God Bless the Secular Fundamentalists

Did you know that we live in an age when the achievements of science and technology are under attack from religious extremism as never before? Then the Center for Enquiry (CFI) is for you. As CFI’s home page puts it:

Although modern world civilization is based upon the achievements of science and technology, until this time there has been no authoritative and credible voice defending the scientific outlook in examining religion, human values, and the borderlands of science.

Oh dear, writes Father Thomas Berg on NRO. Where do we start? The fact is that religion is not necessarily opposed to science and reason. Catholicism, for instance, is a 2000-year-old effort to develop a reasoned religion. And anyway, Berg writes,

it may come as a surprise to many secularists that their unquestioned faith in the possibility of an objective, “scientific” approach to life, cleansed of “religious ideology”, is itself an ideological hangover from the Enlightenment, one that has been long since de-legitimized by contemporary thinkers as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty.

Secularists miss the big point, and make the fundamental category error of conflating the “Is” and the “Ought.” Science can do wonders illuminating the “Is,” but it has little to tell us about the “Ought.” RMC Chappie F.S.C. Northrop has a whole book devoted to this problem. It is called The Complexity of Legal and Ethical Experience. He was a professor of law and philosophy at Yale who flourished in the mid-twentieth century.

We know, as well as we can know, that we live in an amazing universe, and we know how it works, especially in the realm close to our everyday lives. But the big question is: What does it all mean? And closely allied to that question is: How should we live?

The basic problem is that science cannot provide answers to these questions. To know the answers would be to know the destiny of the human race, to have reduced the universe to a deterministic problem. Hence religion; hence “belief systems.” Berg again:

If secularists want to have a meaningful voice in the public square — and not a preposterous one — then we invite them to be attentive students of history, and with intellectual honesty to recognize that Christianity in particular has a lengthy track record of contributing to the very goals that secularists profess to be seeking: beliefs grounded in reason, an ethics sustained by reasonable moral discourse, advances in human knowledge, and the general betterment of human life.

Of course, monstrous things have been done in the name of religion. But then monstrous things have been done in the name of science and reason.

The basic problem with the secularists is that they are utterly unreflective on the basic articles of their faith. (And yes, they do have a faith.) Their faith is so immediate and obvious to them that they aren’t even aware of their assumptions. They bandy about terms like “medical ethics” and “ethical foreign policy” as if these concepts were fully decided and that all reasonable people agreed upon them.

What do you call a faith like that? How about “secular fundamentalism?”