Chapter 3.    Part C 

       Opponents of Empiricism and Science have long asked: when a human sees things in the real world and spots patterns in the events going on there, then makes statements about what she is spotting, what is doing the "spotting" of the details and the patterns in them? That human mind and the sense-data-processing equipment that it must already contain in order for it to be able to even begin to do these tricks that the empiricists describe obviously came before any data processing could be done at all. What is this equipment and how does it work? Explain it to me. Philosophers of Science have had much difficulty explaining what this "mind" that does the knowing is, and thus what Science, the most rigorous form of knowing, is and is trying to do.

               

      For example, consider what it is that Science aims to achieve. What scientists want to discover, come to understand, and then use in creative ways in the real world are what are usually called “the laws of nature”. Scientists do more than simply observe the events in physical reality. They also strive to understand how they come about and then to express what they understand in general statements about these events, statements expressed in mathematical formulae, chemical formulae, sentences in one of the languages of humans on this planet, or some other symbol system used by people for conveying their thoughts to other humans. A “natural law” statement must describe one of the ways in which reality works, and, to be scientific, the statement’s claims must be set down in a way such that these claims can be tested in the real world. 

       If your claims about this real-world truth that you have discovered are going to be worth considering, then scientists must be able to test those claims in some real, material way. Thus, any “natural law” statement that you make, to be of any practical use whatever, and to stand any chance of enduring, must first be expressed in some language or symbol system that humans use to communicate ideas with other humans. A theory or model that can be expressed only inside the head of its inventor will die with her or him.

                                 

Formula expressing Newton's law of universal gravitation 

                                  

The Pythagorean Theorem, a mathematical law, but is it a scientific one? 

               

         The big problem occurs when we try to analyze logically just how true statements like Newton’s Laws of Motion or Darwin’s Theory of Evolution are. Do they express unshakeable truths about the real world or are they just temporarily useful ways of roughly describing what appears to be going on in reality, ways that people follow for a few years while the laws seem to enable scientists to predict events in reality, but that then are revised or dropped when new problems that they can’t explain are encountered? 

         Many scientific theories in the last four hundred years have been revised or dropped altogether. Do we dare to say, about any of our natural law statements in Science, that it is “true” in the final, unassailable way in which “5 + 7 = 12” is true or the Pythagorean Theorem is true?

               

         This debate is a hot one right up to the present time in Philosophy. There are many philosophers of Science who claim that scientific law statements, once they are supported by enough experimental evidence, can be considered to be true in the same way as valid math theorems are true. There are just as many who say the opposite. For people in this second group, all scientific statements are tentative. They believe that, given a bit of time, all natural law statements get replaced by new models or theories.

               

       Note that anyone who argues that scientific law statements are only our latest guesses about what is going on in reality is arguing against the reliability of Empiricism and its whole way of seeing what human knowing is. This is so because Science is merely Empiricism applied in its most practical form. To say that, in principle, there can’t be ultimate truthfulness in any scientific law statements is to deny Empiricism. 

           If all natural law statements are seen as being merely “temporarily true”, then Science can be seen as a kind of fashion show whose fads have a little more shelf life than the fads in the usual parade of clothes, hairstyles, make-up, television shows, and songs on the radio. Or put another way, Science’s “law statements” all become just more “narratives”, not really “true” so much as useful, but useful only in the lands in which they gain some currency and only for limited time periods, at best.

               

          And the logical flaws that can be spotted in empiricist reasoning are not small ones.

               

       In the first place, even the terms that natural-law statements contain are vulnerable to attack by the skeptics. Hume argued more than two hundred years ago that we humans can’t really know that any of the laws we think we see in nature are absolutely true because when we state a natural law, the terms that we use to name objects and events that we want to focus on exist only in our minds. A simple statement that seems to us to make sense, like the one that says hot objects will cause us pain if we touch them, can’t be trusted. To assume that this “law” is true is to assume that our definitions for the terms "hot" and "pain" will continue to make sense in the future as they have in the past. But we can’t know that these assumptions will hold in the future. We haven’t been to the future. 

               

         Thus, all of the terms in natural law statements, even terms like “protons”, “atoms”, “acids”, “genes”, “cells”, “galaxies”, etc. are fabrications of our minds, terms that we create because they help us to sort and categorize our sensory experiences and memories of sensory experiences and so to talk to each other about what seems to be going on around us. But reality does not contain any atoms, cells, or galaxies. If you ask a gene what its name is, it won’t say “Gene.” 

       Right from the start, our natural law statements are gambles on the future validity of our current mental categories of things. They can seem very convincing, but they are still gambles, and some of the ones that humans once gambled on with great confidence turned out in later experience to be naïve and inadequate. 

     Isaac Newton

        Newton’s laws of motion are now seen by physicists as being useful, low-level approximations of the much subtler laws of motion formulated by Einstein. And Einstein’s models don’t work in most of Quantum Theory. The substance “phlogiston” once seemed to explain most of Chemistry. From the work of Lavoisier, we learned phlogiston had never really existed at all. 

        Antoine Lavoisier 

        The list of scientific theories that eventually “fell from fashion” could go on and on.          

Chapter 3.    Part B 

John Locke (whom many see as the founder of empiricism) 

David Hume (arguably the most famous empiricist philosopher)

    Very basic ideas lead to more complex ideas which lead to ways of acting and living. Knowing how ways of thinking and believing lead to ways of living, and how belief systems can lead us astray, I now set out to try to construct a reliable base on which I can erect the rest of my thought system.

               

        In a modern, scientific view, what scientists yearn to know first is what is real. What is this ocean of stuff in which we swim our whole lives long, and how do the things in it work? But the harder we think about this question, the more we see that there is a deeper one. Again, the most fundamental question is not: "What is real?" but "How can I know what is real?" That question, stated more plainly, asks: "What is knowledge?" How reliable is the system that I use to take in, organize, interpret, and understand sense data about reality? Trying to answer these questions leads us into the most basic branch of Philosophy, which is called "epistemology".   

               

      The epistemological view of most scientists and philosophers today is called "Empiricism". It is a beginning point. Empiricism assumes that all that I can know is my sensory experiences and memories of sensory experiences, plus the concepts that I have been taught, or have discovered, that enable me to recognize and sort those experiences and memories, plan responses to the events in my world, and then act out the plans. I keep and use those concepts that have reliably guided me in the past to more health and vigor and less sickness and pain as I continue to move through, and respond to, my environment.

               

         Our sense organs are feeding bits of information into our minds all of the time: textures, colors, shapes, sounds, aromas, flavors, and so on about the things around us. Even when I am not consciously paying attention, at other, deeper levels, my mind is aware of these details. I know, for example, when the noises outside suddenly contain the sounds of a car approaching or a dog barking. I detect headlight beams sweeping across my yard, crunching gravel in the driveway, etc. – sometimes even in my sleep. One spouse wakes up to the baby's crying; the other dozes on. One wakes when the furnace isn’t cutting out as it should be; the other sleeps. The ship's engineer sleeps when the steam turbines are roaring and the props are churning. She wakes when one bearing begins to hum just the tiniest bit above its normal pitch. She wakes because she knows that something is wrong. Empiricism is the modern way of understanding this complex information-handling system. 

               

         In the Empiricist view, the human mind notices how certain patterns of details keep re-occurring in some situations from one time that we encounter them to the next. When we notice a constant pattern of details in a certain type of situation that we have met up with on several occasions, then we make mental files, for perhaps "round things", "red things", "sweet things", or “crisp things”. Then we save the information about that situation-type in our memories. The next time we encounter that type of object or situation, we simply go to our memory files. There, by cross-referencing, we discover: "Apple. Ah! Probably good to eat." All generalizations are built up thus. 

          To be complete here, we must also say that scientists now know most of the concepts that I use as I recognize things and respond to them are concepts that I was taught by the mentors and role models that I saw as a child. My childhood programming teaches me how to cognize things. After that, almost always, I don't have to cognize things, only recognize them. I only cognize a thing when it is totally new to me. Why my childhood mentors programmed me in the ways that they did will be explored in upcoming chapters.   

               

         Empiricists claim that all human knowing and thinking happens in this way. Watch the world. Notice the patterns that repeat. Store them up in memories. Pull the memories out and - when they fit - use them to make good probability decisions and to react effectively in new situations. Remember what works, and keep trying. For individuals and whole nations, according to the Empiricists, that's life.

               

        There are arguments against this way of thinking about thinking, arguments against this model of how human thinking and knowing work, in other words. Empiricism is a way of seeing our own minds that sounds scientific, modern, and logical, but it has its problems. 

Chapter 3  Foundations For A Moral Code: Empiricism And Its Flaws

Part A

    At first glance, it seems that what we most want to know is how this universe works so that we can then figure out how to navigate through its currents over the years with more health and joy and less suffering and misery for ourselves and our children. If we get the basics of our world right, we have a reasonable chance of figuring the rest out. If not, we’re doomed to wander off track over and over. People who don’t make these concerns the primary ones of their lives tend not to pass their short-sighted values and ways of living on to their children because they tend not to have any. People who do want to find better and better ways to live do pay attention to the universe around them and as a result do transmit their genes and their belief systems more efficiently over time.

        

       So we want to understand this world and our place in it. However, as we study this problem in a general way, if we think hard about it, we realize that there is a deeper problem. We begin to wonder just how reliable our basic information-processing system, i.e. the human-brain-hardware-human-mind-software, is. Can we trust the senses and faculties that we use to gather information about our world? 

 

Karl Marx 

  Consider, for example, a girl that I knew when I was at university in 1971 who was a Marxist. For her, all was Marx: all the troubles of the world were attributable to capitalist manipulations and conspiracies and only a world workers’ state would ever create a decent life for all people. The fact that the communist states of the world at that time were rife with corruption, for her, was always somehow due to the capitalists. The harsh living conditions and the secret police that obtained in these states were temporary measures that would be discontinued as soon as the capitalist dogs had been eradicated from the earth. She had so utterly deluded herself that I used to begin to feel weak as I listened to her. She used to carry a list of provincial government people that she and her friends were going to assassinate “when the revolution comes”. I wonder where she is now. But I know that she taught me something: she taught me how fully humans can delude themselves. 

    Since then, of course, Communism has failed totally; the world has learned that centrally planned economies wither. However, she was just one of many sincerely deluded people I met over the years who left me wondering, “Which of my beliefs can I trust?”, “Can I trust my moral beliefs?”, and “Can I even trust my everyday ones?”

Clostridium botulinum 

    Another example: I may think I know all about bacteria and how to can foods at home in sealer jars. I’ve looked through microscopes. I am confident that my picture of the microscopic level of the world is a true one. But if my knowledge of home canning only covers common bacteria, my limited knowledge of bacteria and of canning may prove to be a dangerous thing. The usual boiling water bath for foods canned in jars does indeed kill most bacteria, but for some microbes that is not enough. Botulism is nothing to be played around with. Botulinum bacteria can be boiled to death, but their toxins survive. My partial and inadequate set of beliefs about home canning might get me killed.    

  Or consider a few even more basic examples. Even my senses sometimes are not to be trusted. I may believe that light always travels in straight lines. I may see, half-immersed in a stream, a stick that looks bent at the water line, so I believe it to be physically bent. But when I pull it out, I find that it is straight. If I am a caveman trying to spear fish in a stream, a blind adherence to my ideas about light will cause me to starve. I will overshoot the fish every time, while the girl on the other shore, a better learner, eats.

  I can immerse one of my hands in the snow and keep the other on a battery-powered heating pack in my pocket. Then I can go into the cabin to wash my hands in some standing water in the sink. One hand tells me the sink water is cold, the other, that it is warm. Can’t I even trust my own senses?

     We can barely imagine the revolution in thinking that a person made blind and deaf at nineteen months old would undergo when she began to break through her solipsistic shell. Helen Keller’s story is too complex for us to analyze here, but it clearly involved the re-writing of most of her system of beliefs, when she made her breakthrough at six years old. It is amazing, in both human and philosophical terms.   

    When we seek to find some things in our experience that we can count on and believe in absolutely, we are stopped by questions like: “What do I really know?” and “How can I be sure of the things that I think I know?” and “Can I even be certain of what I see, hear, and touch?”

               

        We know that we have to have a base on which we can build the rest of our system of thought or we may, at some time down the road, suddenly realize that a whole set of ideas and ways of living that we had been counting on is founded on an illusion. Whole sets of ideas can be rendered unusable simply because we suddenly realize that they are founded on a lie.

  Even a complete world view, learned, used, and trusted, may turn out to be a fraud. To me, Nazism may sound logical. If I am told, as a boy, by teachers whom I trust that every race on Earth, including my own, must fight to survive, I may come to truly believe in their model of the workings of the biosphere of this planet. If I believe it, I may sincerely conclude that winning new land for my race and subjugating competing races is my sacred duty to my people. I and millions of my like-minded comrades may march off to a war that gets millions killed before my nation loses and the war is over.

World War II cemetery - France 

   

    The problem all along was that the Nazi worldview was built on a set of myths. Humanity is all one species, and the Nazi ideas of race have no foundation in fact. In Science, there is no "Aryan race". Different human nations/cultures, not races, do compete and struggle to survive, and Germany was, and is, a nation that has had one of the harder struggles. But culture is not genetically acquired. Culture is learned, and therefore, cultures can be amended by experience. And war is not the only way by which cultures can evolve. Germany, as a nation, changed profoundly after WWII, but then it went on; it didn't fizzle out and vanish, which only means, in fact, that millions of Germans, and of their adversaries, died because of an illusion.    

    Very basic ideas lead to more complex ideas which lead to ways of acting and living. Knowing how ways of thinking and believing lead to ways of living, and how belief systems can lead us astray, I now set out to try to construct a reliable base on which I can erect the rest of my thought system.

Be

Standing silent, in the twilight,

By the path where lovers linger,

Here among the fragrant cedars,

Hear the river insects murmur;

See the fading sky reflected,

On the rippling, blue-gray waters;

           

Weave the quiet, dark sensations,

In and out of … who? Who am I?

Can I see me? Can I be me?

Standing silent in the twilight.

             

Chapter 2    Part C 

   

British Army bulldozer burying bodies at Bergen-Belsen

  

  British soldiers forcing German guards to load bodies

    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 so many and so ugly. The Russian Revolution and Civil War. The worldwide Depression. World War II, six times as destructive as World War I. Hitler’s camps. Stalin’s camps. And on and on. But we don’t need to describe any more. The point is that they were the actions of a species that had gained great physical power at the same time as it lost its moral compass, or, more plainly, its ability to handle that power.

    The big question (What is right?) and the big fears that go with it have only grown. Where will the code that we need to guide our behavior in international affairs, business, or even everyday matters come from now?

    From the nation to the person, some coherent code must be in place in order for us to function, even if that code is mostly programmed into the subconscious. People without any operating code in place can’t act at all. They are called “catatonic”. The problem today is that for millions of people all over the world, the old moral codes that used to guide all that human beings did are fading. World War I was the first in a series of real world shocks that have deeply rocked all of our beliefs - our beliefs about the value of our Science and, even more deeply, our beliefs about our codes of right and wrong.

     So let me reiterate: what is far worse is that, collectively, the gurus of Science, though they have been able to achieve amazing things in the realms of machines, chemicals, medicines, etc., have had nothing to say about how we should or should not be using these technologies. Many of them even go so far as to claim that “should” is a word that has no meaning in Science.

    It seems bitterly unfair that the same Science that eroded our moral beliefs then offered nothing to put in their place. But what seems far more cruelly, diabolically ironic is that at the same time as Science was eroding our religious/moral beliefs out from under us, it was putting into our hands technologies of such destructive power that we can’t help but wonder whether any individual or group of individuals could ever be moral enough to handle them responsibly.

               

         We are living in a time of terrifying uncertainty. We now have the weapons to scorch our planet in one afternoon – so totally that the chances of our species surviving in that post-apocalyptic world are effectively zero.

     Furthermore, even if we escape the holocaust of nuclear war, we are also steadily polluting our planet. We know that we are, but we can’t seem to stop, even though the vast majority of the scientists who study the Earth and its ecosystems say that the point of no return is rapidly approaching. To people who have studied the Earth and its systems, the risk of environmental collapse is even more frightening than that of nuclear war.

   Large numbers of us, in the meantime, “lack all conviction”. Without a moral code to guide us – one that we truly believe is founded in the real world – we are like deer on the highway, stunned in the headlights, seemingly incapable of recognizing our peril.

               

         All reasonable, informed people today know these things. In fact, we are so weary of hearing what are called the “dire predictions” that we don’t want to think about them anymore. Or we think, get scared, and go out with our friends to get intoxicated. There seems to be little else one ordinary person or even clusters of rich and powerful persons can do. The problems are too big and too insidious for us – individually or collectively. Shut it out. Forget about it. Try to live “decently”. Hope for the best.

               

         For me, none of these answers are good enough. To ignore all of the evidence and arguments and resign myself to the “inevitable” is to give in to a whole way of thinking I cannot accept. That way of thinking says that the events of human lives are determined by forces that are beyond human control.

    I disagree. I have to. I believe true philosophers must.

     Whether we are talking about the cynicism of people who focus on events in their personal lives or the cynicism of some of the people who study all human history, or at any level in between, I have to tell these cynics bluntly: “If you really thought that way, we wouldn’t be having this debate because you wouldn’t be here.” 

Albert Camus, French philosopher (1913 - 1960) 
   
    As Camus sees it, suicide is the most sincere of all acts.(5) Its only equal is the living of a genuine life. A genuine person stays on in this world by conscious choice, not by inertia.  A genuine person is still here because he or she chooses to be. The other kind of person may claim to be totally disillusioned with this world and the people in it, but that simply can’t be the case if he or she is still alive and talking. These people are only partitioning up their minds, for the time being, into the manageable compartments of cynicism. But the disillusionment that they feel now – on any scale, personal to global – is going to seem minor compared to that which they are one day going to feel with themselves, one day when their fragile 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 undercut and eroded the old beliefs in God and the old codes of right and wrong. Second, that, because of our ongoing need just to manage our lives and because, even more importantly, of our recently acquired and constantly growing need to manage wisely the physical powers that Science has put into our hands, we must find a way to replace the moral code that we no longer believe in with one that we do believe in. Then, perhaps we will have a chance - a chance just to live, to go on, to get past our present peril.

    If we can work out a moral code that we do truly believe in, will it then lead us on to a renewed belief in a Supreme Being? That question is one that I will have to set aside for now. But I will deal with it in the last chapter of this book. For now, let’s set our sights on trying to begin to build a new moral code for this new age, so that finally we may confront and quell the “worst” among us. And in us.

Notes 

5. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus; translated from the          French by Justin O'Brien; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,           1975, p. 11.  

Chapter 2    Part B 

World War I recruitment poster 

   

   When World War I began, in the cities and towns of Europe, and in the cities of all other countries that were attached even remotely to the main belligerents, there were banners flying, troops marching, bands playing, and huge crowds of men, women, and kids all shouting for joy. A few sober people raised objections for one set of reasons or another, but they were drowned out in the din. Finally, the superior armies and ideals of “our way of life” were going to sweep aside the barbaric, inferior armies and ideals of our nation’s enemies.

   

48th Highland Regiment getting ready to leave Toronto 

    Exhorted by their leaders and in the media to stand up for their homelands, the men of Italy, Germany, France, Britain, Austro-Hungary, and Russia, along with all of their allies, accepted the jingoistic stories that were being told in their newspapers and got set to fight. Competing “narratives” about Europe and its history finally brought the European tribes into head-on confrontation.

Anti-German propaganda poster 

               

      My country, Canada, in 1914, was part of the British Empire, and Canadians were just as gung-ho as any of the loyal subjects in downtown London, England. Young men leapt 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 across to Europe, the fighting would be over. Girls clustered around guys 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 historians’ terms 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 ways. The whole process was going to be made as efficient as the new, scientifically-designed factories: scientific technologies, arranged in efficient sequences and supervised by experts. Now we would see what Science could do.

               

         We saw.

   Consider just one telling statistic: the British Army lost more casualties – wounded, missing, and killed – on the first morning of the first day of the Battle of the Somme than the British Army had lost in all of its recorded history, all over the world, up until that day. France, Russia, Germany, Britain, Austria, Italy, the U.S., and all of the others got hit with similar experiences, over and over, for four long years.

               

       In the end, nine million combatants were dead, three times that many permanently disabled. 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. Of the 600,000+ Canadians (from a population of eight million) who went over to Europe to fight, one in nine died there. (65,000+)

               

      Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to the war had been discussing in total seriousness the very likely possibility that the new modern weapons would be useless because young men would simply refuse to use them on other young men. Repeating rifles, torpedoes, poison gas, machine guns, airplanes, flame throwers ...the horrors they’d cause. No. No one would be able to use them.

early French postcard depicting the year 2000

   

    Other writers a few years before had even been speaking of the coming “Golden Age”. Science wasn’t just showing us how to build horrible weapons. It was also curing diseases, creating labor-saving machines, 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 point is that 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 general in the West had come to believe that the wise men of the West were in control now: the ways of the West, with Science in the vanguard, were taking over the world, and therefore the sufferings of the past were going to gradually be reduced until they became only rare anomalies or 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 held onto the loyalties of people in the West because, firstly, the damage had been minor compared to that caused by WWI, secondly, the ways of the West, mostly, had seemed to work, and thirdly, there really 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 that power began to seem more and more 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. 

   As Science, with its new media of communication, was giving the jingoistic, xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in modern societies more power to mold people’s minds, Science was also arming these forces and leaders with ever bigger and more terrible weapons ...while the philosophers and social scientists dithered. The outcome had a feeling of inevitably to it. A global arms race had become normal. Sooner or later a war of monstrous proportions had to happen.  

German soldier's belt buckle (standard issue) WWI 

    

    Descartes’ compromise way of Christian morals being used to control scientific technologies was not working. Not only were Christians of the West performing previously unthinkable horrors, they were doing them mostly to each other. 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 every German soldier’s belt buckle. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was being sung at every English-speaking Sunday service.   

    There was no doubt about it; the old beliefs and values just weren’t up to the hard tests that the new, scientific age was posing for them. The sages that many people had been looking to, namely the scientists, in all fields, asserted that, on the subject of morality, they had nothing to say. 

  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. They went on spouting the platitudes that had got them and their nations into the horror to begin with. The moral systems appeared bankrupt. Paralyzing doubt began to haunt people in every level of society, from the rich and powerful to the ordinary to the poor. 

   If the morals of the West had led to this, then, people could not help but think, maybe Science was right about the Bible. Maybe the set of moral beliefs that it recommended had also all been a fraud. Maybe there were no moral rules at all. Darwin’s model of the living world had portrayed “nature red in tooth and claw”. Survival of the fittest. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. 

   Before the Scientific Revolution began to erode God out of the thinking of the majority of the citizens of the West, even if people couldn’t grasp why bad things sometimes happened in this world or why bad people sometimes got ahead in spite of, and even because of, the suffering of others, people could still believe God had His reasons and the code of right and wrong still held. God was watching. Matters would be sorted out in time. The liars, manipulators, 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 huge. With the scale of the destruction, the pathetic reasons given to justify it, and the amorality of Science gnawing at their belief systems, more and more people began to suspect and fear that, just as Science had said, there was no God, the Bible was a collection of myths, their leaders were a bunch of deluded incompetents, and the old moral system was a sham.