De Novo

At the Guardian, Charlie Brooker reviews Richard Dawkins’ latest film, Enemies of Reason. As in his last film, The Root of All Evil, Dawkins takes apart straw men of all shapes and sizes, all of which personify a variety of human foolishness he lumps together as “superstition”. To his credit, Dawkins correctly perceives a threat to human progress, and he gets close to the root cause of this evil – but ultimately, blinded by outdated semantics, he misses his true target.

As we’ve all learned in our high-school history classes, over the last 600 years, Western society has advanced in great strides, made possible by the birth of rationality through the liberation of progressive minds from the shackles of orthodox correctness. This brought about the Renaissance – the first major revival of state-sponsored secular progress in the West since antiquity – and later, the Enlightenment, an embrace and codification of rationality and a renewed interest in studying mankind’s place in the universe as hitherto accepted notions of divine origins were discarded.

However, in our current time, we can observe the tendency to drag humanity back into the dark ages – to resist scientific ideas which disagree with an outdated worldview, and attack those value rationality over fealty to frozen, self-righteous dogma.

Apparently, those are our only choices.

Brooker attacks those who harbor fondness for “outmoded” worldviews:

“Spirituality” is what cretins have in place of imagination. If you’ve ever described yourself as “quite spiritual”, do civilisation a favour and punch yourself in the throat until you’re incapable of speaking aloud ever again. Why should your outmoded codswallop be treated with anything other than the contemptuous mockery it deserves?

Really? Does this image ring a bell?

Fundamentalist christianity is a child of the enlightenment, the ugly twin of reason.  And both sides get it wrong.

Prior to Gutenberg and widespread literacy, the Bible was largely a secret, an ancient tome in dead language read and digested by clergy, who fed it in soundbites to the masses.  As ugly as the Catholic church was in the Dark Ages, the cosmology and creation stories of the Bible were not read as literal truths, but rather as allegories, codifications of eternal recurring stories handed down from culture to culture, early Greek and Roman Christians working Mithras and Apollo into an appropriated Hebrew mythology, itself brought out of Egypt (hello, Moses?) and adapted through trials and competition with Sumerians and Phoenecians (aka Canaanites), worked in with the ancient proto-Indo-European archetypes which also found their way into Hinduism.  (Go read Joseph Campbell.)

The Church, for its part, was concerned with secular authority and denounced those who fought against that authority.  It had no particular stake in this or that creation story; what it feared most were the implications that its right to determine truth was being challenged.  Hence heresy, excommunication, burning at the stake.

After the Renaissance, empiricism made its debut, and faith responded by breaking away from organizational rigor: after Martin Luther, Christians began fighting amongst themselves, which took the heat off science and reason.

After the Enlightenment, science proceeded about its business of chipping away at the authority of religious institutions in the 18th and 19th centuries; after the Protestant reformation (and correspondingly, literacy) began to take hold, the individual was given a “personal relationship” with Christ.

Literacy taught naivety.  It gave theology over to the untrained, undisciplined layman.  The theology of Protestant churches (and, yes, for the most part, mosques and synagogues) had to compete with science for mindshare.  On all fronts, including the Creation story and the afterlife, it demands to be taken just as seriously as science, seeking to answer the same questions (where do we come from? where are we going?) with the exact certainty and specificity of scientific inquiry.  It starts with a different premise (that the Bible/Koran/Torah is the literal word of God), but uses the same means (or at least a mockery of those means) to analyze and dissect its subject.

Fundamentalism is essentially a reaction against science and modernism.  It is the equal and opposite force that resists change.

But Brooker and Dawkins and the “New Scientists” don’t realize what’s at fault here.  It’s not spirituality per se, it’s the very means developed by science that have brought about the fallacies of Modern America.  Look in the mirror to point your finger: the resoluteness of belief, at any time anywhere, is responsible.

Science and faith get along much better when we all acknowledge that nobody has the complete picture of truth.  We’re all seekers here, with two halves of the same picture.  Science, the extension of our senses, establishes what is known to be repeatable.  Faith translates the information of our senses into the language of our animal brain.  We’re made of both things and we need them both.

UPDATE:

Emily proposes that all Dawkins needs is a good peak experience.  So does John Horgan.