Chapter 3            Where Moral Emptiness Leads

                      

       

           World War I, young German soldier (credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

By the early twentieth century, the impacts of the ideas of Darwin and Freud, and of Science generally, had arrived. Social scientists and philosophers were left scrambling to understand what new moral code, if any, was implied by this new way of seeing the world. “What is Science telling us about what’s right?” people asked. Answers on every side were contradictory and confusing. Then, following too soon, in a bitter, perhaps inevitable irony, real-world events broke out of control. In 1914, World War I arrived; it became the major test of the moral systems of the vigorous, new Science-driven societies of the West.

                                    

                               

                                  

                    World War I recruitment poster (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

When World War I began, in the cities and towns of Europe and of all the other countries attached to the main belligerents, banners flew, troops marched, bands played, and crowds of men, women, and children all shouted for joy. A few sober people raised objections for one set of reasons or another, but they were drowned out in the din. In every nation involved, people fell easily into viewing the human race as being made up of "us" and "them", as people tend to do in wartime, and people easily began to say, even in ordinary conversation, that the “decent armies and ideals of our way of life are finally going to sweep aside the barbaric armies and ideals of our nation’s enemies”.

Exhorted in speeches by their leaders and by writers in the media to stand up for their homelands, the men of Germany, Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Russia, France, Britain, and Italy, along with all their allies, absorbed the jingoistic stories being told in their theaters and newspapers. Men signed up to fight. Competing “narratives” about Europe and its history had brought European nations into head-on confrontation. "They" had their view of how the future should go. "We" had a different one. Scientists said, "You're both right.", or more often, "Don't look at us. We don’t get involved in debates about moral rightness." The only way left to resolve the dispute was to fight it out.

                         

                           

                     Anti-German propaganda poster (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

My country, Canada, was part of the British Empire in 1914, and Canadians were just as eager as any of the loyal subjects in London, England. Young men leaped out of the crowds lining the streets to march in step with the parades of soldiers going by. Many of them were worried that by the time they got through their training and over to Europe, the fighting would be done. Girls clustered around men in uniform who came back to visit their workplaces or colleges or even high schools before shipping out. Old ladies out shopping, by 1916, would spit on any young man of military age who was not in uniform.

Long before the horrible casualties began to mount, World War I was huge in the views of the historians even from its very beginning because, for the first time in history, modern scientific weapons and technologies were going to be used to kill men in assembly-line style. The process was going to be made as efficient as the new factories. Scientifically-tested technologies, arranged in efficient sequences, supervised by experts, would be set up to kill human beings. (“To end the war”, the leaders said.) Now we would see what Science could do.

We saw.

Consider just one telling statistic: the British Army casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme were 60,000 – 20,000 of whom were killed. Actually, in about five hours. France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, the U.S., and all other countries involved eventually suffered similar losses, for four long years.

In the end, nine million combatants were dead, with three times that many permanently scarred. And those were just the combatants. How many civilians? No one really knows. Every country on Earth was touched, or we should say wrenched, either directly or indirectly. Over six hundred thousand Canadians (from a population of eight million) enlisted in the armed forces, and out of the four hundred twenty thousand who actually got into the fighting in Europe, over sixty-five thousand died.

Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to WWI had discussed in total seriousness the very likely possibility that the new modern weapons would be useless because men would simply refuse to use them on other men. Modern torpedoes, flame throwers, machine guns, poison gas, airplanes – and the horrors they’d cause! No. No one would really use them.

   
   

                         Early 20th-century French postcard depicting the year 2000

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Other writers a few years before, more hopeful about how Science would affect society, had even been speaking of a coming Golden Age. Science wasn’t just showing us how to build horrible weapons. It was also curing diseases, creating labour-saving machines, improving agriculture, and even inventing new forms of entertainment. Progress was steadily reaching into the lives of even the humblest citizens. Surely, goodness and mercy would follow close behind.

The First World War shattered the optimism of the Golden Age prophets, but it also shattered much more deeply the confidence of the nations of the West, which had begun to believe that they had found the answers to life’s riddles. Pre-WWI, people in the West had come to believe that their wise men were in control: the ways of the West, with Science to lead them, were taking over the world, and thus the sufferings of the past would be gradually reduced until they became only dim memories recorded in books.

There had been wars and famines and depressions before, but the traditional ideas of God and of right and wrong, based on the Bible, had retained the loyalties of people in the West because: first, the damage had been minor compared to that caused by WWI; second, the ways of the West had, for the most part, seemed to work; and third, there hadn’t been a serious alternative set of beliefs to consider.

But now, with the rise of Science, all was changing. As we gained physical power, our ideas about how to handle all that power began to seem increasingly inadequate. Then, in the horrors of WWI, the moral systems of the Western societies seemed not just to fail but to unravel; people’s worst fears came true. The “guys at the top” were fools. Science was a monster, and it was on the loose.

Science was providing new communications technologies that were giving the xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in Western societies more power to mold people’s minds. It was also arming these forces and leaders with ever bigger and more terrible weapons – while the moral philosophers and social scientists dithered about what “right” was and what we “should” be doing. The outcome had a feeling of inevitability to it. An arms race became normal. Bigger warships, cannons. Weapons ever more effective. Poison gas. Flame throwers. The odds of the war starting kept rising. Sooner or later, it had to happen.

   

  

    Standard German soldier’s belt buckle (WWI (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Descartes’ method, using Christian morals to control scientific technologies, wasn’t working. Not only were Christians doing unthinkable horrors, they were doing those horrors mostly to one another. Worst of all, in every one of the warring nations, these acts were being done expressly in the name of their God. Gott mit uns was embossed on nearly every German soldier’s belt buckle. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was sung at church services in nearly every English-speaking country in the world.

In the meantime, by the end of the fighting, the political, religious, and business leaders in every sector of society appeared to be out of answers. Most of the victors continued to spout the platitudes that had got their nations into the horror to begin with. To thoughtful observers, Western moral systems looked bankrupt. Paralyzing doubt began to haunt people in every level of society, from the rich and powerful to the middle classes to the poor.

If the morals of the West had led to this, people could not help but think, maybe Science was right about the Bible. Maybe the moral beliefs that it recommended had all been a fraud. Maybe there were no moral rules at all. Disputes must always be settled by violence. Darwin’s model of the living world had portrayed “nature red in tooth and claw.” It seemed to be the final word. Survival of the fittest: wolves kill deer, spiders kill flies, big fish kill little fish. This seemed to be the only credible model left. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. 

For millions, the old moral code was done. Obsolete. It didn't work. It had led the world to "this". The only viable alternative people had to look to – Science – flatly refused to say anything about what right and wrong were. 

Before the scientific revolution began to erode God out of the thinking of the citizens in the West, even if people hadn’t been able to grasp why bad things sometimes happened in the world or why bad people sometimes got ahead in spite of, and even because of, the suffering they inflicted on others, people could still believe God had reasons and the code of right and wrong still held. God was watching. Matters would be sorted out in time. The liars, thieves, bullies, and killers would get their just deserts in time. We just had to be patient and have faith. The people, in large majority, believed the authorities’ official spiel.

But World War I was just too big. With the scale of the destruction, the pathetic reasons given to justify it, and the amorality of Science gnawing at their belief systems, people began to suspect and fear that, just as Science had said, there was no God, the Bible was a set of myths, their leaders were a bunch of deluded incompetents, and the old moral system was a sham. And then, things got worse.

   

        British bulldozer burying bodies at Belsen (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

                               

   

   

      British soldiers forcing German concentration camp guards to load bodies

                                                    (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Following the First World War, to exacerbate the moral confusion and despair, the man-made horrors of the twentieth century began to mount. They are many and ugly. The Russian Revolution and Civil War. Many other smaller wars. The worldwide Depression. World War II, six times as destructive as World War I. Hitler’s camps. Stalin’s camps. But we don’t need to describe any more. The point is that these were the actions of a species that, by its science, had gained great physical power at the same time as it lost its moral compass.

The big question, “What’s right?” keeps echoing, and the big fears that go with it keep growing. Where will the code that we need to guide our behavior in business, international affairs, or even everyday life come from now?

Of course, there are the cynics, the ones who say that they don’t know or care whether we ever find a way to set up universal standards of right and wrong. They see the pursuit of a universal moral code as a futile waste of time.

But whether they focus on daily human lives or on History’s big trends, or their focus is somewhere in between those limits, I tell these cynics, “If you really thought that way, we wouldn’t be having this debate. You wouldn’t be here.”

                       

                                           

                              Albert Camus, French philosopher (1913–1960)                           

                                                 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

As Albert Camus sees it, suicide is the sincerest of all acts.¹ Its only equal in sincerity is the living of a genuine life. A genuine person stays on in this world by conscious choice, not by inertia. A genuine person has created a vision of the world and how she/he can live with purpose and meaning in it, and so is still here because she chooses to be, even when, especially when, she knows the life she will live will be full of hardship. The sincere have guts. 

Insincere people may claim to be alienated from this world and the other people in it, but that simply can’t be the case if they are still alive and talking. These people are only partitioning up their minds, for the time being, into manageable compartments of cynicism. But the disillusionment they feel now – on any matter, personal to global – is going to seem minor compared with that which they will one day feel for themselves, one day when their mental partitions begin to give way. And it doesn’t have to be that way, as we shall see.

So, to sum up our case so far, what have we shown?

First, that Science has severely eroded the old beliefs in God and, thus, the old moral codes. And it continues to do so.

Second, that Science has refused, and continues to refuse, to take responsibility for the gap it has made. It has insisted adamantly for decades that it has nothing to tell us about which of our actions are right or wrong.

But, thirdly, due to our ongoing need just to manage our lives and, more importantly, the power Science has put into our hands, we must replace the moral code we no longer believe in with one we do believe in. Perhaps then we will have a chance to get past our present peril.

In short, Science’s refusal to tell us anything about what our moral code ought to say is not good enough. Period. We have to find a code of behavior that will give us a way of life, one that makes “right” consistent with “real”.

If we can work out a moral code that we truly believe in, because we see solid reasons and objective, replicable evidence that show it is congruent with reality, will it lead us on to belief in a Supreme Being? Or, in short, can a case based in Science lead us to a new code of decency that then leads us on to belief in God?

That question I will set aside for now. Let’s aim first to find a moral code that’s based in physical reality. A scientifically sound model of what “right” is.

As promised, I will deal with the Supreme Being question in the last chapters of this book. But for now, let us try to confront and quell “the worst” among us.

And in us.

Notes

1. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien 

    (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 11.

Chapter 2 – The Moral Emptiness Of Science

                           

                     

                              William Butler Yeats (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

—from “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats, 1919

When our idea of God began to erode, so did our ideas of right and wrong, and when those ideas began to erode, we became the society that Yeats described in his great poem “The Second Coming”. We live in a time in which some of the most immoral of citizens are filled with “passionate intensity”: fraudsters claim they are daring entrepreneurs; Mafia thugs claim that they are just soldiers in one more kind of war; warmonger generals tout their own indispensability. In short, these people see themselves as moral, even heroic, beings.

In the meantime, some of what should be society’s most moral citizens “lack all conviction.” For example, it would seem logical that people looking for moral direction in the Science-driven countries of the West would turn to their gurus, i.e. scientists. Especially those who study human societies and the moral beliefs they run by. In the West, these experts are our anthropologists and sociologists. Trained to make astute, Science-based judgments about human societies and their “ways of life”, social scientists should be our most morally gifted citizens.

But social scientists in the West have no moral directions to offer their fellow citizens. In their writings, they flatly deny that moral values refer to anything real at all. American anthropologist Ruth Benedict put it succinctly: “Morality differs in every society and is a convenient term for socially approved habits.”¹ Thus, as moral guides, Science and scientists – social scientists, in particular – appear to be pretty close to useless.

How can this be? How can highly intelligent people who set as their life purpose a full comprehension of why humans in groups behave in the ways that they do – and who engage in years of study and research intended to bring them to that goal – how can they then tell us that the moral codes all people learn as children, and consult to guide their behavior, their choices, and actions every day, are all hollow, devoid of content? This picture defies sense. If social scientists aren’t working to understand why groups of humans act as they do, what are they doing? If humans’ stated moral codes are unrelated to their actions, even though they say those codes are what guide their actions, then why do all those people – observed and observers – talk about their moral sentiments at all? Is it all verbal “grooming behavior” that does nothing but fill idle time?  

But in response to questions about what moral codes are, and how they relate to humans’ real actions, most social scientists, as noted above, say their studies have led them to conclude that moral codes have no grounding in the real world. Moral claims are just expressions of tastes, like a preference for one brand of perfume or flavor of ice cream over its competitors. Statements about “right” and “wrong” are just ways of venting emotion. “Right” and “wrong” are empty concepts, unrelated to any empirical facts. These experts then challenge their opponents to prove otherwise. 

Many even go over to the offence and ask what it is that all Science is seeking. Are scientists seeking truth about reality? That, by pure Logic, is unattainable. But, if not truth, sociologists ask, then what is Science seeking? The answers to these questions are parts of a fight going on in universities worldwide right now.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is arguably the most influential work on this topic. In it, he casts a dark shadow over Science’s view of itself. He argues that in reality all branches of Science move forward via processes that are not rational. The scientific method is driven by intuition, not logic. Science does not progress by a steady march of improving knowledge; it moves from less useful pictures of reality to more useful ones by unpredictable leaps that he calls paradigm shifts. 

A paradigm shift occurs in a branch of Science when many individuals in that branch, separately, each have a moment of insight and then experience a leap of understanding so profound that it makes them literally see reality in a new way. But they cannot tell you after their cognitive leap has occurred how it came to pass, and they then came to grasp this new picture of the world.

Scientists who grasp a paradigm shift do indeed come to “see” the world in a totally new way because their minds then have been reprogrammed to see different patterns in the details around them. That’s how profoundly the new model, once they learn it, affects them. Each scientist who “gets it” experiences a kind of “conversion” that steers her/him into a community of fellow believers.

In all branches of Science, Kuhn claims, old ways of thinking are dropped, and new models become accepted ones via this process that appears to be driven at least as much by non-rational mental processes as by rational steps like theorize, test, and repeat. Clearly, the modes of thinking that enable Science to evolve run deeper than reasoning and evidence can explain. Kuhn gives many examples from the History of Science to support his case. His work has evoked many responses, pro and con, but there is no doubt that he has shone a troubling light on the reliability of all of Science.² In short, Science is not done scientifically.

In the meantime, counterattacks aimed back at the social sciences are made by critics like philosopher John Searle. He admires the physical sciences because, he claims, they can be logically rigorous. Physical sciences describe their theories and the studies designed to test them using unambiguous terms. (One calorie heats one gram of water one Celsius degree.) But the social sciences use models that are too vague to support rigorous reasoning. (In Anthropology, what makes a “big man”?) Thus, conclusions reached in social science are not reliable.³ (Critics of social science are well countered in Harold Kincaid’s Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences.⁴)

   

        Clash of cultures: skulls of buffalo shot by U.S. government hunters, 1880’s   

                                 (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In response to the criticisms of the “unscientificness” of their discipline, some social scientists have tried hard to be more rigorous in their work. However, many have admitted Searle is at least partly right. For example, studies done in Anthropology are usually difficult to replicate for a whole array of reasons. Thus, careful checking and re-testing theories in social science is not possible.  

Here let’s recall that, in order to qualify as “scientific”, a model or theory must be testable in the real world, and the tests must be replicable. If the tests can’t be replicated, the theory is not Science. Tell me how you test your theory. Then, I can check it by doing those tests myself. Easy to do in Physics and Chemistry where materials and pieces of apparatus are standardized. All but impossible in Sociology and Anthropology.

Many factors other than its vague terms make social science’s studies hard to replicate.

First, background conditions of studies in social science often can’t be reset. Socially relevant facts keep changing. For example, how could a tribe return to living as fishers if the species they once caught off their coasts are gone?

In social science, we also accept implicitly that, even when conditions in the world can be “reset”, that no custom should ever be forced on a tribe. For example, trying to get a tribe to go back to living naked once they have chosen to wear clothes would be unethical. Tribes in the Amazon, once they join a society where clothes are worn, don’t want to live naked anymore. Cultural anthropologists would not try to make these people go back to living naked, as they had been living just a few years before. The anthropologists’ own moral code tells them that trying to “guide” changes in a tribe’s way of life to aid research – or for any other purpose – is wrong. Social scientists are ethically bound to observe societies as they live, but never to interfere in their changes.    

In addition, a researcher’s own biases influence what she looks for and how she sees it. These biases are impossible to avoid, no matter how carefully the studies are designed. People of the Amazon see trails of peccary or cayman in crushed grasses. But Western anthropologists see details they have been programmed to notice (e.g. flowers, insects). An anthropologist living with an Amazon tribe needs years of training before she can learn to track peccaries.  

  

Finally, a social scientist’s watching a tribe of people also changes what is being watched, namely the morés of those people. For example, an anthropologist in the field usually can’t work without shoes. Often in only weeks, the folk she’s living with and studying, if they have been living barefoot, start to want shoes.  

For all of these reasons then, social scientists admit they often must settle for what is really a single occurrence of the social phenomenon they wish to study. One that can’t be replicated. But no generalizations can be drawn from a single, unrepeatable instance of anything. That’s a direct contradiction of what the word “generalize” means.

These difficulties with social science research put us in a logical quandary.

Societies vary widely in their beliefs and morés, and those morés keep changing even while scientists are studying them. There are many human tribes to study, and each contains many customs that are changing all the time. Social scientists will never adequately document all the societies of the world as they are now.

Thus, we’ll never arrive at any useful conclusions in social science unless we can first propose larger, more generic theories of how human societies work.

In fact, social scientists see that kind of plan as being immoral from its outset because it amounts to Europeans imposing their ways on other cultures. In the meantime, critics of social science say such a grand theory can’t be formulated. They insist absolutely that social science is too vague, from its terms on up, to ever enable its practitioners to create a general theory of how societies work.

If such a theory ever were articulated, it would give direction and focus to all social science work. Under it, social scientists could propose and test specific hypotheses. But until social science has a comprehensive theory to guide its research, it will remain what Ernest Rutherford dismissively called “stamp collecting”: people recording data but making no attempt to explain them.

          

   

                                                Cooperation of cultures:

     soldiers of the 8 nations alliance during the Boxer Rebellion in China, 1900       

                                                (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

At this point, some social scientists’ respond to their critics with further, more aggressive counterattacks of their own. They argue that no science, not Physics itself, is “objective”. Culturally-slanted biases shape all human thinking – even the thinking of physicists. For example, over a century ago Western physicists postulated, and went looking for, what they called “atoms”, because early in Western history, a philosopher named “Democritus” had postulated the idea of that the world is made of atoms. Once instruments capable of reaching into very tiny levels of matter became available, Westerners had already available the concept that enabled them to imagine and set up experiments at that level. It had been planted there during the educations they acquired in their cultures. But Democritus did not derive the idea of the atom from observations of any “atoms”. The idea was purely a product of his speculative imagination.   

Thus, these social scientists argue that the overarching view called relativism is the only logical one to adopt when we study the body of social science research (or all research in all fields, for that matter). We can try to observe human societies and the belief systems they instill in their members (Western science being just one example of a belief system), but we can’t pretend to do the work objectively. We come to it with eyes already programmed to notice in the details around us the patterns we consider “significant”. We see as we do because of the beliefs we absorbed as children. Every scientist’s model of what the world is lies deeper than her/his ability to articulate thoughts or even just observe. Cultural biases can’t be suspended; they prefigure our ability to think at all.

The whole of reality is much more detailed and complex than the set of sights, sounds, etc. any one of us is paying attention to. Other folk from other cultures notice different details and construct their own pictures of reality, some of them radically different from ours, but still quite workable.

In short, any human view of the world, and especially any culture-wide model believed and used by any human society, is inherently biased. This is the stance taken by the most adamant of social scientists: even Physics is made of opinions.  

Some social scientists go so far as to claim there aren’t really any “facts” in any of our descriptions of past events or even of events happening around us. There are only various sets of details noticed by some of us; these are filtered by values and concepts we learned as children. Within each culture, people group these details to form a “narrative”. But as we go from culture to culture, we see that any one of these various narratives is as valid as any other.

So, at the level of large generalizations about what “right” and “wrong” are, social scientists not only have nothing to say, they insist that nothing objectively true can be said. “Science” is just a Euro-based set of theories that seem to work most of the time. For now. 

Scientists in the sciences other than the social ones continue to assert there is an empirical, material reality out there that is common for us all and Science is the most reliable way we have to understand that reality. But in all branches of Science, scientists admit that they can’t give a very good explanation or model of what “right” and “wrong” are – if such things can even be said to exist.

In a further rebuttal of relativism, however, scientists in the hard sciences and life sciences assert that the idea that Science can’t give us any reliable insights into how any parts of the world work is nonsense. Science works. Its successes have been so large and so many that no sane person can doubt that claim.

In this complex picture lies the dilemma of the West in modern times. Back and forth, these arguments called the Science Wars continue to rage. I’ve touched on a few of them, but there’s not enough space here to go into even five percent of the whole controversy.

So what’s the bottom line? The point of all the discussion so far in this chapter?

The point is that Yeats was right: the best really can lack all conviction. They can even reject the whole idea of anyone having any “moral convictions” ever. Thus, many social scientists can read about customs like honor killings and remark, “Well, that’s their culture.” In fact, for many thinkers today in the universities, all convictions are temporary and local. (A more sensible compromise position is taken by Harris in Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times.⁵)

This has been the scariest consequence of the rise of Science: moral confusion and indecision in first, our intellectual elites, then, the whole of Western society. This confusion began to become serious in the West in the nineteenth century, after Darwin and the granddaddy of all relativists, Nietzsche. But here we are in the twenty-first century, and the crisis of moral confidence is getting worse. No educated person in the West wants to say what “right” is anymore.

Now, all of this still may sound far removed from the lives of ordinary folk, but the truth is that relativism’s effect on ordinary people’s lives is crucial. When a society’s sages can’t guide its people, the people look elsewhere for moral leaders. When the wise respond to their fellow citizens’ queries about morality with jargon and equivocation, others – some very unwise – move in to fill the demand in the ideas marketplace.

So, now we must ask: how has this moral paralysis since Darwin and Freud affected ordinary folk? How has the eroding of our old moral codes affected real people’s lives? What consequences did people who lived in the morally emptiness of the last hundred years have to endure?

Notes

1. Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” Journal of General Psychology,          10 (1934). 

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/heathwood/pdf/benedict_relativism.pdf.

2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996).

3. John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard       University Press, 1984).

4. Harold Kincaid, Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

5. Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999).

  

Chapter 1     Science Gets the Blame

                          

                                       

                  Plato (l) and Aristotle (r). From Raphael’s The School of Athens 

                                           (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Science gets the blame – or the credit, depending on your point of view – for having eroded the base out from under the moral systems that our forbears lived by and depended on. For the most part, it fully deserves this blame. Prior to the scientific revolution, people were very miserable in terms of their physical lives. Life was hard for nearly all folk and death came soon. Famines, plagues, and wars regularly swept the land. Infant mortality rates are estimated to have been between 30 and 50 percent¹, and life expectancy was under forty years.²

But people knew where they stood in society, and they knew where they stood – or at least should be trying to stand – in moral terms, in their relationships with other people, from the bottom of society to the top. Kings had their duties, as did nobles, merchants, craftsmen, and serfs – and all their wives – and sins had consequences. God was in his heaven; he enforced his rules – harshly but fairly – even if humans couldn’t always see His logic and even if His justice sometimes took decades to arrive. People knew “what goes around comes around.” And if they were good, they knew they would go to a beautiful place after they died. For most folk, all was right with the world.

How sincere was their faith? Men worked for generations on cathedrals, on top of all the other labor they had to do. They believed they’d gain status in heaven if they served God here on Earth. And cathedrals were but one kind of example. Heroic toils on a local lord’s lands were performed generation after generation, and Crusades were fought in faraway lands by people who trusted the code of behavior and belief system that they’d been taught nigh on to absolutely.  

                      

                               

                                                   Francis Bacon (Vanderbank) 

                                                 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Then came the scientific revolution. It began from a new method for seeing and studying the world, one articulated most clearly by English Renaissance philosopher, Francis Bacon.

For centuries before the Renaissance, most people who studied the material world had followed the models of reality that had been laid down in the texts of the ancient Greeks, or even better, the Bible. In particular, works by Aristotle described how the natural world worked in almost every one of its aspects, from Ontology to Biology to Cosmology.

On most matters, the Greeks were seen as having merely described in more detail what had been created in the first place by God, as the Bible plainly showed. In most fields, original thought was not resented or despised. It was just absent. Thus, for over a thousand years, our forebears believed the classic Greek works and the Bible, taken together, contained every kind of wisdom (from ancient times to the Renaissance) that human beings could want to know. A gentleman’s life duty was to pass on to his sons, intact, the beliefs, morés, and values of his ancestors.

                           

                                        

                         Thomas Aquinas (Fra Bartolomeo) (Wikimedia Commons) 

Was there any risk that the ancient Greek texts and the Bible might contradict each other? No. Many experts, including Aquinas, had shown these two sources were compatible. Even if inconsistencies were found, of course, the divine authority of the Bible resolved them. For the folk of the West, for centuries, the Bible was the word of God, to be believed and obeyed implicitly. 

For over a thousand years in the West, in every field of human knowledge, if you wanted to learn about a subject, you consulted the authorities – your priest or the teachers who taught the wisdom of the sages of old. But for most folk, analyzing events in their own lives or analyzing things the authorities told them wasn’t so much worrying as inconceivable. Over 90 percent of the people were illiterate. They took on faith what their authorities told them. Everyone they knew always had. A mind capable of memorization and imitation was valued; a questioning, innovative one was not.

The Renaissance changed all that. Bacon came late in the Renaissance era, but he is usually given credit for articulating the new system of thinking that had been sweeping over Europe for more than a hundred years by the time he came on the scene.

Essentially, what Bacon said was that the authorities were just people. They were fallible. They should be questioned. He proposed people could learn about this world themselves, by watching real events closely and developing their own ideas about how things worked. Then – and here came the crucial step – they could devise ways to test their theories of reality and create increasingly better models that allowed them to conduct more and more reliable, real-world tests, until they could predict precisely, in advance, something like “If I do or see A and B, I know that C will result, within a reasonable time frame.”

This proposed change to the method of learning at first seemed a bit silly and very likely to be a complete waste of time. Why spend months or years carefully observing, thinking, and testing, only to discover that Aristotle or the Bible had been right all along? Most medieval scholars assumed that this was all that would happen. Their confidence in the Church authorities and the classics was near to absolute. Scholars might discuss how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (they really did argue over that one), but the major questions had already been given answers that were beyond debate.

Of course, “Science”, in the modern sense of the word, was not suddenly made possible by one writer’s describing how it should be done. In every era, for centuries, a few rare thinkers had already been using methods pretty much like those Bacon described. They just hadn’t been conscious of the steps in the method. But Bacon’s book on how the world should be studied gave scholars a new model to think about and discuss, one much more specific and real-world oriented than any of the earlier models had been.

      

   

                                  St. Peter's Basilica, scientific marvel of its time

                                 (credit: Patrick Landy, via Wikimedia Commons)

Whether Bacon started a revolution or merely articulated what was already taking place in the minds of the creative folk of his time is not important for my case. What matters is that the method Bacon articulated began to produce results. Navigation, architecture, agriculture, medicine, industry, warfare – even the routines of daily life began to undergo radical improvements because of the insights and inventions of Science.

At this point, as Science began to affect people’s material lives, inevitably, its ways began to affect their deeper thinking. For many people who were trying to hang on to a traditional faith, the changes to the old, generally accepted ways of thinking were not welcome. The same still holds true today.

                                   

                 

                                                               René Descartes 

                        (credit: Frans Hals [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

A younger contemporary of Bacon was the man many still see as the leading light of the Renaissance and its new way of thinking, a sickly French parochial-school boy who became a sickly man with a mind like a razor: René Descartes. He spent years manoeuvring to get a feel for what the religious leaders of his time would let him say, and only then did he publish his views on how thinking and learning about the material world should be done. (We need to keep in mind that Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake when Rene was 4 years old for spreading views that the Church did not like. Descartes knew all about Bruno’s case. He was understandably wary of offending the authorities of his time.) Descartes offered his readers a way of thinking about thinking that was more nuanced and sensitive to the authorities than was Bacon’s. But Bacon lived in Protestant England; he could afford to be more venturesome.

Descartes separated Science from Religion and, thus, from moral theory. Under his model, Science can advance our ways of dealing with the physical world, the world of the body, but Religion and its inherent morality must oversee the activities of our minds and souls, which were not in any way physical. For the people of his time, the affairs of souls were seen as being much more important than those of bodies or anything else made of matter. Under Descartes’s model, Religion retains control over our decisions about what we should be doing with our lives, including how we should be using the findings of Science.^3,4

Descartes’s clever maneuver enabled him, in his writing at least, to separate the mind from the body and the realm of faith and morality from the realm of physical experience. It was a move that somewhat ameliorated the religious authorities’ scrutiny of those who studied the physical world and how the things in it worked, but he only delayed the inevitable. Humans have concerns in both “realms”, the concrete/sensory and the abstract/moral, so sooner or later we must deal with the fact that the two realms must interact somehow in order for them both to involve, and matter to, us.

Describing all the ways in which Science gradually eroded or, sometimes, violently shattered, the traditional beliefs of the societies of the West would fill a whole encyclopedia. We can be content with looking at just three such ways. I chose these three because I believe they are the key ones, as did Freud.⁵

                      

                         Galileo Galilei (Tintoretto)  (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

First, the astronomers shook the traditional view of the heavens. In 1543, Copernicus proposed a new model of our universe. Instead of the earth being at the centre with the rest of the heavenly bodies like the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars revolving around it, he said the sun was at the centre of our solar system, and the earth was just one more planet – along with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – revolving around the sun. Supposedly, his idea was proposed only for discussion purposes, so he was not attacked by the religious leaders of his time. But in the 1600s, Galileo and, later, Newton took up and refined the Copernican model. They discovered a set of natural laws that described both events in the cosmos and on the earth in mathematical formulas that gave precise predictions about phenomena like falling objects, fired cannonballs, eclipses, comets, and planetary orbits – phenomena that had previously been given only inaccurate, conceptually messy, ad hoc explanations.

And all these scientific laws could be stated in mathematical formulas that could then be used to make very accurate predictions about how cannonballs, comets, falling objects and the moons of Jupiter move now and will move in the future. Their explanations and predictions about reality were literally amazing.

Today, Galileo and Newton’s picture of the solar system and how it works seems intuitive and obvious to most people. But Galileo was seen by religious leaders in his time as a demon. The Bible said God had made man as his special, darling creation. The Earth had been created, along with all its life forms, as a special home for us. Thus, the Earth had to be the centre of the universe. Ptolemy had said so, over a thousand years before, and his model of the cosmos fitted neatly with the doctrine of the Church. Besides, the sun, moon, and stars moved across the sky from east to west. These things would not be if the earth were not the cosmos’ centre. What fool could question these obvious truths?

Galileo did and almost paid with his life. He was forced to recant under the threat of horrible torture. Galileo had begun his higher education studying medicine. He knew what they could make him say once they began to apply their racks and thumbscrews. With his telescope to back him up, he tried hard to persuade the pope and his agents that the evidence showed the Copernican model was correct. They weren’t interested; in fact, they became angrier. So, he signed where they told him to sign. But according to one version of his story, as he left the building, he pointed up at the moon and said, “It still moves.”

That statement deeply reveals the kind of thinking on which Science is founded. It could stand as a statement of the fundamental belief of Science. Material reality is what it is. Our role is to learn about it by observing it, formulating theories about it, and doing experiments to test those theories. We can’t impose our views onto reality. If one of our theories goes against society’s received wisdom on any subject, this contradiction, for scientists, means nothing. What matters is whether the theory or model fits observable, real-world evidence.

Aristotle and the authors of the Bible and even last year’s scientific theories have no more of a monopoly on truth than any one of us. Most crucially, we can always go back to physical reality and test again. Let reality be the arbiter. That is the method and belief system to which scientists are committed. (The Catholic Church pardoned Galileo in 1992, nearly 360 years after his “offence.” The Copernican model of the solar system, the one that Galileo championed, has been generally accepted as the correct model since about 1700.)

Some scientists have also been deeply religious people whose scientific findings have clashed with their religious beliefs. The history of Science is filled with accounts of people who felt they had to drop their faith in the Bible, usually after much personal anguish, in order to continue to pursue Science. (Darwin suffered deeply over what his own Theory of Evolution meant about his faith.)

However, what these scientists internal torments mean to our argument today is nothing. These scientists’ anguish does not have any bearing on what Science considers to be knowledge; only the evidence does.

                                   

                             

                                                     Charles Darwin 

                (credit: George Richmond [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

In the mid-1800s, Charles Darwin hit the faithful and their institutions and beliefs with Science’s second blow to the body of traditional belief, probably the biggest of all the jolts. He gave an excellent scientific explanation for life itself. Life on earth, by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, had evolved from a few simple cells to complex organisms made of trillions of cells over the course of millions (or, he surmised, perhaps billions) of years.

Darwin had the theory, and he had the evidence to support it. The models of genetic variation and natural selection can explain all life forms on Earth in all their many subtle variations. Fossils in the rocks all over the world show the stages through which life has developed and spread. Chemical and physical tests give consistent, predictable results that clearly support Darwin’s theory. Life, in all its complex forms on this earth, developed very gradually, from a few simple cells, through myriad forms, over billions of years.

Where was the Bible then? The first book of the Bible, Genesis, portrays all the history of the pre-human universe as happening in six days. The Darwinian Theory of Evolution says this picture is silly. Furthermore, the theory implies that natural physical processes – ones that can be observed, measured, predicted, and even manipulated – can account for all the phenomena in reality, living and non-living. For scientists, the Bible is not needed in their discussion of what the universe is or what human beings are. The Bible, for Science, is pretty much irrelevant.

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was a shock of such magnitude that Christian authorities and most of the faithful who listen to them are still reeling from it and still lashing out at it. Scientists who believe the theory gives a true picture of reality find these attacks annoying. The evidence is there – mounds of it. What evidence is there for the alternate explanation? One old book, written by a bunch of delusional priests, prophets, and disciples with vested interests and sinecure jobs to protect, making claims about events they did not witness, events that can’t be replicated, examined, or tested. It just isn’t Science.

In fact, how can the “faithful” – who every day derive most of the comforts of their way of life from the ideas, discoveries, and inventions of scientists – be such ingrates? It’s a sure bet that however much they may want to criticize the broad range of studies and activities called “Science”, they don’t want to starve, and they don’t want their electricity turned off. They certainly don’t want to be eating tainted food, shivering in a hovel by a wood fire, watching their children die of mysterious “miasmas”.

In spite of all of these accusations, however, a main intention of this book is to show that the full description of both sides of this nasty quarrel is more complex than what the last couple of paragraphs portray. For now, this small section on the Theory of Evolution can be summarized by saying that Darwin’s theory, for most thinking people, floored the Bible for the count. He had found a theory that explained the greatest of the mysteries of our human experience, and he had assembled the evidence to back up that theory.

The Bible had been reduced, apparently, to a collection of myths and poems, with bits of the history of one ancient tribe (the Hebrews) woven in. Yahweh was like Zeus or Wotan: a story-book character created by a gang of theocrats who played on human fears in order to rule the masses.

                                        

                               

                                   Sigmund Freud (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

All of this may seem bad enough, but it gets worse. The third significant way in which Science eroded Religion came when Science began to understand the workings of the human brain. Humans had long felt that many things in this world could not be explained in scientific terms because they had long known that inside the privacy of their minds, which even ordinary experience had shown resided in their brains, they had dreams and feelings that, by logic alone, made no sense. Even in physical reality, away from all dreams, they sometimes saw or did strange things that seemed to have no logical explanation.

Cruel or lustful thoughts and acts were bad enough, but at least they seemed somewhat predictable, given humans’ “sinful” nature. From long experience, we’ve come to know our human drives, so we can accept intermittent thoughts of fornication, theft, violence, and murder as natural. The traditional wisdom had explanations for them all. We are morally “fallen” creatures, the Bible says.

But people also have weirder dreams and even see weird things when they’re awake that are, by the laws of both Science and common sense, not possible.

                                

   

                                  The Nightmare (Fuseli) (credit: Wikipedia)  

Why do people have dreams and waking visions of angels or demons hovering in the air, or of talking cats on mountaintops bathed in orange light and standing on their hind feet? Night after night, many of us dream not just cruel or lustful dreams, but also many more that are simply absurd. Other people, wide awake, see angels, demons, and miracles. For centuries, if a person saw or did something that afterward he himself could not make sense of, the widely accepted explanation was that God (or Satan) had caused the event or had made him do the deed. Much of normal human experience, apparently, lies beyond Science and even common sense. In those times, “The Devil made me do it” was an acceptable explanation for unexplainable behavior.

When Freud came along, his big contribution to human knowledge was simply the proposition that all these perceptions come from inside the brain of the person having the dream or vision. Thus, visions and miracles can be easily explained. They come from stored-up memories that combine and recombine to form narratives that are driven by deep, unconscious needs – needs that the visionary isn’t aware of because they are buried so deeply, she can’t consciously access them, no matter how she tries. Under stress, her brain transmits images into her optic nerves – the opposite of what usually happens. And so it is that even wide awake, we sometimes see what in physical reality is not there.

Most of our memories are not recallable at will, but they are all in there. Unless a person has had some brain-destroying injury or disease, her brain holds all she has ever experienced, all the sense data that have ever been fed into her brain via vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. How they will affect her moment-by-moment flow of consciousness can’t be predicted in advance, but the patterns in “paranormal” experiences coincide too often and too closely with the subject’s personal issues for us to believe that those experiences are somehow independent of the mental states that preceded them. 

People have visions of angels when they have been reading about miraculous cures for the very illnesses under which they have lately been suffering. They dream of tidal waves after watching a t.v. show about a recent big one in Japan. They see ghosts of their dead fathers after days of feeling guilty about how they neglected him while he was alive – the dream coming just before what would have been his 80th birthday. The sciences of the mind have shown us convincingly – with evidence – that we can literally see what we want to see.

While at first, Freud and his followers were considered to be sex-obsessed crackpots, they soon began to gain credibility and command respect, mainly because they were getting results. Their models could explain all of human behavior, they could make high probability predictions about how individuals with certain backgrounds would act in specific future situations, and they began to cure people of neuroses and psychoses that, in earlier times, would have been pronounced hopeless.

Then, as research on the human brain advanced, other researchers showed that the model portraying all of a person’s experiences as being stored in his brain – even though he can’t recall the experiences at will – is literally true. Patients willing to stay conscious during neurosurgery and allow researchers to place tiny electrodes on their brains are able, when milliamp currents are turned on, to recall all kinds of memories which they are ordinarily not aware of.⁶

Freud went much further with his psycho-sexual explanations of nearly all of the motives that drive human behaviour. Much of what he had to say has today been discredited; for example, we no longer believe little girls are consumed with a desire to have a penis. But the larger impact of his discoveries remains. Those parts of human experience that for so long had seemed to defy both logic and common sense can now be explained rationally. The dreams and visions are products of overactive human imaginations; they never actually took place.

No more dreams sent from God. No more visions. No more miracles.

If we consider just these three scientific theories – Galileo’s, Darwin’s, and Freud’s – what can we say have been their consequences? Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, for most people, removed the biblical God from their picture of the cosmos. They didn’t need him in their model. Darwin removed God as the creator of life. He even reduced humans to just one more kind of animal. And Freud made humans look like sick animals, easily deluded by their own lustful, aggressive, self-absorbed thoughts. (Palmer articulates this idea well.⁷)

Despite all this, Science has not proved that a universal moral code is impossible or that the existence of God is impossible. But over the past four centuries, Science has badly shaken traditional ideas of God and thus, also, traditional ideas of morality. (The two are deeply intertwined, as we shall see.)

However, let me stress again that what does not follow from these scientific models is that there is no God or that all forms of theism and all moral codes are wishful thinking. We just need a new understanding of what “right” and “wrong” are. Then, we can reason our way to a new view of God.

But for now, we can say that Science has almost levelled the pre-Enlightenment ways of thinking of these things. And let’s make no mistake about what the loss of their belief in God has done to the masses of ordinary people. Removing God from Western society’s generally accepted picture of how this world works had the inevitable consequence of ending our society’s confidence in its moral code, our ideas of what right and wrong are, and how we should try to act – toward the world in general, but especially toward each other. 

If the moral rules we’re supposed to follow aren’t God’s rules, whose rules are they? Human authorities’ rules? Which human authorities? Who are they to be telling me what to do? They’re human, like I am. I know all humans make mistakes. Therefore, I will work out my own moral code. Thank you, anyway.

And perhaps it is worth pointing out here that there are still people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe, and God made the universe in six days and rested on the seventh, and the miracles described in the Bible really did happen, parting a sea, walking on water, and all. But the trend of the last five hundred years is unmistakable. More and more people are having less and less confidence in the old ways of explaining the world with each passing decade.

The point may seem a trivial one to most people today. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? But it turns out that our caring and thinking about these matters is vitally important. If we don’t believe in Christian moral codes anymore, then they must be replaced with something. That space in our lives can’t just stay empty. 

Explaining in more detail how morally vacant Science has been so far and why humans all over the world are struggling to cope with the loss of their moral codes – even though they may not be aware of the philosophical names for the thoughts and feelings they are having – will be the business of our next chapter.

Notes

1. Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 55.

2. “Life Expectancy,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed March 29, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.

3. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Articles 211 and 212, ed. Jonathan Bennett. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/descartes1649.pdf.

4. Ibid., Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 3 and 4., trans. John Veitch, 1901.http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations.

5. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1966), p. 353.

6. Cathryn Delude, “Researchers Show That Memories Reside in Specific Brain Cells,” MIT News, March 22, 2012. http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/conjuring-memories-artificially-0322.

7. Donald Palmer, Does the Center Hold? An Introduction to Western Philosophy (California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1st edition, 1991), p. 56.