[lbo-talk] Barack Obama/Christianity

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Mon Nov 8 06:28:26 PST 2004



>From: Jon Johanning <jjohanning at igc.org>
>
>On Nov 7, 2004, at 4:17 PM, John Thornton wrote:
>
>>You simply cannot say belief in religion is for stupid people. Millions of
>>intelligent people are christian or muslim or whatever and a lot of
>>intellectually challenged folks are atheists. The reality is no body knows
>>why some people believe in religious things and others do not but
>>intelligence has next to nothing to do with it. I know it is tempting to
>>say that people who reject religion do so on the grounds of making an
>>intelligent decision to reject superstition but it just isn't that simple.
>
>It does seem paradoxical that people who are, one would suppose,
>intelligent enough to understand that there is no proof or body of evidence
>for the existence of God and other tenets of the monotheistic religions
>that hold water could still believe them. However, there are many reasons
>why people believe propositions besides their having sufficient proof or
>evidence. Or, as Pascal, another really smart Christian, wrote, "The heart
>has its reasons that reason is entirely unaware of."

In all fairness to the religious (and it pains me to be fair), this electoral revolt against rationalism tends to confirm a suspicion I've had for many years, that the Enlightenment has proved very unenlightening. In other words, people are reverting to a pre-scientific understanding of the world because science -- now the exclusion dominion of specialists -- fails to make the world intelligible to them.

I believe this was the argument raised in something I read many years ago in college, _The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers_ by historian Carl Becker (1873-1945). One web source sums up that book saying:

"Here Becker advanced the paradox that the philosophes who had undermined the traditional intellectual world in the name of science were themselves dominated by a nonscientific faith in a rational universal order (a secular version of the Heavenly City)." By this argument, today's high-tech world -- for all the material benefits it brings -- is as incomprehensible and terrifying to its denizens as the world of nature was to the cave people. In an eerie approximation of the Tower of Babel myth, even understanding *within* the scientific world seems to be breaking down because of the every more specialized nature of scientific advance. People crave personal understanding that science can't provide them, and they want some assurance that their existence as individuals really matters, something that science definitely can't offer.

If you let that toxic stew simmer for decades, it's really no wonder that holy rollers are running the country now. The electorate will be baying at the moon next.

Carl



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