philosophy
religion

Is Secularism the Root of Society’s Ills?

Physicist, Author
Philosophy, University of St. Andrews
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Lawrence Krauss

Physicist, Author

February 23rd, 2020
Some historians have proposed that Newton’s development of his Universal Law of Gravity over 300 years ago led at least indirectly to the ending of the practice of burning witches in Europe. The idea is as follows: If the motion of the planets around the Sun could be explained by the same laws that govern the motion of cannonballs on earth, then perhaps the entire cosmos was not so inexplicable. Perhaps all natural effects could be explained by natural causes. Bad weather or a drought might not be due to some magical spell cast by a witch, but rather to the dynamics of the atmosphere, in turn governed by laws derived by Newton, and before him, Galileo.
I mention this example because the rise of secularism—which I will take as the effort to separate religion from affairs of state, including state education—has as its basis the claim, now validated by over 400 years of scientific progress, that there is no need for supernatural postulates in order to understand both the workings of the Universe and the affairs of humankind. This in turn implies that we should base our predictions, our behavior, and our laws, not on our intuitions about some divine purpose or dictate, but rather on continuously tested rational deductions based on observational evidence about the world around us. In this sense, the progress of science does not require disbelief in the divine, it just makes such disbelief possible because it has made God irrelevant to our understanding of the world, including our understanding of ourselves. The Newtonian example, if correct, provides early support for a fact validated over the intervening three centuries: Secularism, a product of the enlightenment, has not been at the root of society’s ills, but is rather a major tool to help overcome them. Early Western laws did derive from Judeo-Christian orthodoxy. But so did science. But science, importantly, outgrew religion. So too has common law. Laws survive because they survive the test of rationality and experience, not because of their reliance on the divine. The US Declaration of Independence, strongly influenced by Thomas Paine, may pay lip-service to a Creator, but does not use divine revelation to justify itself but rather the statement: “We take these truths to be self-evident…” In order to accept the premise proposed for this online debate one would need to argue that somehow the ‘loss’ of religious faith in guiding society leads to bad behavior. There is statistical historical counter-evidence but even without harping on the numerous examples which led Christopher Hitchens to famously claim ‘religion poisons everything,’ the term ‘loss of faith’ is itself misleading. Loss of faith suggests something is lost when one is liberated from the shackles of myth and superstition. Most often, however, it is quite the opposite. Without religious dogma as a guide for action, the search for rational explanations about the world and rational justifications for action emboldens the mind. Life itself can become more precious, and an understanding of the consequences of one’s actions more immediate. Similarly, secularism does not imply a loss of awe or wonder about the cosmos. Rather the wonders of nature that have been revealed by science surely far exceed any claims about the universe made by the early prophets. And many find ‘spirituality’ in the images from the Hubble Space Telescope. But that sense of connectedness to something far greater than themselves relates to reality, not myth, dogma, or superstition. Hume may have been correct that you cannot get ‘ought’ from ‘is’, but rational introspection guided by empirical evidence can take you almost all the way there. Reliance on iron-age or earlier societal versions of morality on the other hand lead to prescriptions for action that enlightened humans, aware of the wonders of nature that have been discovered in the intervening centuries, reasonably find intolerable. My friend Noam Chomsky has said to me that he doesn’t care what people believe, it is what they do that matters. But the problem is that actions often stem from beliefs, and when those beliefs do not conform to empirical reality, the consequences can often be harmful. How can it be a bad thing for a worldview to argue (a) that our experience of reality, not myth or superstition, should form the basis of our actions and laws, (b) that we need to accept the world for what it is and not what we wish it were, and finally (c) that we need to encourage constant questioning, about oneself and one’s actions, and accepts that as we learn new things about the world our opinion of what is right can and will change?
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