Ultra-Science and Infra-Religion

This is a revised and updated post from over seven years ago, but it serves as a useful commentary on the previous post:

Turns out that Darwin wasn't necessarily the vulgar Darwinian his disciples and detractors make him out to be. For example, Purcell quotes a letter from 1870 in which he frankly confessed that "I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance." Oopsie. No tenure for you!

To another author who had published a book in 1881 that "defended evolution and theism together," Darwin wrote that it "expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the universe is not the result of chance." Indeed, for Darwin, "the rationality and moral probity of God underlay the rationality and meaningfulness of science" (Gillespie, in Purcell).

Which only goes to show how fundamentalists and extremists in both camps -- ultra-Darwinists and infra-religionists -- get it wrong.

I attach the prefix "ultra" to the former because it conveys the idea that they over-interpret the theory, and push it beyond its rightful limits. And I apply the prefix "infra" to the latter, because in my opinion they fall short of the deeper meaning of religion by rigidly applying a manmade framework on God, just because God must speak in a certain way in order to make himself known to human beings.

Analogously, I must speak in a certain way in order to make myself understood by my seven year-old. But it would be an elementary, if understandable, error on his part to assume that I have the mind of a seven year-old who's just bigger than he is. While I don't patronize him, neither do I gratuitously toss in words and concepts he can't possibly understand.

In fact, both types -- the ultra and the infra -- make the error referenced in yesterday's post, of imposing an ideological grid on reality in order to make the mystery go away. Of all people, you'd think that postmodern folks would be aware of the irony of engaging in this futile enterprise. But it seems that one of the properties of ideology is to blind the ideologue to its presence. Or just say that some people have a hard time recognizing their first principles -- especially people without any.

One of the dangers of ideology is that it doesn't just operate like a static map one uses to navigate the world. Rather, it is much more like a mind parasite, in that it actively hijacks the thinking process and thereby restricts the scope of reality.

In his Tyranny of Clichés, Goldberg quotes Orwell's famous essay on Politics and the English Language, in which Orwell highlights "the special connection between politics and the debasement of language."

It's easy to see how parasitical clichés can "construct your sentences for you" and "even think your thoughts for you," while performing "the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself" (Orwell) A political cliché operates "like a pill with a pleasant protective coating" which "conceals a mind-altering substance within" (Goldberg).

Although that might sound like a cliché, it is critical to realize and understand that it is literally true. The human mind cannot function in the absence of an "operating system," of some way to organize reality and convert experience into ideas, the question being "which one?"

For example, I've mentioned in the past that when I first began studying psychoanalysis, it was liberating at first but eventually became restrictive and confining, because, once internalized, I couldn't help interpreting everything in terms of its principles. I lost my perspective, such that the tool started to displace the man. Come to think of it, that's how you become a tool, isn't it -- by seeing everything in terms of a theory or ideology?

This is what ideology does. You might say that it results in damage to, and sometimes annihilation of, the person. I hasten to add that the Christian operating system doesn't (or at least shouldn't) do this, because it is not an ideology, rather, a cure therefrom (a subject worthy of a separate series of posts).

Many important Aphorisms come to mind:

--Ideologies are fictitious nautical charts, but in the end they determine which reef one is shipwrecked upon.

--In order for a multitude of diverse terms to coexist, it is necessary to place them on different levels. A hierarchical ordering is the only one that neither expels nor suppresses them.

--The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

--The Christian who is disturbed by the “results” of science does not know what Christianity is or what science is.

Ultimately, The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality. Boom. It's fine and appropriate to argue over appearances, contingencies, and relativities, which is what science does. Just don't conflate its appearance with its source. Never forget that Truth is a person, or better, the Person, and all this implies.

To the extent that the Raccoon has an "ideology," it would have to be called "Mysterian," in that it holds the human mystery to be the axis around which it revolves. We can never eliminate the mystery, we can only hope to circumscribe it. And A fool is he who thinks that what he knows is without mystery.

The human mystery (or mystery of the human) does not, and cannot, stand alone. Rather, for reasons articulated in yesterday's post (and many previous ones), the "human substance" isn't just some featureless and isolated blob, but has certain distinct properties, the most important ones being relation and sanctity (or potential sanctification, i.e., theosis).

These essential properties are a consequence of our deiformity. By which I mean that the source of our dignity, our wisdom, our freedom, our greatness cannot be from within ourselves. If we do locate the source there, it doesn't turn us into gods, but rather, monsters -- like domesticated animals that revert to ferality in a generation or two. Or, like the secular left, which becomes more feral by the day.

de Lubac writes that "It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God."

Rather, "what is true is that, without God, he can ultimately only organize it against man." In other words, as we have discussed on many occasions, "exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism" (ibid.), because its very first principle rids the world of God in order to claim a greatness that only God can confer, and without whom we are hardly "everything," and not even nothing, really. At which point you can get away with anything.

As Schuon writes, "Respect for the human person must not open the door to a dictatorship of error and baseness, to the crushing of quality by quantity," or to over-valuation "of the crude fact at the expense of the truth."

We are immersed in a world of ceaseless change, so it is natural that we seek reliable landmarks and fixed lighthouses to navigate our journey. Ultimately these landmarks must concern origins (from where we set off); our present situation (where we are); and our course (to where we are going). Thus there are elements of both space and time, the latter of which being especially relevant to "where we are going," which naturally takes time to get there. For in the words of Kerouac, walking on water wasn't built in a day.

But ideologies tend to spatialize time, for the same reason they immanentize the transcendent. Schuon characterizes certain deviant neo-paganisms as "reactions of space against time." This can be seen in the reactionary left, which always.... Put it this way:

--If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

--“Human” is the adjective used to excuse any infamy.

--“To have faith in man” does not reach the level of blasphemy; it is just one more bit of nonsense.

--To believe in the redemption of man by man is more than an error; it is an idiocy.

Having said all this, it is nonetheless true that, from a certain perspective -- and largely in reaction to the errors and superstitions of the infra-religious -- "it must be admitted that the progressives are not entirely wrong in thinking that there is something in religion which no longer works," and that its "individualistic and sentimental argumentation... has lost almost all its power to pierce consciences."

This is because the "usual religious arguments" often don't probe "sufficiently to the depths of things," since past editions of man, unburdened by ultra-science, didn't really demand such explanations. The whole thing made sense intuitively, and there wasn't even really a framework in place to oppose it, or to understand it in any other way.

Which leads back to our mission and blog-hobby, which is to deploy arguments of a higher order to illuminate the lower, and to make religion once again relevant to the ultras and more efficacious or integral for the infras.