Death of God , death of man Jonathan McCormack

“the final triumph of the Hollow Men, who knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, had lost the ability to feel or think deeply about anything.”-Charles Taylor

The enlightenment project is dead. Secularism has imploded on itself. The same

arguments against religion can cut the other way demolishing atheistic presuppositions.

Indeed, it is now no means clear that reason, rationality, or morality can be intelligible

without grounding them in God’s existence. This essay will search out the

epistemological foundations and consequences of the secularization of the world.

First, it ought to be pointed out that the very ontology of modernity is violence.

We are coming out of an extended rule of Christian rule. Within Christian economy

reality was perceived as trinitarian - a harmony in difference displayed by the Father,

Son, and Holy Spirit. Violence was seen as an intrusion upon this basic peacefulness.

By contrast, the secular liberal narrative posits an original ontology of violence with

atomized individual wills all conflicting in the pursuit of private interest that can only be

controlled by an exercise of power. In his work John Milbank shows that difference in

todays culture came to be understood as harboring potential conflict instead of

harmonious unity. This led to what is sometimes referred to as the 'flattening' tendency of

modernity, ie the desire to eradicate difference in favor of homogeneity and uniformity.

Part of the reason for this occurs when people were rebelling against King and

Church, searching for a way to find authority for knowledge within ones self. Dr. James

M. Houston quickly sums up the philosophical progression:

Rene Descartes “I think therefore I am”, a radical shift to situate moral sources within ourselves... Instead of having an external referent as does Plato (in the Eternal Ideas) and Biblical faith (in the Creator), Descartes now builds upon human intelligence to construct reality from within one’s self, as the ‘thinker’. But he goes further, for likewise, morality comes from within the self, controlled by ‘reason’, to be used instrumentally.

This has led to modern man’s search for self vs search for God. This liberal

individualism continued, working its way into politics and culture. Dr Houstin continues :

“With John Locke (1632-1704), knowledge is not genuine unless you develop it

yourself.”

This marked a break with what Charles Taylor called the ‘representational view’ of

knowledge and reality:

The most important traditional view was Aristotle’s, according to which when we come to know something, the mind (nous) becomes one with the object of thought. Of course this is not to say that they become materially the same thing; rather, mind and object are informed by the same eidos. Here was a conception quite different from the representational model...he mind participates in the being of the known object, rather than simply depicting it. The seeker after science is not directed away from shifting and uncertain opinion toward the order of the unchanging, as with Plato, but rather within, to the contents of his own mind. Thee correct issue of science, that is, of certainty, can be posed. The confidence that underlies this whole operation is that certainty is something we can generate for ourselves, by ordering our thoughts correctly — according to clear and distinct connections.

All this reflects the underlying unconscious morality of the modern obsession with the

will of the individual. Freedom today is defined as being free to rely on ones own

judgment, to find ones own purpose in oneself .

This explains the illusions of disengagement and atomic individuality that are

constantly being generated by a civilization founded on mobility and instrumental reason.

Russell McNeil notes that

instrumental ‘logic’ obfuscates, obscures true meaning. It is really a kind of fuzzy logic designed to persuade through the magic of mathematics and statistics while ignoring, as often as not, the real human values instrumental reason circumvents in the exclusive pursuit of economic justifications.

This rise of deifying instrumental reason coincides with the Enlightenments focus on

dismantling a tradition of objective morality. One need only glance at Bauman’s work in

Modernity and the Holocaust wherein he studies this substitution of technical for moral

responsibility:

"When the modernist dream is embraced by an absolute power able to monopolize modern vehicles of rational action, and when that power attains freedom from effective social control, genocide follows."

This is not a coincidence. The goal of science is to emancipate reason from ethics.

Science being 'value free', was in no position to speak of the ethically considerations.

The enlightenment project had profound consequences for mankind's subjectivity. The

modern idea of the secular moves the loci of power to the human mind, the self. This

leads to a new, “buffered” conception of the self, one which leaves behind the

“vulnerability” inherent to the “porous” self (ie a self open to transcendence and objects

charged with significance). The modern buffered self attempts to distance itself from the

“meaning” of things. Previously, in Taylor’s reading of history, an individual would

likely have trouble distancing his internal “self” from his actions. In his Open World

System nonmaterial, supernatural aspects of reality regularly shaped his spiritual/

emotional condition. Echoing Heidegger Taylor calls how secular man experiences

reality, based on his secular presuppositions, a Closed World System.

Commenting on this Milbank says:

I think that Charles Taylor provides important clues by saying that the atheist self is the ‘buffered self’—no external spiritual forces can get to it—and also that it is a self entirely in charge of its own morality and self-disciplining. This self is definitely the self that is totally autonomous and so likes to reduce all to predictable calculation. Spiritual security and worldly freedom and comfort are preferred over the aristocratic heroism of a quest for meaning. Today in Great Britain the left is more or less now defining itself as scientistic which actually permits an underwriting of a new mode of fascism and ‘racism’ as said above.Atheism is bourgeois oppression. Atheism is the opium of the people—it claims to discover an ontology which precludes all hope. The very idea of social and political order without religion is bizarre by all traditional lights. The invention of secular order is an extraordinary achievement, if highly questionable – because instead of faith it requires rational foundations which one can’t really have. So practical atheism is more dogmatic than religion.

Taylor describes the buffered self:

The fears, anxieties, even terrors that belong to the porous self are behind it. This sense of self-possession, of a secure inner mental realm, is all the stronger, if in addition to disenchanting the world, we have also taken the anthropocentric turn, and no longer even draw on the power of God.

He describes modernity’s model of what people are: images of power, of untrammeled

agency, of spiritual self-possession (the "buffered self"). Taylor’s description of todays

secular mythologizing of history is instructive:

The increasing recourse to instrumental rationality allows us to get more and more of what we want, and we were only ever deterred from this by unfounded injunctions to limit ourselves. The modern conception of social order, starting with individuals, reinforces and is reinforced by the primacy of the ego in epistemology. an atomistic construal of society as constituted by, or ultimately to be explained in terms of, individual purposes.

This picture of society coincides with the view of DH Lawrence, whose writing on

sexuality are ironically co-opted by Liberal ideology:

.. . they want an outward system of nullity, which they call peace and goodwill, so that in their own souls they can be independent little gods, referred nowhere and to nothing, little mortal Absolutes, secure from question. That is at the back of all Liberalism, Fabianism and democracy. It stinks. It is the will of the louse.

The problem, as Roger Scruton points out, is that “In all its forms the social contract

enshrines a fundamental liberal principle, namely, that, deep down, our obligations are

self-created and self-imposed.”

In other words, there are no “real” moral obligations, or even real morals! It is just this

issue that Alsadair Macintrye confronts in his work ‘after Virtue.’ Teo-lohi summarizes

Macintrye’s ideas succinctly:

According to MacIntyre morality becomes nothing but the assertion of individual whims, and this is no morality at all. Moral language is still used, however, because fragments remain from earlier periods of history when morality did have a proper context. But we no longer use the language of morality to express moral claims at all, but merely our preferences.

Because the secularization of society has led to the rejection of a morality based on theology, and the enlightenment project failed in its attempt to provide a rational grounding for morality without reference to teleology, what we are left with are the fragments of the theological and teleological schemes, but these lack any proper context in the modern world. As we saw, people in modern liberal democracies still have moral debates about abortion or nuclear deterrence, but they lack any rational way of making sense of morality. The rival premises of moral debate derive from the fragments of the older scheme. But because of the rejection of theology and teleology, there is no overall framework for morality. For moral debate to make sense, a society must have a set of shared basic principles, but our societies lack them. The failure of the enlightenment project led to the triumph of emotivism in modern culture - and conversely, to the decline of morality.

The reason for this babel like confusion is largely explored in Macintyre’s next work,

Whose Justice? Which Rationality? He points out that there is no such thing as a “pure”

rationality apart from specific cultural conditions because different rationalities ultimately

rely upon presuppositions that cannot be verified evidentially or scientifically. Exploring

Macintyre’s theory Neil Levy concludes “there is no rationality outside of traditions, for

there is no way of giving reasons that does not presuppose a system of beliefs. The notion

of rationality as such is a myth.”

Andy Blunden notes “that the type of justice and the type of rationality which appears to

the philosophical spokespeople of the community to be necessary and universal, turns out

to be a description of the type of citizens of the community in question. Accordingly, the

justice of liberalism and the rationality of liberalism is simply that justice and that

rationality of the “citizens of nowhere” the “outsiders”, people lacking in any social

obligation or any reason for acting other than to satisfy their desires and to defend the

conditions under which they are able to continue satisfying their desires. Their rationality

is therefore that of the objects of their desire.”

MacIntyre charges that from an Aristotelian point of view modern people have refused

to learn or have been unable to learn that "one cannot think for oneself if one thinks

entirely by oneself," and that it is only by participation in rational practice-based

community that one becomes truly rational.

Look at our national debates. Take the abortion issue. Really, both sides have perfectly

rational opinions BUT they are using different rationalities and so talk past each other.

The pro-choice side talks about a woman's rights and points out that there is no proof of

any God or that an Embryo really has a right to life. The problem is that secularism itself

is an ideology and has its own presuppositions that cannot be rationally defended.

Secularism only pretends a neutral position. A rude Pro-lifer could simply point out that

the opposition believes in a “creator” that apparently told a few white slave owning

gentlemen some centuries ago that people had these things called “rights” but that no one

can see them or touch them and science can’t measure them but they really exist. In other

words either side holds differing basic premises both of which lacks a rational or

evidential basis. Hence political debates are based on heated emotionalism rather than

reason.

One need only recall Nietzsche's prediction of “Great Politics”:

It is easy also to understand why protest becomes a distinctive moral feature of the modern age and why indignation is a predominant modern emotion. . . . Protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone's rights in the name of someone else's utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because . . . protestors can never win an argument: the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because . . . the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors' premises. . . . Protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective.

Commenting on this passage Edward T. Oakes adds,

The obvious accuracy of this passage constitutes the clincher for MacIntyre's argument. But perhaps an even better argument for his view is the loneliness and anomie that comes from a “lifestyle” that condemns the virtues. Those who take the emotivist route pay a heavy price in stifling their human nature, leaving unfulfilled what is meant to be fulfilled. Consider not just the appalling record of the twentieth century; consider as well the sullenness of so many high school students today, the emptiness of their elders in college, the despair of the underclass, the desperate fun-seeking of the jet set, the divorce rate, the incidence of child abuse, and on and on.

Secular reason is inferior on two counts - 1) it cannot meet its own standards, it refutes

itself. Secular reason will state that all truth is relative - but that statement itself is an

absolute truth statement! It refutes itself. Secular reason will state that only scientific

evidence 'ought' to be believed. But that proposition itself lacks scientific evidence and so

by its own standard 'ought' not to be believed. Not to mention the word 'ought' which

implies a moral obligation. Secular reason states that religion 'ought' to stay out of the

public square, but then talks about "self-evident rights" given by our "Creator."

Think of how secularism has retarded science in the past 60 yrs. Look at the fine tuning

of the universe. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the

Big Bang’s low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 1010

(123). Penrose comments, “I cannot even recall seeing anything else in physics whose

accuracy is known to approach, even remotely, a figure like one part in 1010(123).”

Stephen Hawkings admits the Big Bang theory clearly points to God - since all time,

space, and matter came into existence at that point, it’s cause must be an uncaused,

changeless, timeless, and immaterial being which created the universe.

But then, to get around it, he posits that we are living in "imaginary time"! Which

means Abraham Lincoln could have been shot before he was born (Hawking's example)!

Or think of all the frantic work of quantum physicists who have posited another

metaphysical possibility - the multiverse, which has no proof. Philip Blond and Adrian

Pabst, point out:

The trouble is that this supposition sounds more bizarre than religion. Moreover, to posit this paradigm leads to the Matrix hypothesis that we are actually only a virtual simulation run by other universes more powerful and real. So religion finds itself in the strange position of defending the real world against those who would make us merely virtual phenomena.

Don't forget the brilliant Nurophilosoper Paul Churchland who states, as a confirmed

materialist, that we have explored the brain and science can find no such thing as an "I"

or any things called "thoughts" and so everyday mental concepts such as beliefs, feelings,

and desires are simply unscientific superstitions. Secular reason would have us jettison all

the things which make us human, which make us love one another, things which we are

intimately aware of as essential aspects of ourselves. Indeed materialist cannot even

'believe' in beliefs!

Philosophers such as Germain Grisez, Joseph M. Boyle, Jr., and Olaf Tollefsen have

shown in painstaking rigorous fashion that any denial of free choice is rationally

untenable, because it is a self-referentially contradictory claim, a self-defeating

proposition. Do I have to go on to show how secularism ends in nihilistic incoherence?

Think of Hume’s famous statement:

Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? And on whom have I any influence? I am confronted with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty.

Hume was reduced to this state, according to MacIntyre, because “he has set a standard

for the foundation of his beliefs which could not be met.” Ultimately, this led him to

radical skepticism, which in turn led him to a point in which he loses “any means

of making himself—or others—intelligible to himself, let alone to others. His very

skepticism itself becomes unintelligible.”

2) Secular reason allows for no real objective morality and so ends in nihilism.

Dr. William Lane Craig makes this point dramatically:

“Only if God exists can a person consistently support women's rights. For if God does not exist, then natural selection dictates that the male of the species is the dominant and aggressive one. Women would no more have rights than a female goat or chicken have rights. In nature whatever is, is right. But who can live with such a view? Take the biological determinism of a man like Francis Crick. The logical conclusion is that man is like any other laboratory specimen. The world was horrified when it learned that at camps like Dachau the Nazis had used prisoners for medical experiments on living humans. But why not? If God does not exist, there can be no objection to using people as human guinea pigs. The end of this view is population control in which the weak and unwanted are killed off to make room for the strong. But the only way we can consistently protest this view is if God exists.”

Robert P. George is the Cyrus Hall McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton

University notes :

Alasdair MacIntyre observes that traditions of thought about morality go into crisis when they generate questions they lack the resources to answer. By this standard, orthodox secularism is a tradition in crisis. It generates the question, Why should I respect the rights of others? Yet it possesses no resources for answering it.

Worse than mere arrogance and ignorance secularism leads inexorably to rationally

justified horrors. Wendell Berry explains :

"If we lack the cultural means to keep incomplete knowledge from becoming the basis of arrogant and dangerous behavior, then the intellectual disciplines themselves become

dangerous. What is the point of the further study of nature if that leads to the further destruction of nature? To study the "purpose" of the organ within the organism or of the organism within the ecosystem is still reductive if we do so with the assumption that we will or can finally figure it out. This simply captures the world as the subject of present or future "understanding" which will become the basis of further industrial and commercial optimism, which will become the basis of further exploitation and destruction of communities, ecosystems, and local cultures.I am not of course proposing an end to science and other intellectual disciplines, but rather a change of standards and goals.”

Goals are important. “The hard work of morality,” MacIntyre insists, “consists in the

transformation of desires, so that we aim at the good and respect the precepts of the

natural law.”

His solution is a kind of Aristotelian (non-biological) teology where society is ordered

towards the Good whereas secular science today, inn the terms of Aristotle's fourfold

scheme of causality, studies solely the efficient and material causes while leaving the

questions of formal and final causes unaddressed.

The consequences of this “enlightened” rationality is all to obvious. David Bentley

Hart writes:

"We live now in the wake of the most monstrously violent century in human history, during which the secular order (on both the political right and the political left), freed from the authority of religion, showed itself willing to kill on an unprecedented scale and with an ease of conscience worse than merely depraved. If ever an age deserved to be thought an age of darkness, it is surely ours."

We must turn to our religious and other traditions to supply us with the ethical

resources to resist the secular tradition’s disastrous project of measuring the world by the

individual’s wishes. Even so it is astounding the dogmatic faith many of the new secular

atheists have in progress and the naive promises the religion-free secular rational society.

Atheist Steven Pinker, for example, believes that "In the scale of decades, comprehensive

data again paint a shockingly happy picture. Some of the evidence has been under our

nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been

getting kinder and gentler." I end this essay with chart made in response to Pinker by the

secular mathematics professor David Berlinski.

A Shockingly Happy Picture by Excess Deaths

• First World War(1914-18): …..........................................15 million • Russian Civil War(1917-22) ..........................................9 million • Soviet Union,Stalin's Regime(1924-53) ..........................20 million • Second World War(1937-45) ……...................................55 million • Chinese Civil War(1945-49) ……..................................2.5 million • People's Republic of China,(1949-75) ..........................40 million • Tibet(1950 et seq.) ……....................................................600,000 • Congo Free State(1886-1908) ……..................................8 million • Mexico(1910-20) …….......................................................1 million • Turkish Massacres of Armenians(1915-23) …................1.5 million • China(1917-28) ……........................................................800,000 • China,Nationalist Era(1928-37) ……..............................3.1 million • Korean War(1950-53) ……............................. ............2.8 million • North Korea(1948 et seq.) ……........................................2 million • Rwanda and Burundi(1959-95) ……..............................1.35 million • Second Indochina War(1960-75) ……..............................3.5 million • Ethopia(1962-92) ……......................................................400,000 • Nigeria(1966-70) …….........................................................1 million • Bangladesh(1971) ……....................................................1.25 million • Cambodia,Khmer Rouge(1975-78) ……........................1.65 million • Mozambique(1975-92) ……................................................ 1 million • Afghanistan(1979-2001) …….............................................1.8 million • Iran Iraq War(1980-88) …….................................................1 million • Sudan(1983 et seq.) ……...................................................1.9 million

• Kinshasa,Congo(1998 et seq.) ……..................................3.8 million • Phillipines Insurgency(1899-1902) ……...........................220,000 • Brazil(1900 et seq.) ……...................................................500,000 • Amazonia(1900-1912) ……..............................................250,000 • Portuguese Colonies(1900-1925) ……...............................325,000 • French Colonies(1900-1940) …….......................................200,000 • Japanese War(1904-5) ……................................................130,000 • German East Africa(1905-7) ……........................................175,000 • Libya(1911-31) ……...........................................................125,000 • Balkan Wars(1912-13) ……...............................................140,000 • Greco-Turkish War(1919-22) …….........................................250,000 • Spanish Civil War(1936-39) ……..........................................365,000 • Franco Regime(1939-75) ……..............................................100,000 • Abyssinian Conquest(1935-41) …….....................................400,000 • Finnish War(1939-40) …….....................................................150,000 • Greek Civil War(1943-49) ……...............................................158,000 • Yugoslavia,Tito's Regime(1944-80) ……................................200,000 • First Indochina War(1945-54) …...........................................400,000 • Colombia(1946-58) …….........................................................200,000 • India(1947) ……....................................................................500,000 • Romania(1948-89) ……........................................................150,000 • Burma/Myanmar(1948 et seq.) ……......................................130,000 • Algeria(1954-62) ……............................................................537,000 • Sudan(1955-72) ……..............................................................500,000 • Guatemala(1960-96) …….......................................................200,000 • Indonesia(1965-66) …….......................................................400,000 • Ugandi, Idi Amin's Regime(1972-79) ...…..............................300,000 • Vietnam, postwar Communist Regime(1975 et seq.) ............430,000 • Angola(1975-2002) ……........................................................550,000 • East Timor, conquest by Indonesia(1975-99) …….................200,000 • Lebanon(1975-90) …….........................................................150,000 • Cambodian Civil War(1978-91) …….....................................225,000 • Iraq, Saddam Hussein(1979-2003) …….................................300,000 • Uganda(1979-86) ……..........................................................300,000 • Kurdistan(1980's,1990's) ……................................................300,000 • Liberia(1989-97) ……..............................................................150,000 • Iraq(1990- ) …….....................................................................350,000 • Bosnia and Herzegovina(1992-95) …….................................175,000 • Somalia(1991 et seq.) ……..................................................400,000