equal billing with the real climate experts in public ‘debates’, which allow them to weave pseudo-scientific public-relations-speak into scientific dialogue, that corrupts, as it corrodes as it undermines the integrity of public discourse.

And the 'progressive' left is not above using science, and scientific mouthpiecing in its propaganda battles, particularly in the behavioral sciences where it is easier to front load unstated assumptions and agendas than science of the laboratory kind.  Studies comparing the caring attributes of homosexual couples with the heterosexual community has a propaganda assumption that 'caring attributes' are the basis of parenting rather than the male/female biological roots and connectedness of progenitor and progeny through the creation act, and the gender/sexuality mentoring and the familial succession modeling that follows it.  The propaganda agenda is the obvious likely outcome of such research which would be that there was no difference in caring attribute distribution, which would then justify the political demand for the right of homosexual couples to adopt/raise children.

A recent declaration by the chairman of 'Beyond Blue' (depression response agency in Australia) that he thought homosexual marriage is not legitimate because it is the preserve of heterosexual couples, was widely attacked in the health industry by prominant academic and health institution mouthpieces.  He was held not fit to be leading a mental health institution and his resignation was called for.  There was the implied assertion that the reason for this was that he was compromising the mental health of homosexual by attempting to 'discriminate' against them.  Health 'science', health management, moral judgment and political clout became extremely blurred. 

Courts are perhaps the only places left with enough perceived neutrality and authority to forensically cross examine bogus pseudo-scientism and the conflation of science and moral judgment, leaving none of the protagonists room to obfuscate and bluster their way through.  But it doesn't matter a jot to the believers how expertly pinioning the court judgments were or are.  They are not listening.  All they are interested in is fairy stories and ideological myths that tell them what they want, what they need to hear.

All that is necessary is some kind of disturbance within the economic or cultural infrastructure to unravel rational and critical thinking.  Getting a handle on that and addressing the issues it raises is the real answer to individual and collective fantasizing.  (See also my "Brouhaha For Hitler' at http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1623216-Brouhaha-for-Hitler , for a comparison with Germany during the crisis of the 1930s).  Irrational thinking only becomes a resort when what is currently on rational offer becomes inadequate or threatening in some way(s).

Dawkins et al need to take a good hard look at what has happened to secular society in the last sixty years.  The irrational forces he is confronting are just a symptom of what is going on within it.  He can get the ideological traction and hitting power he so passionately wants, by beginning the process of recognizing a need for and then designing a rational alternative to, what religious groups deliver to their acolytes, in the circumstances they now find themselves in.

It is some measure of the complacency inside secular society that no one has even made a start on such a project, let alone considered competing with traditional religions for their adherents.  The rising power and aggression of religious feeling is a crie de coeur that cannot be argued away.  And unless something concretely changes, that cry will only get stronger and more insistent.

It is no longer good enough to talk about 'progress' when it is starting to look like the march of the lemmings.  It is no longer good enough to proffer the hope of rising affluence, or even a more equitable distribution of it, as a panacea for the future.  Stuff is not enough; at least not by itself.  The wealth that is tied up in the software in our heads is at least as great as anything else we will ever own!  In much of our society now, all that is left of that software are the production drivers and market signal responders, and not much else.

A society that cannot reliably reproduce well constructed and disciplined children within a strong and warm family setting, that will grow them into responsible adults who can deliver the same high standard to their children, doesn't deserve to last.  A society that leaves its children to toy makers, electronic child minders, and the endless patter of propagandists, doesn't deserve to keep them, except as house guests.

An economy that asset strips its environment, is prepared to enter into a suicide pact with its future and has institutionalized megalomania as part of a super powerful privatized totalitarian marketing suite, also devours its subjects. It turns the cities of their imaginations into third world slums and their emotional hinterlands into degraded deserts. (See my 'Satan Speaks' at http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1759332-Satan-Speaks).  No society has a right to destroy its future and turn its people into existential ghosts, just to maintain World War intensity levels of production output on a permanent basis until one day everything goes feral and belly up.

The bottom line is about social regulation and the secure reproduction of the values that will sustain it into the very long term.  Almost nothing that is being done now is sustainable.  This is not just an ecological question.  A sustainable society is one that can go on replicating itself indefinitely, in everything it does, by delivering stabilized natural and existential environments, and a realistically empowering and confident vision of itself, of what we are and what we will become.

The modern secular industrial society that emerged out of the World Wars is now as seriously damaged internally as the destruction it is visiting on everything else around it.  Irrational faith that something ‘out there’ will save us from the damning nature of what we are doing, seems entirely understandable and a truly accurate reflection of just how grave our condition has become. But trying to force the school science curriculum into line with scripture is the desperate behavior of people who need help to rejoin the worlds of faith and reason, that have been split asunder by the times we live in.

Faith has become anything that looks like it might float on uncertainty and the fear beneath it.  Reason is now a kind of Titanic that is heading straight for an iceberg as we speak.

Survivability criteria insist on two things: firstly that faith has strongly rooted rational foundations; i.e., faith that is grounded on evidence that would reasonably justify it; and secondly, the social and economic expressions of our reason must be kept within an in-depth defensible and shock proofed infrastructure; i. e., whatever we do has to be able to withstand multiple adversities and assault  These are the twin basic requirements if we are to make it through the likely extremely difficult transition that will mark the end of modern times. 

Nothing is going to get us, or even some of us, out of the trouble we are already in, except the vision, problem solving skills and self belief that got us into this fix in the first place.  On the face of it, that might not seem terribly re-assuring, but it is pure fantasy to believe that some Big Daddy in the sky is going to rescue us.  As a species, we cannot afford to lose our collective nerve when the going gets tough.

Notwithstanding any of this, people will continue to cling to irrational faith despite the fact that the language and thinking behind the biblical mind is obviously at variance with modern experience and understanding.  To come at it at all one has to completely suspend disbelief and most, if not all, of what one has learned about how the world and the universe work.  And despite the fact that its documentation was written before our species discovered evidence based thinking, or the intellectual and observational tools that would inform it, or the data streams and technology it made possible, irrational faith continues to grow apace.

In this struggle of ideas, Richard Dawkins can order back the tide as much as he likes.  It is coming in, ready or not.  Building ideological life boats seems a better way of avoiding being drowned by it; or more likely murdered by the nasties that lurk beneath it, like poor wretched Hypatia, all those years ago.  (See my 'Ideological Lifeboats 1 and 2' and my 'Meditations on the Road to a Post-Modern Age' at http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1747034-Ideological-Lifeboats-1 , and http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1746755-Ideological-Lifeboats-2 , and http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1576546-Meditations-on--Postmodern...).