Future Technoscientific Education: Atheism and Ethics in a Globalizing World

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society31(2) 81 –102© 2011 SAGE PublicationsReprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0270467611399743http://bsts.sagepub.com

Future Technoscientific Education: Atheism and Ethics in a Globalizing World

Colin D. Pearce1

Abstract

This article attempts to assess the claim that the unum necessarium in our time is the general dissemination of scientific knowledge because liberal civilization or the “good society” cannot be had in the presence of traditional religion and “metaphysics.” The paper attempts to place this claim in the context of continuing globalization and related questions such as 9/11, Fundamentalist Islam, Sino-Western relations, “pop” atheism and the prospect of a “post-human” future. The paper describes the continuance of pre-Enlightenment traditions and beliefs even as constant globalizing influences with their attendant secularism, atheism and technologism make their presence felt. The paper canvasses the views of Chet Raymo, C.S. Lewis, Bryan Appleyard, Werner Heisenberg, Stanley Rosen, Henry Adams, Friedrich Nietzsche Martin Heidegger and Francis Fukuyama as a means of assessing the claim that an education rooted in a simple commitment to scientific progressivism will be inadequate to the demands of the 21st Century.

Keywords

globalization, education, enlightenment, atheism, fideism, technology, metaphysics, progress, liberalism, positivism

Student: I take it you rule out metaphysics as unwor-thy of serious consideration.

Leopold: As I stated quite clearly in my latest paper, metaphysical philosophers are men who are too weak to accept the world as it is. Their theories of the so-called “mysteries of life” are nothing more than projections of their own inner uneasiness. Apart from this world, there are no realities.

Student: But that leaves many basic human needs unanswered.

Leopold: I’m sorry. I did not create the cosmos. I merely explain it.—(bell chimes the hour)

—Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy by Woody Allen(Opening Scene)

Introduction

Since the cataclysmic events of 9/11, the global scene has been dominated by the “War on Terror,” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and related geopolitical decisions on the part of the United States and its allies. The stated purpose of these wars and decisions is to advance global peace and stability by attempting to build secure and reasonably liberal or lawful

polities in parts of the world where such phenomena have remained unknown. The “ideological” background to these endeavours is frequently described as the defence of secular, Western values against the values of Islamic Fundamentalism and Jihadism, or the cause of Western Church/State separa-tion against the threat of a global theocratic order sought by those whose stated goal is to have the whole human race submit to the will of Allah and the laws of his Holy Book.

One of the most vociferous proponents of the “War on Ter-ror” and the ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan is the former Trot-skyist and now “neocon” commentator Christopher Hitchens. It has not escaped the attention of critics that since 9/11 Hitchens has gone from an observer whose quasi-Marxist arrows were primarily aimed at the capitalist society of the West to an opponent of those elements of the Left who have been shilly-shallying on the question of the superiority of Western liberal civilization to the forces of Radical Islam. Hitchens has been most successful in publicizing the atheistic cause through his book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1997) in which he deconstructs the Armenian nun

1University of Guelph-Humber, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Corresponding Author:Colin D. Pearce, University of Guelph-Humber, 207 Humber College Boulevard, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M9W 5L7Email: [email protected]

82 Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 31(2)

and her legacy, and his more recent bestsellers The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer (2007b) and God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007a). As paradoxical as it may seem, Hitchens is a proud and uncompromising atheist who at the same time demands an absolute moral commitment to the struggle against reli-gious thought and practice wherever it may be found as the ultimate litmus test of an enlightened and humane mind. Hitchens never fails to remind us that the phrase “under God” was included in The Pledge of Allegiance only in 1954 at the height of the Cold War against the atheistic Communists. His point is that it is not an original American principle. Indeed, the case of Hitchens suggests that the events of 9/11 and the rise of Jihadism has if anything “flushed” the atheism of the West out from under the bushes and made it self-consciously pugilistic in a way that it never was during the Cold War, its rival at that time being even more “atheistic” than it was.

Globalizing AtheismThe general populations of the non-Western lands are, to state the obvious, far from being straightforward atheists in the Hitchens mold. One need only think of the second half of the neologism “Chindia,” which has been coined to symbolize the parallel process of globalizing modernization under way in the world’s two most populous countries. Surely, if there is a country that is distinguished by the religiousness of its vast population, it would be India. And we cannot fail to mention here the “Asian Tigers” of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore who have also grown into economic powerhouses since 1945 but who also have deep and abiding religious tra-ditions. And the emancipation of Russia from Communism since the “fall of the wall” has only served to show that 70 years of Communism had not succeeded in dissolving the traditional Russian religious piety. How is it then that whatever the difficulties of relations with these countries, we have seen no such “clash” or “problem” with them as we have become used to discussing in connection with the Islamic world? We talk constantly about the West’s relationship with Islam obviously because of 9/11, the Israel/Palestinian issue, the nuclear factor in Iran, and to be sure the West’s vital need for oil from Islamic countries. But why is there so relatively little public debate and “steam” about the global role of China, for example, whose power is so much greater than any particular Muslim country or any likely collection of Muslim countries?

The 2008 Beijing Olympics were meant to indicate to the world that China had arrived on the world stage as a global superpower and is rightfully pursuing policies in accordance with that status. In addition to the Olympics, China has put a man in space, achieved the highest economic growth rate in the world, has completed the construction of the world’s largest dam (Three Gorges), and built the world’s highest railroad to Tibet to consolidate its authority over a continent-sized

territory. Western relations with China, while at times tense, are not characterized by aggressive conflict and violent erup-tions. Indeed, it goes without saying that the trade and finan-cial relations between China and the Western nations are too important to jeopardize, and Western powers often seek help from China with respect to the North Korean problem and other globally relevant diplomatic issues. But when will an Islamic country or federation of countries rank with China by holding the Olympics, outstripping the world in terms of eco-nomic growth, putting a man in space, and moving to consoli-date into a cohesive political entity? Surely, then it is fair to say that relations with China are of more long-term global import-ance than relations with the Islamic world, however import-ant they may be. The public controversy surrounding these two relationships seems to flourish in inverse proportion to their actual geostrategic importance. One might observe here that the West has more tranquil relations with the Far East than it does with the Middle East even as the religion of the latter is rooted in the Western religious tradition going back to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (Moses is referenced 100 times in the Quran.) Our question here could even be stated in symbolic terms: Is the really big geoglobal news of our era the Jihadist attacks of 9/11 on New York City or the atheist-communist Olympic Games of 2008 in Beijing? If we respond it is “New York 9/11” as opposed to “Beijing 2008,” is not the suggestion that the challenge posed by the “New China” is of less interest to us as compared with challenge presented by relations with the Islamic world? Could this asymmetrical focus on the Islamic world as compared with China have some-thing to do with the success of the forces represented by Mr. Hitchens? Could it be that Islamic Fundamentalism poses a “metaphysical” challenge to Western “Hitchensism,” whereas Chinese “muscle-flexing” in contrast really only constitutes a “pragmatic” problem of realpolitik between atheistic “friends”? President Jiang Zemin for one lined up very firmly in the Hitch-ens camp when he stated in a 1998 presidential press confer-ence that “as the President of the People’s Republic of China and as a member of the Communist Party, I myself am an atheist” (Woolley & Peters, 1998). President Zemin was in effect saying here that whatever other differences may sub-sist between China and the West, there are none of any “meta-physical” substance with those who incline to Mr. Hitchens and his “school.” Or stated slightly differently, is it possi-ble that the only notable force in the world not implicitly following the “Hitchenist” playbook is Radical Islam and Fundamentalist Jihadism?

President Zemin’s comment about being an atheist simply indicated that he was part of an atheistic power elite, infinitesi-mally smaller than the Chinese population at large. This elite finds itself ruling over “religious” masses in a way that sym-bolizes the situation across much of the globe although to be sure not all instances would approach the repressiveness of the Chinese regime, especially when it is moved to anger. All of which leads to the question of whether there is a

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connection between a nation’s participation in economic and technological globalization and having a leadership that when all is said and done is more inclined to Hitchens’s standpoint than to that of its local religious traditions and influences. Can we say that the atheism that Nietzsche insists is the destiny of the West is necessarily connected to the technological and sci-entific knowledge that China and other countries have taken over from the West in charting their future course? And sec-ond, must we not ask the question of whether the Islamic world is at some level the exception here? To be sure, there is variation within the Islamic world itself where countries such as Turkey and Indonesia are more “secular” in character than other countries in the Muslim fold. And certainly, there has been spectacular modernization in places such as Dubai and elsewhere. But we also know that the laws in places such as Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, for example, are nowhere near as “modern” as their fighter jets or even nuclear weapons (so to speak). The ruling elites of these countries seem to be religiously closer to their populations or to be more tradi-tionally “fideist” than any of the other non-Western countries with the exception perhaps of a place such as Tibet that has lost its independence to China.

So we see here that Islamic Fundamentalism might in some sense be described as a “minority” rebellion against the forces of atheistic globalism emanating out of New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, and indeed Beijing and Mumbai. To be sure, it is only a tiny minority of the billion-person Muslim world minority that is bent on engaging in direct jihad with the West. But this “activist” minority hopes to bring their billion co-religionists along with them by showing them the dangers of straying down the path of Western “infidelism” that has seduced so many other non-Western cultures. Looked at from their angle, the struggle of our era may indeed pit Islam against the West. But it could also be described as a conflict between “Islam and the Rest” given that the modern-ized non-Western countries show no more sympathy for Fun-damentalist Islam than Mr. Hitchens. Islamic Fundamentalism seeks to save the world for God or “Belief” with a capital “B” from the pincer pressures of Mr. Hitchens and President Zemin we might say.

Standards for Progress?How then do things stand with this global “atheist/fideist” situation in the long run? To say the least, such a globalized set of circumstances requires thinking in globalized terms. It is evident that global atheism must deal with the global preten-sions of Islamic “fideism” as well as with whatever “fideist” forces surface within various domestic jurisdictions. All of which leads to the question of the standards by which post-modern, globalist atheism will judge of its success or failure in dealing with the “fideist” world? Clearly, the answer to this question will be connected to the education that the atheistic techno-scientific-bureaucratic-political elites receive on their

way to taking up their responsibilities. How will they think about the constant revolutions that atheistic science and tech-nology are forever generating in the “fideist” parts of the global community? Will they seek to convince the Islamic world that atheists too have standards—not exactly Islamic standards to be sure—but standards nevertheless that go beyond unlimited consumption and modern, globalized, pop-ular culture? Will they articulate the kind of moral principles that might point the way to a modus vivendi of some kind, at least with respect to those more “moderate” Islamic popula-tions who are amenable to reason and “pragmatism” at some level? Will they be moderated in their decision making by a certain level of doubt about whether a commitment to endless globalized technodynamism is necessarily the wise course for any civilization be it Western or non-Western?

Given that Islam is in fact an offshoot from what today we might call the “Judeo-Christian Tradition” and that indeed we are indebted to the Islamic Enlightenment of the 10th to 12th centuries for the transference of the classic Greek texts to Europe, it is reasonable to say that the thought of Plato and Aristotle is a legacy common to both Islam and the West. And this is especially significant because Aristotle for his part counsels his readers to caution in respect of technological change. He speaks of Hippodamus the Milesian who recom-mended “that those should be rewarded who found out any-thing for the good of the city.” It is a “pleasing speculation” Aristotle says to “bestow honours” on “those who can give any information useful to the community.” But at the end of the day, the legislator should not settle on such a law for it would “probably occasion commotions in the state.” In other words, “useful information” can often make possible technological change, and technological change is inevitably related to the operation of the laws sooner or later.

Aristotle has no doubt that the reform of the laws can be a very beneficial and desirable thing. As with the sciences of “physic, gymnastic and all other arts and powers,” the “art of government” can be “extended beyond its ancient bounds.” Indeed, ancient laws are often “too simple and barbarous,” and so we bid them good riddance. But at the same time it is important to “consider this matter in another point of view” from which changes in the law “will appear to require great caution.” In a word, “when the advantage proposed is trifling . . . it is evidently better to pass over than to alter some faults which either the legislator or the magistrates may have com-mitted.” This is because the strict analogy between law and the arts and sciences is “fallacious.” The “law derives all its strength from custom” while the arts and sciences are pre-mised on the breaking of custom in the light of new and more accurate knowledge. To frequently pass “from established laws to other new ones, is ultimately to weaken the power of laws” (Aristotle, 2009 trans., 1268b31ff). To appreciate what Aristotle is driving at in this connection we need only think of the new fields of legal studies that have opened up in recent years as a result of scientific and technological change—fields


such as Internet law, the law of space, new reproductive tech-nologies law, environmental law, media law, animal rights law, and so on.

But the broader point here is that Aristotle truly belongs both in the West and in the Islamic world, and there is no reason why the two civilizations should not meet somewhere in the range of his thought properly understood. To show caution in introducing technological innovations into soci-ety, especially into societies that are still shaped by ancient and traditional legal habits and customs, is a fundamental Aristotelian point, which both the West and the non-West can appreciate. Nowhere is this more evident than in Francis Fukuyama’s concerns about the rise of recent biogenetic technologies.

Fukuyama, who is famous for his thesis of “The End of History,” has adjusted his argument to say that History with a capital “H” will not end until the power that has driven it in modern times has come to an end. This power is modern science, and it is still on the march. Thus, Fukuyama found himself a member of The President’s Council on Bioethics from 2002 to 2005 raising the alarm about the possibility of a “posthuman” future held out by the new biotechnologies. His example serves to show us that the “Aristotelian” alternative of caution and legislative regulation of “useful information” is alive and well in our time at least in the sense of recommenda-tions for restraint coming from a source such as the Bioethics Commission.

But such recommendations for Aristotelian prudence on the practical level necessarily need to be assessed in light of the intellectual authority of modern science in our day. This authority is ultimately dependent on its standing in the cen-turies-old debate as to whether the only true and valid knowl-edge is empirically verifiable scientific knowledge. In this regard, we know that Western scientific rationalism, whether it wants to or not, continues to face the challenge of meta-physics and “spirituality,” while for its part “metaphysical theism,” must face the catcalls of “skeptics,” even as it insists on its adherence to rational and analytical standards. Indeed, in his 1999 book bearing the title of a 1910 Thomas Hardy poem—God’s Funeral—Wilson (1999) says that debate over the relationship of science to religion is still as “hot” today as it was back at the time of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. As Wilson puts it, “The old Victorian ‘Big Fight’ first popular-ized by Thomas Huxley, with God in the Blue Corner and Science waiting in the Red Corner to punch his teeth out, still has the capacity to draw crowds” (p. 178). Such crowd-drawing capacity no doubt is related to modern science’s continued and energetic attack on the tradition of religion, even though modern science and the applied technologies that issue from its discoveries have long had the most power-ful determining influence over our culture (Langer, 1951, pp. 230-231). Wilson in fact maintains that the “Big Fight” between science and religion has possibly “more pull now than it ever [had]” (p. 178).

So the fact of the “Big Fight” highlighted by Wilson reminds us that we are faced with a choice of continuing loyalty to technoscientific liberalism and its ongoing prom-ise to solve all our problems via ever more breakthroughs in the quest to master nature, and a postmodern mentality that can neither accept modern rationalism nor return whole-heartedly to premodern “naturalism.” On the one hand, we seem to be lashed like Byron’s Mazeppa to a wildly gallop-ing technological steed, while on the other hand we sense implicitly that novel scientific conditions do not of them-selves anathematize traditional wisdom. All the elements that go to make up the massive edifice of Aristotle’s thought are no more falsified by modern brain research than they were by the earlier rise of Newtonian physics. To say that some of Aristotle’s views have to be reconsidered in light of modern knowledge is only to say that other of his views might be made more relevant to our situation by new modern knowledge. If his philosophy was worth attending to after the Enlightenment showed some of his physical theories to be in need of modification, it is perhaps even more worth attending to now that this Enlightenment science has in its turn been superseded by the revelations of post-Newtonian physics and modern biology. If Aristotle represents the notion that techne cannot necessarily solve all human prob-lems then at a minimum he is entitled to a seat at the table along with Jonathan Swift, Gustave Flaubert, Friedrich Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, C. S. Lewis, and all those who along with T. S. Eliot decline to be “formulated, sprawling on a pin . . . and wriggling on the wall.”

So there is no question as to the vigor of this ongoing debate between scientific rationalism and its critics in our time. The only question is how fully it is to be integrated into the education of those who will be determining policies in the future. Perhaps considering the contributions of Chet Raymo and his critics for inclusion in the curriculum would be a good start.

The Way of Chet RaymoChet Raymo (born 1936) is a distinguished educator and author who is Professor Emeritus of Physics at Stonehill College. He has had a wide public audience via his weekly newspaper column for the Boston Globe titled Science Musings. Naturally enough, this column has more recently migrated to the web in the form of a “blog” for all “netizens” to consult (blog.sciencemusings.com). Raymo has published more than a dozen books over a span of nearly 30 years, and his work has also appeared in the Norton Book of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing.1 Stephen Jay Gould has said of Raymo that he is “a wise religious humanist” who seeks “to bridge the gap between knowledge and morality” (Lannan Foundation, 2010).

In a recent autobiographical work titled When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist,

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Raymo (2008) describes his evolution over time from a tradi-tional Roman Catholic into both a “religious naturalist” and a “Catholic agnostic.” He states his credo in the following terms:

I am an atheist, if by God one means a transcendent Person who acts willfully within the creation . . . I am a pantheist in that I believe empirical knowledge of the sensate world is the surest revelation of whatever is worth being called divine. I am a Catholic by accident of birth. (p. 22)2

Thomas Clark (2005) says that Raymo is a writer who shows us the way to “spiritual experience” via “the awe-inspiring facts given by science.” He does so, Clark says, with “a sure, skillful touch that will likely move all but the most confirmed religionist or most crusty atheist.” Clark also points out that Raymo provides a “sharp dissection” of “New Age fads” as well as taking “resurgent fundamentalism” and “the academic left’s bungled critique of science” to task. Clark is quick to assure us that Raymo deals with these targets “compassionately but effectively.” But at the same time, he explains, all such phenomena as “astrology, intercessory prayer, angels [and] creationists” are grist for Raymo’s mill. At one point, Raymo even went so far as to criticize the “New Age sympathies” of the former Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel. It is certainly refreshing to see a commentator like Raymo ply his trade regardless of certain “sacred cows” or the august reputation of some of his targets. Most impressive in this regard is Raymo’s “remonstrating Stephen Hawking for supposing that his astrophysics might reveal ‘the mind of God’” (of which more in a moment). Clark describes Raymo’s purpose as “wishing to show the way in which modern, empirical science does not permit of uncritical acceptance of feel-good solutions to the problem of meaning,” and to this end his “tone throughout is serious, but never pompous, pedantic, or condescending to the ‘true believer’ clinging to traditional certitudes”.

According to Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Raymo “is a skilled teacher in the art of making connections.” He has been aided in this task by being “tutored in the arts of long-looking and wonder by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gilbert White, and other poets.” It is also not unusual they say to find allusions in his work to other figures such as Walt Whitman, Martin Buber, Teilhard de Chardin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Nikos Kazantzakis. Such a literary dimension to Raymo’s endeav-ors helps explain his capacity to render the wonders and beau-ties of nature into words. Raymo (2008) himself says that he has sought a “language of spirituality that is consistent with the empirical way of knowing” (p. 125).

But while admiring these virtues in Raymo’s output we can’t help but wonder whether Emerson, Whitman, Buber, and others are sufficient unto Raymo’s purposes as someone for whom “Faith no longer matters.” It seems fair to suggest that someone who says of himself that he can “no longer

believe that Christians are any closer to God than right-living people of any other faith” and that he is one scientist who has “given up the certainty that I know the Truth” (Raymo, 2008, p. 4) carries a fairly heavy intellectual burden. What kind of philosophical and “metaphysical” foundations does one need to be able to make such asseverations and have them carry weight? Let us consider for a moment the list of religious thinkers that Walter Kaufmann thinks we must consider if we are to talk seriously about the place of faith, belief, reason, and religion in modern civilization. We can do so briefly by glancing at the table of contents of his reader titled Religion From Tolstoy to Camus (1994). In this collection, Kaufmann has gathered together selections from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Clifford, James, Royce, Wilde, Freud, Cohen, Enslin, Niemoller, Hay, Barth, Brunner, Maritain, Tillich, Wisdom, Schweitzer, Buber, Camus, McTaggart, Flew, Hare, Mitchell, and Popes Pius IX and John XII. It is a curious thing that these great names do not make their presence more felt in Raymo’s reflections on reason, faith, and knowledge. Why should this be so? The answer is given by Raymo directly when he describes himself as one of those “who came of sci-entific age during the 1950’s and 1960’s” and who “were deeply influenced by positivist philosophers.”3 Raymo (1998) notes that because he and his colleagues had become “weary of the seemingly endless squabble of metaphysicians” they “dreamed of objectivity, even if it meant focusing our atten-tion on the small part of human experience that is amenable to logical analysis” (p. 170).

Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat (2008) explain that in his book The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe, Raymo assembles “a stunning array of scientists, philoso-phers, mystics, and poets who help him discover glimmers of the Absolute in every particular.” However, Sally Dougherty (2009) says that it has been fundamental for Raymo to aban-don the idea of “absolute Truth in favor of discovering the particular truths of nature.” She states that Raymo found him-self more “comfortable with admitting ‘I don’t know’”. Raymo then has been taken to eschew “absolute Truth” on the one hand while remaining open to “glimmers of the Absolute” on the other. To say the least, there seems to be a certain level of ambiguity in his thought. More recently, he has even gone so far as to say we can have access to the true path to highest reality. “Ultimately,” he says, it became evident “almost without my willing it” that there is “a thread that ties one human life and the universe together.” As a result of this insight, the path he used to follow on his daily walk “became more than a walk, more than an education, more than a life; it became the Path, a Tao [Way]” (p. 47).

For Raymo to say that a single, actual path somehow became the (“metaphysical”) Path or Tao is arresting because it suggests that a form of “spiritual” knowledge that can guide our lives here below with some specificity is to hand. We cannot help but refer to Lewis’s (2002) definition of the Tao here for purposes of comparison. Lewis’s Tao is not simply an aesthetic phenomenon but has very definite and clear meaning


for practical human conduct. He explains that what he calls Tao “others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Plati-tudes.” His Tao “is not one among a series of possible sys-tems of value.” Rather it is “the sole source of all value judgements.” If this particular Tao “is rejected, all value is rejected,” and if “any value is retained, it is retained.” Lewis’s Tao is very much connected duty, obligation, and morals. “If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity.”

Raymo too connects the knowledge of the order of the uni-verse to human conduct at some level. “The universe is a unity—an interacting, evolving, and genetically-related community of beings bound together inseparably in space and time. Our responsibilities to each other and to all of creation are implicit in this unity” (p. 98). But for all this we never see Raymo descend to the level of particularity that we see in Lewis. Raymo’s Tao shows we have “responsibilities to each other” but do these responsibilities include the avoiding of adultery, for example, which Lewis’s Tao very manifestly does?

The example of Lewis points up the problem of Raymo’s “religious naturalism” in respect of its moral and therefore social implications. If for his part Lewis sees the “real value” of the knowledge that “conjugal fidelity” is morally obligatory as in principle equivalent to that of knowledge of quantum physics, for his part Raymo sees no evident connection between the two. For Lewis if reason can show us that knowledge of the law of gravity is a “good thing,” then it can also show us that there is such a thing as right or “correct” conduct as far as sexual behavior is concerned. In contrast, Raymo’s prefer-ence is to remain at such a high level of generality in his observations about man’s place in the natural order that the kinds of discussion that are a staple for a “traditionalist” like Lewis are not to be seen in Raymo’s work.

Raymo (2008) sees rapt attention to the particulars of nature as a type of prayer or meditation: “When we are con-tent to admit that we do not know what lies behind the god-dess’s veil, every jot and tittle of creation becomes an object of our reverence and respect” (p. 47). One cannot miss the religious tone in Raymo’s words here. Thomas Clark (2005) notes that “some will ridicule his response [to the grand spectacle of creation without a creator] as just more, if more sophisticated, wishful thinking in the face of the uncaring abyss”. Clark also thinks that those readers for whom even “god” in the lower case, “may be too burdened with theistic connotations to figure in a thoroughly modern spirituality” will not be sympathetic to Raymo’s case. His suggestion is that those seeking a “spirituality without spirits” will be shy of going in Raymo’s direction toward what sounds very much like old-fashioned “worship.” Nevertheless, Clark brushes by the problem by concluding that Raymo’s intimations of “theism” should be seen as only a “minor quibble” he has

with those dedicated to “a thoroughly modern spiritual-ity.” After all, Clark says, it is obvious that “no vision of the ultimate will please everyone.”

But can the existence or nonexistence of “spirit” in nature, which is to say at some level the question of “theism” or “nontheism” really be put aside as simply a “minor quibble”? If modern science is truly incompatible with “frankly reli-gious awe” or rules out any such thing as “the god of the galaxies” then Raymo will not be persuasive to the most insistent seekers after God. The contrast we have noted between the Tao of Raymo and the Tao of Lewis brings into focus the fact that the question of “theism” is not a “minor quibble.” Lewis is manifestly a “theist” and a Christian “the-ist” at that. Therefore, his Tao is very evidently a “moral” phenomenon, which is in some sense to say “social” phe-nomenon as well. Raymo, however, is insistent that he is not in any sense a “theist,” and this seems connected to the diffi-culty we have in grasping the precise relationship between his Tao on the one hand and his abandonment of “absolute Truth” on the other. Is Raymo’s Tao strictly “personal”? If so, it is not the Way but a symbol for a million possible ways (in the plural). If it is more than “personal,” does it oblige us to marital fidelity as the Tao of Lewis would seem to do? We are left to speculate.

Raymo precedes the current wave of atheistic “enlighten-mentism” by about a decade, but he can reasonably be placed in the school of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Raymo is certainly not as “political” as Hitchens, nor as elo-quent an apologist for the value of science as Dawkins, but he shares in their belief that the claims of traditional religion have been shown to be illusory by the standards of science and are evidently morally scandalous by the standards of jus-tice and humanity. Where Raymo might be distinct from Hitchens and Dawkins at some level is in his practical confi-dence that the whole religion-science dynamic can be solved by prudent and vigorous efforts at public education. One does not get from Raymo the “it’s a fight to the death” sense one gets from his trans-Atlantic colleagues who see the battle between secular enlightenment and traditional religion in very stark “Manichean” terms. Hitchens and Dawkins have a tendency to see the battle between science and religion as a grim struggle between the truly enlightened and secular minds and the forces of retrogression, victory over which is certain (or else why all the talk about “progress”)4 but not for this reason easily won. Raymo is no doubt with them in “the cause,” but he seems to think that the issue might be put to bed if the right measures are put in place to generally inform the public about the “nature of things” as revealed by scientific inquiry.

In opposition to Whitehead,5 for example, Raymo (1998) is confident that there is no need to glance back at meta-physics or to be less than optimistic about the results of the propagation of new scientific knowledge. Indeed, the future bids fair to see the rise of a new “ecumenical,

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ecological, non-idolatrous” theology (p. 246). So for all his “scientism” Raymo expects a “renaissance of religion” based on “cosmic knowledge, the power for good, awareness of mystery, a sense of responsibility to all creation, and a longing for union with the Absolute” (p. 267).6 Speaking of the images brought to our senses by our “magnificent space-crafts and telescopes” such as the Hubble Deep Field Photo-graphic Project, Raymo suggests that they can help us fill the “theological” vacuum left by modern science’s triumph over the old faith. Raymo believes that an edifying new theology can be sustained by a new “art form” in the shape of lavishly produced scientific movies. The new religion will certainly avoid the idolatry associated with the old, but at the same time it will provide the basis for a new popular worship. Raymo suggests that

NASA should produce a full length film of astronomical images for the big screen, a grand tour of the universe, from Earth to the black holes at the core of distant gal-axies, a Hollywood-quality production with narration by Leonard Nimoy and score by John Williams.

Cinemas in every town and neighbourhood of the world should be subsidized by governments to show the film for free. Yes, it would cost several hundred mil-lion dollars, but that’s a small fraction of the cost of the scientific programs that produced the images. These splendid products of human curiosity and ingenuity could be the true Gothic cathedrals of our time, the nexus where human striving touches the highest mysteries—the embroidered cloths of heaven laid at the feet of every human, rich or poor. (pp. 249-250)

Raymo is confident that the “cinematic method” (if we may call it that) is the way forward to an improved and more enlightened society. Vice President Al Gore seems to have agreed and met with enormous success with his film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006.

Diminishing HumanitySo what is the character of Raymo’s new theology? Raymo (1998) explains that the “New Story” of the cosmos in modern times after “the last cobwebs of arminianism, anthropomor-phism, anthropocentrism” have been “brushed away” is one of “Copernicanism and Darwinism.”7 Happy is modern humanity because “the human gods are swept from their thrones,” and we now fully understand that we “are contingent, ephemeral—animated stardust cast up on a random shore, a brief incan-descence” (pp. 249-250).

Raymo is in effect just reiterating a Nietzschean cosmo-logical observation made a century before.8 The two thinkers are in agreement on man’s cosmological and astronomical insignificance. But how different is the philosophy of Nietzsche from that of Raymo! While the “new story” of the cosmos fills

Raymo with pride in his human status and high hopes for the future, Nietzsche insists that this “new story” points to one thing very specifically—human self-degradation. Indeed, “Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane—now he is slipping faster away from the center into—what? Into nothingness?” Since Copernicus, Nietzsche asks, has man’s “will to self-belittlement, not pro-gressed irresistibly?” Science has progressively dissuaded man “from his former respect for himself, as if this had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit.” “Alas,” Nietzsche (1967b) concludes

the faith in the dignity and the uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past—he has become an animal, literally and without reservation and qualification, he who was, according to the old faith, almost God (child of God, or “God-man”). (pp. 155-156)9

The science which so inspirits Raymo, really points to a posture of utter human self-contempt accompanied by a direct assault on human dignity in Nietzsche’s estimation.

It is evident then that Raymo has not taken the reflections of Nietzsche into consideration as part of the development of his overall views. But he does direct his attention to the work of Bryan Appleyard (1993) who agrees with them both that everything science has uncovered since Galileo suggests that we are accidental, contingent, ephemeral parts of creation.

Appleyard (1993) takes the view that the strictly scientific explanation of the world is incompatible with its nonscien-tific counterparts while at the same time stressing the point that it is the scientific understanding of the world and no other which is the most powerful force shaping our politics, economics, common culture, and more generally our overall self-understanding. Appleyard argues that modern science of necessity abjures all discussion of ultimate purpose because it sees all claims to knowledge of such purpose are unavoid-ably subjective in nature. They have no cognitive value from the strictly scientific point of view and so should play no real role in the determination of society’s direction. From the scientific point of view then there can be only “technical” solutions to any problems with which modern society might be confronted. In other words, Appleyard wants us to see how science is hived off from the everyday (alltaglickheit in Heideggerian parlance) experience of human beings who willy-nilly guide their lives and make their choices based on beliefs and values that are taken to be reflective of ultimate meaning or purpose. Given this fact, modern science is neces-sarily corrosive of moral conviction not least because of its inevitable tendency to weaken religious belief that it demon-strates to consist of just so many values that human beings in their need arbitrarily adopt according to their intrinsic prefer-ences. It is the province of such modern disciplines as psy-chology and sociology to explain the formation of these


intrinsic preferences and the “existential” concerns to which they give rise. Appleyard insists that there can be no “halfway house” between this “scientistic” standpoint on the one hand and the claims of religion on the other. They are mutually exclusive ways of seeing the world, and there is no point in pretending otherwise. In effect, modern humanity faces a permanent and irresoluble contradiction or tension between its two greatest legacies. But Appleyard does not simply leave it there. He says that modern science has been engaged in a “trick” constituted by an insistence that only certain kinds of questions may be asked, which kind of questions happen to be the ones that science has the potential to answer. He goes on to suggest that “Once the implications and shallowness of this trick are realized, fully realized, science will be humbled and we shall be free to celebrate our selves again” (p. 249). Whether this turn of events is probable and if so likely to solve the science-religion problem may be doubted. But that makes little difference to Raymo. What is most lamentable to him in Appleyard’s approach is his very belief that science needs to be “humbled” or “cut down to size” if humanity is once again to feel secure in its access to abiding truth and the meaningfulness of nonscientific experience.10

Raymo’s approach to Appleyard then is to consider him as “one of those creatures” for whom science’s news of man’s “incidentalness” can be “difficult to accept.” This is because “creatures” like Appleyard “long believed themselves to be the raison d’etre of the universe.” (Raymo, 1998, p. 163).11 But on what ground is Raymo so comparatively serene? In try-ing to answer this particular question, we find ourselves in a gray transition zone from science to politics. Raymo is serene compared with Appleyard (and Nietzsche) because in the midst of the modern scientific revolution, he knows that “skepticism, tolerance, and belief in progress are certainly not in opposition to spirituality and ethical behaviour” (p. 162).12

Raymo (1998) sides with “most scientists” who “reject the link, asserted by Appleyard between the ascendancy of science and the spiritual malaises of our time” (p. 162).13 Contrary to Appleyard’s view of the world, Raymo is sure that “our diminished sense of the sacred has resulted not from the growth of knowledge but from the failure of tra-ditional religions to incorporate scientific discovery into a framework of spirituality and religious worship” (p. 164). Raymo talks of Appleyard’s “vexatious misunderstand-ing of the present [which] is awash with unwarranted pes-simism and nostalgia for an Eden of anthropomorphic belief.” According to Raymo (1998), Appleyard should see that “understanding relativity may not be necessary to our happiness, but an open, tolerant, joyful search for truth most certainly is” (p. 165).14

“Civilized Living”Raymo (1998) says that “one could argue that our political freedoms, so profoundly influenced by the Enlightenment,

are grounded in a skeptical view of the world” (p. 265). By “skeptical” Raymo means strictly scientific. Raymo is certain we should all turn our back on “a binge of otherworldliness,” which sees “angels invading our bookstores and cinemas announcing the countdown to the apocalypse” (p. 267). For Raymo, it is “Oui” a la religion du raison, mais “Non” a la religion du nouvel age.15

But on his own grounds how can Raymo pick and choose in the field of religion in this way? He is insisting that his religion should be supported because it is rational while “oth-erwordly” religions are to be roundly condemned because they are not. But Raymo cannot disentangle himself from what is now known as “postmodernism” or in earlier variations as extreme skepticism or “nihilism” to which Wilson (1999) has directed our attention. Raymo (1998) is forced to allow that postmodernism may indeed have a point in that the history of science has shown that “our dream of objectivity was an illu-sion.” Indeed, he says the “critics of science” are right in point-ing out that “personal, institutional and cultural influences” enter into scientific conclusions. Science definitely “embodies all of the foibles of humankind,” and given this it cannot assume that it is without “need of improvement.” “But,” Raymo imme-diately adds, “no one who does science and ‘understands’ sci-ence can doubt that it provides reliable knowledge of the natural world.”16 Raymo’s solution to the challenge posed by postmodernism to the “correspondentialist” standpoint is to promote “public knowledge” of scientific discoveries.

According to Raymo (1998), while “astronomy, biology, chemistry and physics” have been promoted in our schools it has remained the case that in the privacy of our homes “we follow private visions of astrology, creationism, health fads and parapsychology” (p. 266). Raymo’s suggestion is that the seed bed of postmodern irrationality is the realm of privacy that the liberal civilization he defends makes possible. But Raymo is sure that liberalism cannot countenance a thor-oughgoing “postmodern” atheism that would see his beloved sciences as having no more ontological status than the angels and miracles of the New Age thinking. In a word, Raymo is insistent that rational, which in his terms is to say ultimately moral or political, man does not inevitably become a casu-alty of the progress of science in an enlightened age. So it makes sense in his view to “keep up the fight.” He continues to believe that being well informed about modern science will make the populace unsusceptible to the ungrounded claims of the “New Age” mentality that tends toward “fads” such as parapsychology, astrology, and spiritualism as it had earlier done with the claims of the traditional faith.

Raymo places his faith in the cause of scientific atheism because he connects it with a “quality of civilized living” that is self-evidently good and that especially recommends itself because it needs no metaphysical supports. But is this not circular reasoning? What makes positivistic atheism “bet-ter” than “metaphysics”? Answer: It leads to “civilized liv-ing,” or to more “civilized living.”17 But what makes “civilized

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living” so good? Answer: Because it permits of the mental activity whereby one can reject “metaphysics” and adhere to scientific atheism. But if “atheism” and “civilization” are to all intents and purposes one and the same thing, we still lack an “eternal” and “external” criterion by which we can con-clude that this “two in one” is preferable to either “civilized living” in the absence of the truth of atheism, or the truth of atheism in the absence of “civilized living.” Raymo’s calm self-confidence that the popularization of scientific knowl-edge is identical on the practical plane with mankind’s moral advancement provides a vivid contrast to the radically critical thinking of Werner Heisenberg, for example.

Postmodern Physics and Natural LanguageWerner Heisenberg would presumably receive Raymo’s seal of approval as a thoroughly scientific and rationalistic thinker. Like Raymo, Heisenberg (1958) argues that the traditional religion has been shown by modern science to be problematic to say the least. “It is especially difficult to find in [the] frame-work [of classical physics] room for those parts of reality that had been the object of traditional religion and [which] seem now more or less imaginary.” Heisenberg explains that the 19th century had seen “an increasing confidence in the scien-tific method” and this in turn “led to a general skepticism” with regard to those concepts “which do not fit into the closed frame of scientific thought” such as those tied to “religion” (p. 88). But decisively as it turns out “the ethical values of the Christian religion were excepted from this trend, at least for the time being” (p. 88).18

Heisenberg’s remarks here very definitely suggest that observers like Raymo are relying on the “ethical [as opposed to metaphysical] values of the Christian religion.” They exempt “the ethical values of the Christian religion” from the corrosive impact of modern science on the religious tradition-alism of which they whole heartedly approve.19

Very well, modern science has cleared away the theological “underbrush” and made straight the way for secularized Christian values to go from strength to strength under the pro-tection of scientific propaganda. But Heisenberg (1958) is not so sure that this is the way forward. Modern physics, he says, has turned modern thought not only “against the estimation of precise scientific concepts,” but also “against a too optimis-tic view on progress in general.” Most ironically perhaps, it has turned “modern thought” against the standpoint of “skepticism itself.” In fact, the new skepticism of the skepticism involved in relying only on “precise scientific concepts” points in the direction of a new philosophical openness to the possibility “that the human ability to understand may be in a certain sense unlimited” (p. 187). In Heisenberg’s presentation, the strictly scientific orientation comes to sight as cramped and narrow. If we have learnt that “the existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality,” then we must now understand that “the other part that has not yet been

understood is infinite.” It follows then that the nature of human understanding is “in process.” Whenever we proceed “from the known into the unknown we may . . . have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding’” (p. 190). “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5, 166 -167)

Despite or because of his utterly scientific approach to our knowledge and understanding, Heisenberg (1958) still believes that “ordinary” or natural language as distinguished from precise scientific terminology can actually describe things as they in fact are. It is only through the use of natural language “that we can be certain to touch reality.” As a result, we must be skeptical about any skepticism “with regard to this natural language and its essential concepts” (p. 201). Indeed, for Heisenberg, we are as free today as at any time in the past to “use these concepts as they have been used at all times.” And Heisenberg very explicitly includes the “concepts of natural language” deployed in relation to religion in this freedom.20 In this way, Heisenberg explains, “modern physics has perhaps opened the door to a wider outlook on the rela-tionship between the human mind and reality,” which is to say a “wider outlook” on the relationship between rational knowledge and traditional religion (p. 202).

So Heisenberg (1958) suggests that modern science needs to be more “modest” precisely in light of modern science’s own discoveries. But it is precisely this call for science to become more “humble” that, as we have seen, draws Raymo’s attention to the work of Bryan Appleyard as a target of criticism.

Appleyard, like Heisenberg before him, sees that a less rigorously mechanistic conception of the universe is now available to us. But he does not interpret the “lesson” taught to modern science by the advances in the science of relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory to necessarily mean that a solution to the science-religion crisis is at hand. It is interesting to note here that Appleyard is in agreement with Raymo in rejecting the notion of Stephen Hawking that “if we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we should know the mind of God.” The possibility that a “Theory of Everything” may prove to be the solution to the core problem is no more a reality for him than for Raymo. Speaking of Hawking’s (1998) A Brief History of Time, Appleyard says that when it was written, physicists indeed generally believed that “the Theory of Everything (TOE), the completion of their subject, was imminent.” But as it is this development “did not prove to be the case.” “As Hawking makes clear, neither he nor anybody else can any longer be sure we are on the right path, nor how far along that path we have walked” (Appleyard, 2001).21

But the key point here is the grounds of Appleyard’s insis-tence that “Hawkingism” cannot play more than a limited role as far as the “big questions” are concerned. For Raymo, Hawking’s problem is a certain “flirtation” with the “theistic” implications


of his scientific insights such as his trope of ultimately know-ing “the mind of God.” Appleyard (2001), however, adopts the opposite stance in this respect. For him, it is precisely Hawking’s “empiricism” and discountenancing of the pos-sibility of “theism” and not his seeming “wink” at it that is problematic. This weakness in Hawking’s case according to Appleyard is because at the end of the day the highly acclaimed physicist “is a positivist.” As such, he is obliged to acknowledge that his “big bangs, black holes, curved time, cosmic strings . . . p-branes, M Theory and vacuum energy” are “not real at all.” Appleyard explains that for a “positivist” such as Hawking to ask “Do p-branes or whatever exist? is a meaningless question.” To be sure these notions do indeed “have explanatory power” but that is simply “because they accord with theory and observation.” As such, they can be described as “a postmodern retreat from the grand project of physics which is to paint a conclusive picture of the material world.” In Appleyard’s estimation, such a view at a minimum “calls into question the possibility of finality and the seriousness with which the layman should take contemporary physics.” The fundamental contemporary question for the “outsider” to ask then is whether contemporary physics is not ulti-mately “a game played by humans on the surface of an unknowable cosmos?”. Raymo (2008) too has said in his credo, “I am an agnostic in that I believe our knowledge of ‘what is’ is partial and tentative—a tiny flickering flame in the overwhelming shadows of our ignorance” (p. 22). The mystery of the unknown and the unfathomability of the whole have returned to centre stage in an age when science had predicted that the unexplained elements of the universe were in the process of being pushed further and further to the margins from which remote location they would in due course be dispatched forever.22

The Nietzschean Postmodernist PerspectiveAppleyard and Heisenberg’s discussion of a “wider outlook” reminds us that Raymo and those of his school seem not to have shared at any level in the experience of the “Shadow” of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. This figure like them, wants to live the “libertarian” life (to use Ernst Nagel’s phrase for the social orientation of “atheistic thinkers”) or in the “Shadow’s” words “To live as it pleases [him].” But the “Shadow” quickly adds that if he cannot “live as it pleases him” he does not wish “to live at all.” For him, it is “all or nothing”—either a life lived as his will would have it or a quick death. But Raymo is not as clear as Zarathustra’s “Shadow” as to whether he would end his life if he found himself in a situation where he was prevented from living as he pleased. Moreover, Zarathustra’s “Shadow” also ends up asking himself the question:

“How could anything please me anymore? Do I have a goal anymore? A haven towards which my sail is set?

Where is my home?” I ask and search and have searched for it, but I have not found it. O eternal everywhere, O eternal nowhere, O eternal—in vain! (Nietzsche, 1966a, p. 274).23

Zarathustra’s “Shadow” then, with his “mendacious innocence,” maybe taken as Nietzsche’s shorthanded way of describing so many figures who went before, thinkers and writers such as Carlyle, Mill, Renan, Tennyson, Pater, Ruskin, Butler, James, Dostoevsky, Kleist, and others who came to the limit of their commitment to the modern project of enlightenment and progress and were forced by their intellectual probity to go “beyond.” Raymo fits ill with the 19th-century thinkers symbolized by Zarathustra’s “Shadow” even though he is historically placed well after their passing from the scene. He is rather a late blooming “Victorian” who has yet to live through the crisis of that century as did some of its most outstanding intellectual figures. Nietzsche seems to have had no influence on Raymo’s thinking even though a library would have to be cited in order to fully detail his impact on subsequent thought.24

It seems therefore only fitting to listen to Nietzsche on the question raised by the confidence that modern science and lib-eral, progressive morality are mutually sustaining. Nietzsche is the ultimate root of the phenomenon of postmodernism in that he is very sure that the victory of the scientific over the orthodox worldviews is at bottom just the triumph of one faith over another in what really is a kind of religious fac-tionalism.25 And Nietzsche leaves no doubt that he accepts Raymo’s case to the extent it is a case for radical atheism. The question though is whether Raymo would really qualify as a “godless one” in Nietzsche’s eyes, paradoxically enough, precisely because of his eschewal of “metaphysics.” Nietzsche pleads “guilty” to the charge of being tempted by, or unable to escape “metaphysics” while Raymo absolutely does not. “It is still a metaphysical faith that underlies our faith in science,” Nietzsche (1974) says, “and we seekers after knowledge of today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we, too, derive our flame from the fire ignited by faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato’s, that God is truth, that truth is divine” (p. 283).26

So Nietzsche argues that the modern scientist is caught hopelessly “betwixt and between.” He has lost the old God but his attempt to fashion a new “scientific” faith cannot succeed. He needs his “real world” to be there because it is something by the means of which he can cover over his inability to admit that without the old God there is no standard by which to adjudge the superiority of science to superstition. Stated more directly, the modern scientist needs his “real world” above all in order that he can remain confi-dent that science is morally justified by its connection to pro-gressive politics. The scientist puts up a very cheerful front as a confidently “godless liberal” but at bottom he lacks the “right stuff” to follow his atheism through to its

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obviously nihilistic conclusion.27 It is thus that the scientist appears unphilosophical from the Nietzschean point of view because he is so casual about the godless wissenschaft he pur-veys. For him, “morality is not yet a problem” (Nietzsche, 1954b, p. 516).28

The implication for Raymo of the Nietzschean standpoint is that to the extent he is a “scientific worker” he has no basis “deep down” for his enjoyment of “civilized living.” The fact “that one works rigorously in the sciences . . . cer-tainly does not prove that science as a whole possesses a goal, a will, an ideal, or the passion of a great faith.” In fact, Nietzsche says, “The opposite is the case.” The perspi-cacious observer of science today will see that it “is a hiding place for every kind of discontent, disbelief, gnawing worm, despectio sui, bad conscience—it is the unrest of a lack of ideals, the suffering from a lack of any great love, the dis-content in the fact of involuntary contentment” (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 147). In short, it is perhaps “metaphysical need” that has pressed Raymo to promote the Cineplex as the means of disseminating a new “theology” constructed from elements of natural science. It is his particular way of cov-ering up the terror of a blind or “un-intelligent” universe even as he suggests that Bryan Appleyard has shown the exact same weakness in his defense of the claims of nonsci-entific knowledge. Thus, he points to Nietzsche’s case that for those who have imbibed the insights of modern science existence “can now only be endured as creation” (Nietzsche, 1967b, p. 147).29

“Standing About in the Marketplace”One of Nietzsche’s possible explanations for why “scientific liberals” like Raymo does not approach to his level of scien-tific self-questioning is that mankind’s “metaphysical need,” to speak in Schopenhauerian terms, has been withering away. Less and less do we moderns seek for a solution to our dilem-mas where earlier mankind would have thought naturally to go. In fact, the kind of hunger or “great love” prevalent in earlier epochs most likely will fade away over time. This pos-sibility is part of the drama of Nietzsche’s famous madman in the square scene.

Nietzsche’s uses the madman scene in The Gay Science as a way of dramatizing the fact that all transcendent stan-dards of human guidance such as History, Nature, traditional morality, and Divine Will have lost their operative force.30 And as a student of Nietzsche, Heidegger (1982) seeks to be very precise about the nature of the Madman’s derangement. He remarks in this connection that

the speech of the madman says specifically that the word “God is dead” has nothing in common with the opinions of those who are merely standing about and talking confusedly, who “do not believe in God.” For those who are merely believers in that way, nihilism

has not yet asserted itself at all as the destining of their own history. (p. 63)

Heidegger says that Nietzsche’s Madman is ver-ruckt or “de-ranged,” which translates as “insane” when the hyphen is removed. The Madman “is clearly . . . the one who seeks God, since he cries out after God.” As “a thinking man,” he might be crying out de profundis, but his cries will be inaudible as long as “the ear of our thinking” has not “come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought.” (Heidegger, 1982, pp. 111-112; see also Heidegger, 1968, pp. 49-51).

Nietzsche’s point, as amplified by Heidegger, is that the sci-entific truth can really only “come home” to the religious or pious soul. The scientist qua scientist’s familiarity with the “facts” results in a kind of contempt for them. He is “standing about in the marketplace” and “does not believe in God.” He tends to greet the news of the “death of God” as brought about by his discipline as though it was just another weather report. He carries on blithely with his work. But for types like Nietzsche and Heidegger, the death of God necessarily and inevitably raises the question of whether there is any point to human life. The idea that a blind cosmos not only has no particular concern for the human race, or the speck of dust on which it must depend and reside, is the veritable end of the conception of the whole that could give any sustenance whatsoever to the service of jus-tice, humanity, and love. Unlike those whose response to the loss of a cosmic order is to press on with what they take to be “the improvement of mankind,” the Nietzsche-Heidegger types cannot understand how these “improvers” believe they can any longer distinguish between the enhancement and the diminution of humanity in the first place (Nietzsche, 1954a, p. 497).

“Not a World But a Chaos”For a contemporary contrast to Raymo and an example of someone who is radically open to what it is Nietzsche and Heidegger have to teach, we need only cite some remarks from the philosopher Stanley Rosen.

Rosen (1989) says that perhaps the most important forces making for the polarization of two extreme factions in our present-day intellectual debate are “Positivism in all its vari-eties, pragmatism, humanistic existentialism, the fundamental-ontological attack against Platonism, and the various ideological celebrations of contemporary science.”31 These “isms” and “celebrations” represent “a pure or extreme version of the paradigm of enlightenment [which has been] articulated entirely or largely in terms of scientific progress [and] the mathematicization of human experience” (p. 15).32 Accom-panying this “extreme paradigm” and entirely inconsistent with it, Rosen says, has been an “extreme emphasis on fair-ness or egalitarianism and freedom from all forms of domi-nation.” According to Rosen, such a “brew” leads “directly to chaos.” “To my mind,” he says,


the results of the modern revolution are much worse than those of traditional metaphysics with respect to one crucial point. In each of its versions, the world of traditional metaphysics is defined by fundamental a priorai. But the world of post-traditional metaphysics is defined, if by anything, by an absence of foundations, and hence a fortiori by an absence of fundamental a priorai. The postmodern world is not a world at all but a chaos. (p. 165)

As Rosen suggests, proscience commentators like Raymo and his enlightened and educated colleagues give a very high profile to their commitment to “tolerance, openness, and free inquiry.” The intertwining of the quest for scientific certainty with this kind of “nonscientific” commitment can be seen as a reflection of the desire to find the eternal order and with it the human security that used be derived from religious belief. This desire is what science in fact takes for granted as it proceeds on its way. The “great theories” of science—Copernicanism, Evolutionism, the Big Bang, the Human Genome, Black Holes, and so on and their ongoing promises of an endless march toward yet further knowledge are at bottom efforts to fill the vacuum created by traditional theology’s demise. The Old God was the Alpha and Omega, the source of all order, meaning, justice, and morality, and the “New Story” strains every nerve in trying to be an effective replacement.

Science and Enlightened ReligionDuring the ascendancy of the Christian worldview, science had to take second place to the primacy of theology and could not claim to be the highest good in itself. It was sub-ject to the limitations required by the religious needs of the age. When the scientific enterprise was pursued under these “metaphysical” conditions, it was regarded as something more or less marginal and of little direct relevance to the community. It pursued the truth within the confines of tradi-tion and subject to the demands expressed by religious belief. In light of this earlier, subordinate role of science what seems to be at issue in the encounter between the scien-tists and the traditional believer in the moral world order is whether it is possible for the will to knowledge as seen in scientific investigation to limit itself to operating within boundaries supplied by a prior system of “metaphysics.” In the premodern era, the radical will to knowledge of this sort was denied.

Today, scientists calmly accept the worth and value of the scientific “establishment” and the science that it serves. They have long since decided that science is right and good, even as religionists had also previously concluded that ser-vice to the God of the Scriptures was right and good. The value of life to the scientist, we may surmise, is given in the fascinating discoveries of which scientific research permits.

This is a different locus of value to that of the believer but that it is just as much a conclusion with value implications is very evident in the moral observations of “empirio-positivists” like Raymo. Without really being aware of the fact, the attach-ment of these scientistically inclined philosophers to post-Copernican astronomical science, for example, does not really distinguish them psychologically from the scientists of the earlier Ptolemaic persuasion who saw an ordered universe with a place for man. Their equivalent faith in a moral world order is the faith that the progress of science is unqualifiedly good. The proof of this is simply that “it is there” and they have the natural capacities to engage in it. Their indifference to, or lack of entering seriously, the moral, social, and political problems engendered by modern science has engendered in modern society shows how this confidence in the neutral, “objective” unbiased character of their pursuit is a kind of screen that hides from them the nihilistic implications of modern science.33

In other words, whenever one is serious in one’s doubt of the final truth of modern science, the possibility that the theories of Copernicus, Newton, or Einstein are not the ulti-mate expressions of human knowledge and wisdom becomes open.34 The fact that a scientist like Raymo gives no indica-tion, let alone any account of an existential “moment” or “crunch” simply means that he has never really turned his attention with sufficient intensity and urgency to the possi-bility that atheism, nihilism, dogmatic skepticism, postmod-ernism, or whatever one might wish to call “true” or “final” science could have a debilitating impact on the actual prac-tical viability of what Rosen calls the politics of “egalitari-anism and freedom from all forms of domination.” Raymo has mistaken his liberation from the clutches of ordinary or traditional piety as an arrival at the pinnacle of wisdom. He, thus, is in need of the critical self-knowledge, which is the final standard for philosophy. He needs to ask Heidegger’s basic question concerning his own vocation:

If indeed, our own-most being (Dasein) itself stands before a great transformation . . . and if we have to face up to the foresakeness of modern man in the midst of what is, what then is the situation of science? (Heideg-ger, 1985, p. 474)

What indeed is Raymo’s answer to this question? As we have seen, it seems to be that the current situation calls for more strenuous efforts in the cause of public enlightenment using modern techniques such as filmmaking and these days by extension presumably “youtube.com uploading” and online course offerings. In other words, Raymo assumes that there is some uniquely ethical value to “sharing” knowledge with other human beings by means of the technological apparatus available at any given time. But as philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger repeatedly remind us, without some “Platonism” (to use Stanley Rosen’s terminology), it

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is impossible to claim that anything like the genuine communication of knowledge from one human being to another is possible. If science is incapable of any assertions relevant to actual human standards of justice and morality, how can there be anything properly called education as distinct from technical training?

It is perhaps easy to appreciate how the rapid advance of globalization in the spheres of business and finance, the academy, public administration, social interaction, and cul-tural expression might tempt some to proclaim that the “Brave New World” of “egalitarianism and freedom from all forms of domination” (Rosen, 1989) is at hand. All we must now do in order to see this wonderful consummation of the hopes of the Enlightenment is continue down the same road of ever more brilliant applications of technology to the vari-ous aspects of our individual and social existence. But if the globalized “atheo-technological” elites have been educated to understand that the Western tradition is a “metaphysical” one as well as one of science, then perhaps a change in over-all outlook is possible. The point here is that philosophy in the fullest sense of the term needs to play a role in the educa-tion of scientists in the postmodern era. Such a step is clearly indicated in the observations of commentators like Apple-yard and Rosen on the contemporary “situation” of science. To them it is evident that the prevailing scientific mind-set is in need of “humbling,” which is Appleyard’s particular phrase for the desired new attitude. The problem with mod-ern science in their view is one of the hubris inherited from the great days of scientific advancement in the 19th century. Such hubris even today constitutes an obstacle to a consider-ation of “first principles,” which is to say, consideration of Heidegger’s (2001) primal question “Why are there beings at all rather than nothing?” (p. 1).

Thus, it is Wilson (1999) who insists that those involved in the contemporary science versus religion debate “would benefit from a few months spent reading a third discipline—philosophy” (p. 178). This is especially the case Wilson thinks our age has seen a retreat from pure “scientism” at some level.

In our “post-modern” world there have been plenty of arts graduates and would-be clever thinkers prepared to borrow Kuhn’s words and say that science is, after all, only a paradigm, a way of talking about the uni-verse. . . . Science, they tell us, is only “true” in its own way. Theology could just as readily be true in another. (p. 178)

But at the heart of the matter Wilson (1999) insists is the fundamental question “of the non-fantastic nature of [the] postmodern point of view itself, which issue post-modernism sees no point in discussing (p. 178).35

So there can be no doubt that global-centric education for the 21st century must inevitably differ from that of an earlier

period that took shape at a time of scientific hubris and pro-gressive optimism. In this connection, it is very instructive to refer to the case of Henry Adams. He provides us with a unique account of having lived through the transition from the 19th to the 20th century even as we are living through the transition from the 20th to the 21st century. His voice seems especially relevant in our day, given that he frankly describes himself as incapable of making this intercentury transition, so vast had been the social and intellectual changes in his lifetime.

The Education of the Future, Or, Henry Adams ReduxHenry Adams was brought up in all the Victorian certainties, but having lived through to the World War I period, he was hurled willy-nilly into the post-Victorian order. “As a matter of taste,” Adams (1918) says of himself, “he greatly preferred his eighteenth-century education when God was a father and nature a mother, and all was for the best in a scientific universe” (p. 458). “He had seen four impossibilities made actual—the ocean-steamer, the railway, the electric telegraph, and the Daguerrotype” (p. 494). In short, it was impossible for a true Victorian to live in this new Universe. The Darwinians had “triumphed,” and the science of Kelvin and Curie had overturned all the old certitudes. Man “had translated himself into a new universe that had no common scale of measure-ment with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his sense” (pp. 381-382). Arthur Balfour had announced on the part of British science “that the human race without exception had lived and died in a world of illusion until the last year of the century” (p. 457). The “social mind” tried to respond to the “new force,” but “every day nature violently revolted, causing so-called acci-dents with enormous destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing at man, who helplessly groaned, shrieked and shuddered, but never for an instant could stop.” Adams says that “the railways alone approached the carnage of war” while “automobiles and fire-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became a nervous relaxation” (p. 495).

Adams’s (1918) point in all this is that modern scientific progress had reduced man to a “motion in a universe of motions, with an acceleration . . . of vertiginous violence.” True, for “the men who were elderly in the forties,” or the two generations who were “with John Stuart Mill,” there was a faith in a “stationary period, which was to follow the explo-sion of new power.” Indeed, for 50 years science “permitted or encouraged, society to think that force would prove to be limited by supply.” But this “mental inertia of science” lasted only through the eighties before “showing signs of breaking up.” Finally, the discovery of radium “fairly wakened men to the fact, long since evident, that force was inexhaustible.” “Power leaped from every atom,” and there was “enough of it


to supply the stellar universe . . . running to waste at every pore of matter.” Man found himself within the grip of forces that “grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile” (p. 494). At the end of the day, modern man had no control of his fate. Science now “lay in a plane where scarcely one or two hundred minds in the world could follow its mathematical processes.” The “doubling or quadrupling [of] its complexities every ten years” meant that an average mind “could no longer under-stand its problems” (p. 496).

Adams (1918) confesses that he himself could only aspire to be the docile “pupil” of the “new American” who had appeared on the scene and who was “the child of incalculable coal-power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined.” Such a type “must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature.” “At the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000 would . . . only wonder how [the nineteenth century] knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have done so much” (pp. 496-497). In other words, the rate of progress has been so rapid that the fibers of continuity cannot be held in tact. To educate for progress had become impossible precisely because education could not “keep up” with the changes it helped generate.

The attempt of the American of 1800 to educate the American of 1900 had not often been surpassed for folly; and since 1800 the forces and their complications had increased a thousand times or more. The attempt of the American of 1900 to educate the American of 2000, must be even blinder . . . The most elementary books of science betrayed the inadequacy of old implements of thought. . . . The movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer, it would require a new social mind. (pp. 497-498)

Adams (1918) explains that the 20th century was calling for a “new man”—“a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type” for whom the corporations and trusts would “pay millions at sight.” But this meant that “a nineteenth century education was as useless or misleading as an eighteenth century education had been to the child of 1838” (p. 501).

But for all this, Adams does not suggest for a minute that any effort should be made to stand athwart the tide. Rather he argues that the best thing to do at this point is in fact to “accelerate progress.” A “rigorous philosophy” requires such an approach because progress “was the mechanical law of the universe as science explained it” (p. 407). An added bonus here would be that “the present” about which “artists and some others [have] complained” would “get done with.” Thus, it is possible, Adams says, that in 1938, 100 years after his

birth, there might “for the first time since man began his edu-cation among the carnivores . . . [be] a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder” (p. 505).

The Rights of “Theology, Philosophy, or Politics”Adams died in 1918, and we have seen in the century since the radical transformation of the modern science upon which he was basing his conclusions. In light of quantum physics and relativity theory, we today might laugh at his idea that progress is “the mechanical law of the universe.” And the history of mankind since Adams’ passing certainly makes his hope that by 1938 we might live in “a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder” seem unut-terably naïve. But at the same time we look back at Adams with admiration because the daring foresight he showed in his day has become something like de rigeur reflection in ours. This is so much the case that The Education of Henry Adams should qualify as “scripture” in the global-centric studies needed today. The basic rethinking of modernity’s premises we see in Adams should in the future be taken as a sign of one’s globalized thinking. In the 21st century, the absence of a healthy skepticism with regard to modernity’s purposes should be associated not with an advanced and progressive outlook but rather with a lagging behind the times. Such an outlook should immediately identify its holder as unappre-ciative of the educational demands so brilliantly indicated by Adams, which are placed upon us by great scientific and technological transformations.

Deserving special mention in this respect is Francis Fukuyama for whom developments in the fields of neuro-pharmacology, genetic engineering, and other areas of biosci-ence such as in vitro fertilization, human-animal hybrids, and germ line engineering are a source of grave concern. Fukuyama feels the power of the drive to extend life to “Struldbruggian” levels, to be able to “order up” the perfect baby by checking off the boxes on the desired genetic charac-teristics form, and the confidence in psychotropic drugs as foreseen with Aldous Huxley’s “Soma.” The implicit goal of all these efforts is to remove from the human condition those things that we have assumed are inseparable from human life such as suffering, unhappiness, aging, and ultimately death itself. To continue on in this venture, Fukuyama (2002) insists, is unwise, and so he calls for an outright ban on clon-ing and the regulation and monitoring of the scientific research devoted to these ends. Fukuyama’s philosophical point is that with these technologies we are toying with our understanding of what it means to be human, which under-standing has hitherto provided the basis for our concepts of natural rights and human dignity. In a manner that might qualify Fukuyama as a “neo-Aristotelian” at some level, Fukuyama wishes to defend human nature defined as “some essential quality” involving “the sum of the behaviour and

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characteristics that are typical of the human species, arising from genetic rather than environmental factors.” For Fukuyama (2002), “human nature is the species-typical characteristics shared by all human beings qua human beings” (p. 130).

As with everything, Fukuyama (2002) writes, his “Resis-tance Campaign” to some of the new sciences has generated a lot of controversy and disagreement. His case for legisla-tive restrictions on biotechnology may be seen by some as an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle or to save the Titanic by bailing vigorously with a bucket. His definition of human nature has been accused of being terminally vague and of being unable to stand up to both the Darwinian truth about the nonexistence of permanent or fixed species, and the impulse to radical human liberation that drives the modern consciousness. But the practical limits to the relevance of Fukuyama’s case do not in any way diminish the signifi-cance of the instinct at work in his analysis. His plea is for a cautious and moderate attitude as distinguished from the approach symbolized by Clonia, the firm located in the Bahamas the goal of which is to be the first to land on the “clon-ing moon” (so to speak). Fukuyama’s reflections and those of other like-minded observers, of course, do not mean that the juggernaut of technoscience will be stopped in its tracks or even redirected from where it might primarily wish to go any time soon. But Fukuyama’s “Aristotelianism” has immediate relevance in its insistence that it is perfectly reasonable to stand against the likes of Representative Ted Strickland of Ohio who insisted in the debate about cloning legislation that “we should not allow theology, philosophy, or politics to interfere with the decision we make” (Levin, 2006).

Such a claim as Representative Strickland’s in effect asks us to hand over the community holus-bolus to scientific experimentation as though mankind has no way of knowing what is its good beyond the advancement of technoscience for its own sake. The problems and contradictions involved in attempting to sustain a case against open-ended technoscien-tific experimentation and its unregulated application to human life is one thing. The claim that there are no problems and contradictions involved in remaining on a course of open-ended and purely technological “willing” is another. All those who have looked behind the veil of optimistic rhetoric know that such a course is just as fraught with difficulties and conundrums as any of the skeptical critiques applied to it. Such critically minded observers should sympathize with the kind of “Aristotelianism” we see in Fukuyama’s “Essentialism” or Larry Arnhart’s (2010) “Darwinian Conservatism” (http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/) and other lines of thought that remain outside the pale of modern, scientific tri-umphalism. What is needed is a “Declaration of the Rights of Theology, Philosophy, and Politics” in order to make it clear to those who think along the lines of Representative Strick-land that if science has its rights to pursue its ends, then so too do those schools of thought that seek to bring science and its effects under social, political, and ethical scrutiny. That such

a “Declaration” is in line with the temper of the times is indi-cated by some of the characterizations of “Our Age” with which any reasonably well-informed observer should almost certainly have become familiar in recent generations. These include titles for our times such as “The Age of Uncertainty,” “The Age of Nihilism,” “The Age of the Masses,” “The Age of Dictatorships,” “The Age of Defeat,” “The Age of Anxi-ety,” and “The Age of the Absurd Expectations” (Barzun, 2000, p. 799). Such terms very much remind us that an educa-tion premised on an unreflective dedication to the “conquest of nature” and the “relief of man’s estate” is not a self-evi-dently sound formation with which to face “the human con-dition” in our time.36

ConclusionIn a recent interview, Woody Allen was asked, “What seems more plausible to you, that we’ve existed in past lives, or that there is a God?” Mr. Allen replied, “Neither seems plausible to me. I have a grim, scientific assessment of it. I just feel, what you see is what you get.” But such a “postmodern” view has not drawn the famous film director toward any suicidal abyss such as we see portrayed in some of his idol Ingmar Bergmann’s films. When asked what he does with his “down time between projects,” Mr. Allen spoke more like a denizen of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” than Nietzsche’s Mad-man in the square who also concluded that a true “scientific assessment” had made God “implausible.” “I do the usual stuff,” Allen replied.

I take my kids to school in the morning. I go for walks with my wife, play with my jazz band. Then there’s the obligation of the treadmill, and the weights, to keep in shape, so I don’t get more decrepit than I am.

A more “ordinary” private citizen, it is hard to imagine. But then we learn the reason why. In fact, Allen never thought for a minute that the ideas stemming from such thinkers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, and others, which we see reflected in the art of someone like Bergmann, were in fact food for his soul. When the interviewer announced that he “half-expected to see you at that 12-hour performance of Dostoyevsky’s Demons that Lincoln Center Festival produced over the summer,” Allen replied, “No, no, I’m a lowbrow. I read that material, more out of obligation than enjoyment. For enjoyment, for me, it’s a beer and the football game” (Itzkoff, 2010). Certainly, there is nothing wrong with enjoying a beer and a football game, whether one is a world-famous “existential” director or a “Parks and Recreation” worker in Peoria, Illinois. But coming from someone associated so famously with the “postmodern” or “existential” tradition, Allen’s dismissive attitude toward Dostoevsky is surprising. Mr. Allen could certainly be forgiven for being unwilling to undergo the ordeal of a 12-hour performance of Dostoevsky’s


Demons. But we might be inclined to fault him for not paying more heed to observations such as those we find in Aristotle’s (trans. 2009) Politics that “those then who seem to be the best-off and to be in the possession of every good . . . above all will need philosophy and temperance and justice.” A break from the treadmill and the football game for a glance at Aristotle might be just what Mr. Allen needs, along with we hasten to add all those who have seen one or more of his movies.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes

1. While his nonfiction work earned him a Lannan Literary Award in 1998, Raymo has also found time to produce four novels, one of which, The Dork of Cork (1993) was made into a film titled Frankie Starlight with the tagline “Sometimes the brightest star is the one that shines within.” The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg from Raymo’s screenplay and starred Gabriel Byrne, Niall Toiban, Corban Walker, and Anne Parillaud. The film tells the story of a certain dwarf named Walker whose life is divided between Ireland and America because of an unsta-ble family background, which in the end does not prevent him from becoming a writer.

2. Raymo’s other books include 365 Starry Nights (1982); Biog-raphy of a Planet (1984); The Soul of the Night (1985); Honey From Stone (1987); In the Falcon’s Claw (1990); Natural Prayers (2000); An Intimate Look at the Night Sky (2001); The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe (2003); Climbing Brandon (2004); Valentine (2005); Walking Zero (2006); When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy (2008).

3. Raymo (1998) is referring here to people like Ernst Nagel, W. V. O. Quine, Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Carl Gustav Hempel, Susanne [sic] Langer, Robert Lindsay, F. S. C. Northrop, Hans Reichenbach, and B. F. Skinner (p. 170). W. V. O. Quine responded to the classic line in Hamlet that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” with the reply, “Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth” (Raymo, 2008, p. 53).

4. “The belief accepted by the empiricists, according to which science is in principle susceptible of infinite progress, is itself tantamount to the belief that being is irretrievably mysterious” (Strauss, 1968, pp. 211-212).

5. Raymo’s general arguments conform perfectly to what Whitehead (1963) said is “characteristic of physical science,” which is to say that the “sphere of thought” that it always finds is “too wide” for its attention includes much too much (p. 117). But

interestingly enough, Whitehead goes on to envisage a time when the metaphysical and scientific tables will be turned and it will be science that will find itself in a disheveled state. It is entirely possible, he says, “that some distant generations may arrive at unanimous conclusions on ontological questions, whereas scientific progress may have led to ingrained oppos-ing veins of thought which can neither be reconciled nor aban-doned.” In such times, metaphysics and physical science “will exchange their roles.” We can even imagine a time in the future when metaphysics will be standing tall over the shambles of modern scientific thought. Whitehead is at odds here with his onetime colleague Bertrand Russell. Russell (1967) does not countenance Whitehead’s case that it is not the lack of real-ity that marginalizes metaphysics but its lack of agreement (p. 80). Heidegger is closer to Whitehead: “Whether the idea of metaphysica specialis can be developed in accordance with the concept of positive (scientific knowledge)—this is still to be decided” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 16).

Surely no man ought to let himself be bullied into accep-tance of an alleged solution—for the denial of the existence of a riddle is a kind of a solution of a riddle—by the threat that if he fails to do so he is a “metaphysician.” (Strauss, 1968, pp. 211-212)

6. The element of the “New Story” on which Raymo (1998) seizes in this context is its astronomical implications. “We are grudg-ingly willing, many of us, to entertain the notion of galaxies and the galactic eons in the backs of our minds, in a closed cupboard called ‘science.’ But we vehemently resist the human implica-tions of the New Story” (p. 245). Modern astronomy or Coper-nicanism had its martyr in the form of Giordano Bruno who cut a figure traveling around Europe preaching the infinity of the universe and got himself burnt at the stake for his troubles. (Collins, 1959, p. 14., pp. 20-29). Herbert Butterfield (1968) ex-plains that Bruno’s talk of the

actual existence of a plurality of worlds as a necessary corol-lary of the postulate of the universe’s infinity was dynamite from the Biblical Christian point of view. This inevitably led to the question: Did the human beings in other worlds need redemption? Were there to be so many appearances of Christ, so many incarnations and so many atonements throughout the length and breadth of this infinite universe? (pp. 56-57)

David Hume (1947) noted, “The modern system of astronomy is now so much received by all enquirers, and has become so essential a part of our earliest education, that we are not commonly very scrupulous in examining the reasons upon which it is founded” (p. 150). See also Barbour (1966, p. 49); Coulson (1961, pp. 27-28); Pelikan (1966, p. 58). 7. Hans Jonas (1974) observes of the shift brought about by

modern astronomy (Copernicus) in terms of the “upward revi-sion of cosmic magnitudes” was a case where “quantity turns

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into quality.” Or, stated more specifically, the “closed cosmos” consisting of “a well-proportioned distribution of entities occu-pying the space between the earth and the outer limit” would be supplanted by “the immense emptiness of a cavity in whose center huddled the solar system” and from there to “an open universe” (pp. 56-58). “The deification of the heavens or of the chief heavenly bodies is for the most naturally and universally operative reasons an element in all ancient religions (except the Jewish one)” (Jonas, 1963, p. 255). See Plato (1951, p. 49) and (1984a, pp. 66-67), and Figgis (1917). Pascal famously said, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” Chesterton (1955) adds, “I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances that are supposed to dwarf the world. I think there is even something a trifle vulgar this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size” (pp. 21-22).

8. In some remote corner of the universe, effused into innu-merable solar-systems, there was once a star upon which clever animals invented cognition . . . After nature had taken breath awhile the star congealed and the clever ani-mals had to die . . . There were eternities during which this intellect did not exist, and when it has once more passed away there will be nothing to show that it existed . . . it (is) purely human and none but its owner and procreator regards it so pathetically as to suppose that the world revolves around it. (Nietzsche, 1954a, p. 42)

9. “Now that his existence appears more arbitrary, beggarly, and dispensable in the visible order of things . . . has man become perhaps less desirous of a transcendent solution to the riddle of his existence?” “[Modern science’s] own pride, its own austere form of stoical atraraxy, consists in sustaining this hard-won self-contempt of man as his ultimate and most serious claim to self-respect” (Nietzsche, 1967b, pp. 155-166).

10. The scientific understanding implies then a break with the pre-scientific understanding, yet at the same time it remains dependent on the pre-scientific understanding. Regardless of whether the superiority of the scientific understanding can be demonstrated or not, the scientific understanding is sec-ondary or derivative . . . only if it possesses such a coherent and comprehensive understanding of its basis or matrix can it possibly show the legitimacy, and make intelligible the charac-ter, of that peculiar modification of the primary understanding of political things which is their scientific understanding. (Strauss, 1964, pp. 11-12)

11. Raymo says that the tendency of people like Appleyard (1998) is to “plead ‘faith,’ ‘revelation,’ and ‘tradition’ as the basis of rejecting the New Story, [while] forgetting that faith, revelation and tradition, if they are to mean anything at all, must be con-sistent with what our senses tell us is true” (p. 245). But John Dewey (1954) reminds us that

the limits and deficiencies of empiricism and positivism seem to have become apparent in the twentieth century

somewhat in the same way that the limits and deficiencies of the traditional and teleological view of the universe had become apparent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. (pp. 71-72)

12. It is worth noting that Raymo’s views are not confined to the secular, scientific, “intellectual” community. They can be heard from within the Church itself. In his famous and controversial book Honest to God, Bishop J. A. T. Robinson (1963) evinces a strong preference for Raymo’s more “natu-ralistic” religious approach (p. 13). “Since Hegel, and particu-larly through the work of Marx and Kierkegaard, the Chris-tianity of the bourgeois Christian world has come to an end” (Lowith, 1967, p. 385).

13. William Barrett (1986) explains that

it is well to remember that the profoundest and most poi-gnant sense of alienation is our cosmic alienation, which is inherent in human consciousness itself . . . Whether philoso-phy itself—that is a purely rational effort of mind—can heal this condition, remains to be seen. (pp. 8-9).

D. H. Lawrence (1980) says that “the cosmos became anathema to . . . the Protestants after the Reformation. They substituted the non-vital universe of forces and mechanistic order, every-thing else became abstraction and the long slow death of human being set in” (p. 31, p. 38).

14. Sigmund Freud (1964) says that the conflict represented by the fact that “it is precisely the elements . . . which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life . . . that are the least well authenticated of any” has caused “many brilliant intellects [to] have broken down.” “Many characters have [also] been impaired by the compro-mises with which they have tried to find a way out of it” (pp. 41-42).

15. Having been “born and raised” in the land of Nagel, Quine, Hempel and Carnap, Raymo is exceedingly concerned lest sci-ence and the Enlightenment be put on the run by “pseudo-sci-ence and fundamentalist religions” (Raymo, 1998, p. 165). The difficulty here is evident when Nathan Crick (2010) also calls our attention to the danger involved in working toward what he calls “political ecology” through “the further democratizing of science.” He suggests that “the rhetoric of science” may indeed engender “strong critiques of science” from

largely pre-modern partisan interests ready to exploit episte-mological critiques by pushing forward fundamentalist agendas on the back of postmodern relativism, as on display most vividly in the recent rhetoric of Intelligent Design and the criticism of connection between HIV and AIDS. (p. 128)

In other words, Crick (2010) has to acknowledge a deep con-nection between science and “postmodern relativism” and that if there is no more validity to the truth claims of modern science


than there are to “fundamentalist agendas,” then there are no grounds to reject the claims of intelligent design or the exis-tence of the “tooth fairy” come to that. The problem as he sees it is that as modern “epistemological critiques” proceed, the rhetoric of science “must reveal the moments of transformations along the inquiry process in which citizens have the greatest ca-pability for influence” (p. 128). Crick says he believes in radical democracy but at the same time he is deeply suspicious of citi-zens having this form of “influence.” Thomas Kuhn (1970) is free of Raymo and Crick’s angst about “fundamentalist agen-das.” He says that

Lifelong resistance to a new theory is not a violation of sci-entific standards. . . . Though the historian can always find men—Priestley for instance—who were unreasonable to resist as long as they did, they will not find a point at which resistance becomes illogical or unscientific. (p. 159)

Kuhn’s point is somewhat different from that of Kant and Heidegger who would say that nothing scientific could ever affect the fundamental question. But his point is that science is never final and therefore “it is not necessarily unreasonable to say that modern astrophysics may well at some point come around to orthodoxy’s geocentric view of the universe” (p. 159).

16. For Raymo (1998), science discovers truth by ensuring that its assertions correspond to what can be actually known about external reality, which he calls “the natural world.” It is there-fore only “ignorance” that could explain “the popular distrust of science” (p. 170). Contrary to Wilson’s suggestion, Raymo does not wish to plunge into the works of Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche in order to get to the bottom of “the problem of the external world” (to quote from Bertrand Russell).

17. This focus on “civilized living” seems to come to Raymo from one of his acknowledged mentors. Ernst Nagel (1990) says that “The atheist understands that rewards for moral endeavor must come from the quality of civilized living, and not from some source of disbursement that dwells outside time” (p. 597). According to Nagel, “atheistic thinkers have exhibited a liber-tarian attitude towards human needs and impulses” (p. 597; See Strauss,1988,p. 18). More specifically, it is evident to Nagel that atheists are morally superior to “nonatheists” because the “individualism that is so pronounced a strain in many philo-sophical atheists has made them tolerant of human limitations and sensitive to the plurality of legitimate moral goals” (p. 597). But Nagel does not hesitate to say that there are in fact “desirable patterns of human living” and that these can be in-fluenced one way or another by “institutional arrangements.” So it is evident that Nagel, too, like the “metaphysical theists” does have a conception (singular) of the “good life” or the “hu-man good”—it just differs in its (claimed) content from that of the nonatheist. But surely a consistent scientific atheist should have no conception of the human good of any kind whatsoever, if he or she is to avoid the taint of “metaphysics.” See Diggins (1995, pp. 476-478) on Richard Rorty.

18. “Bacon and at least some of his empiricist followers found it necessary to place Christian revelation beyond the destructive grasp both empiricist criticism and technologized domina-tion” (Fackenheim, 1994, pp. 154-155). “Protestantism does not mean the consummation of Christianity, but the beginning of its dissolution” (Lowith, 1967, p. 376). See Joyce (1972, p. 243); Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1958, pp. 59-60); Cox (1966, pp. 145-166); Callahan (1966); Berton (1965, pp. 94-98); Hume (1952, p. 502).

19. They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality . . . [but] when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet . . . Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. . . . [Christianity] has truth only if God is the truth—it stands or falls with faith in God . . . For the English morality is not yet a problem. (Nietzsche, 1954a, pp. 515-516)

“Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has yet heard anything of this, that God is dead?” (Nietzsche, 1966a, p. 12). See also Nietzsche (1974, p. 167, p. 181, p. 279) and Thatcher (1970).

20. Hence the only way of overcoming the naivete of the man from Missouri is in the first place to admit that that naivete cannot be avoided in any way or that there is no possible human thought which is not in the last analysis dependent on the legitimacy of that naivete and the awareness of the knowledge going with it. (Strauss, 1968, pp. 212-213; See Lecky, 1884, I, pp.204-208)

21. One reason Appleyard (2001) gives for this turn of events is that

since A Brief History, biology has taken over from physics in the popular imagination as the hottest field of contempo-rary science. Theoretical physics, we feel, is unlikely to affect our lives in the near future; biology already does, not least in our current anxiety about bio-terrorism.

22. More recently, Hawking seems to have retreated from the pos-sibility of knowing “the mind of God.” In The Grand Design (2010), he makes the case for the superfluity of God stating that “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” Thus, “it is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going” (Holden, 2010). This “adjustment,” however, would not fundamentally affect the tripartite comparison between Hawking, Raymo, and Appleyard given that Hawking never retreated from what Appleyard calls his “positivism” in the first place, that Raymo continues as a “religious naturalist,” and that Appleyard continues to deny that modern science can provide ultimate knowledge of any value humanly as distinguished from “theoretically” speaking.

23. Raymo does not adequately treat of the relation of modern sci-ence and Christianity, which forms the theme of so many of

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Nietzsche’s meditations. Nietzsche’s (1974) case is that the scientific tradition of the West is continuous with the dogmatic-theological tradition that preceded it. The modern scientist has a metaphysical faith in science just as St. Augustine had a meta-physical faith in the Heavenly City. “It is precisely in their faith in truth that [science’s] adherents are more rigid and uncondi-tional than anyone” (p. 307). Nietzsche’s argument is that it is not so much modern science as such but rather Christian moral-ity itself “that really triumphed over the Christian god.” This happened because after “two thousand years of truthfulness” the Christian conscience itself found it impossible to allow “the lie in the belief in God.” In other words, “Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality.” Moreover, “Chris-tianity as morality must now perish too” in exactly the same way. The momentousness of our time for Nietzsche is that we “stand on the threshold of this event” (1974, p. 307; 1967b, p. 161). Nietzsche says that it is now impossible to look at nature and history as forms of “continual testimony of a moral world order and ultimate moral purposes.” Such an attitude now has “man’s conscience against [it]” and is “considered indecent and dishonest by every more refined conscience” (Nietzsche, 1974, p. 307).

24. Nietzsche’s work is directly linked to names such as Stefan George, Max Scheler, Nikolai Berdayev, Oswald Spengler, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Andre Gide, Gottfried Benn, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Herman Hesse, W. B. Yeats, G. B. Shaw, Henri Bergson, A. N. Whitehead, Sigmund Freud, H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Andre Gide, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann who said “knowledge is the abyss.” See Kierkegaard (1955, pp. 150-151); James (1902, pp. 125-162); Heidegger (1967, pp. 205, 208, 217-218); Conrad (1969, p. 95).

25. It is Nietzsche (1966b) who said that “it is perhaps dawning on five or six minds that physics too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world [to suit us, if I may say so!] and NOT a world explanation.” “Most of what today displays itself as ‘objec-tivity’, ‘being scientific’ . . . ‘pure knowledge, free of will,’ is merely dressed up skepticism and paralysis of the will” (p. 130).

26. Zarathustra’s Shadow admits that for all his doubt and skepticism he just cannot stop “preaching.” He is the voice of “European dignity” and must roar like “a moral lion” before the “daugh-ters of the wilderness.” “For virtuous howling,” he explains, “is more than anything else European fervor, European ravenous hunger. And there I stand even now, As a European; I cannot do else; Gold help me! Amen” (Nietzsche, 1966a, p. 305, p. 309).

27. Nietzsche’s portrait of the scientific type is to be seen in “The Most Conscientious Man” in Part IV of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This individual’s specialization is the brains of the leech, a very miniscule thing physically speaking. But the “Most Conscien-tious Man” makes it clear that from his point of view leech brains have the same cognitive status the infinitely large heav-ens above. He relentlessly pursues knowledge of his “target” by scientific methods. “What difference does it make whether it is large or small?” he says (Nietzsche, 1966a, p. 250).

28. What the scientific liberal is especially unlikely to accept is Nietzsche’s implication that he is in fact a close kin to the likes of William Jennings Bryan and like him is desperately attempt-ing to convince himself that he lives in a universe of meaning. The scientific liberal, just as much as the “fundamentalist,” needs there to be a transcendent universal order where morality and justice matter in the scheme of things, when in truth the science to which he is attracted gives absolutely no warrant to think this is possible or even desirable.

29. “Today, as always, art must, willy-nilly, make Transcendence perceptible, doing so at all times in the form which arouses contemporary faith” (Jaspers, 1951, p. 141). Heidegger (1993) says that “creation, i.e., the metaphysical activity of art, re-ceives yet another essential impulse the moment we descry the most tremendous event—the death of God of morality” (p. 166, pp. 169-170). See also Heller (1965, p. 105); Peckham (1970, pp. 175-234); Mill (1961, p. 380); Kant (1956, p. 166); Gilson (1975, p. 79); Maritain (1952, p. 20); Solzhenitsyn (1990, pp. 624-625); Gadamer (1976, p. 100); Steiner (1992, p. 148, p. 156). Frankfort, Frankfort, Wilson, & Jacobsen (1946, pp. 12-15); Conrad (1967, pp. 57-59).

30. The Madman says,

Now that we have killed God . . . Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto. (Nietzsche, 1974, p. 181)

Even Nietzsche is compelled to posit the “Eternal Return of the Same” in order to make existence bearable, so it is perhaps a trifle strict to criticize Raymo for placing his hopes in a Reli-gion du Cinema we might say. Speaking of Heinrich von Kleist Nietzsche says, “And only the most active and noble spirits, those who could never endure living in a state of doubt, would experience a shattering and despair of all truth on the order which Heinrich von Kleist, for example experienced as an ef-fect of Kantian philosophy” (Nietzsche, 1995, p. 188). See also Heidegger (1982, pp. 59-60); Plato (1984b, Euthyphro 3cl-3); Aristophanes (1984, lines 1200-1215); Lewis (1946, p. 38); Toole (1980).

31. We might be more specific than Rosen here and say that theol-ogy and metaphysics were consigned to the scrap heap by the combined forces of Comteanism, Hegelian Idealism, Darwinian Evolutionism, and we may add here for good measure Marxian Materialism and Freudian Psychologism.

32. Nietzsche (1986) argues that to insist

that the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which . . . permits counting, calculating, weighing, see-ing and touching and nothing more—that is a crudity and naivete, assuming that it is not mental illness, an idiocy. (p. 203; 1974, pp. 334-336)


There is to be sure, a profound illusion that first saw the light of the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can pene-trate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capa-ble not only of knowing being but even of correcting it. (Nietzsche, 1967a, p. 95)

See Russell (1967, pp. 152-154); Stephen (1882, pp. 437-439); Veatch (1982, pp. 42-46).

33. Aristophanes (1984) makes the point by having Strepsiades exposed to some elementary lessons in natural science by the star-gazing philosopher Socrates. By the end of the play, the old codger has come a full circle through “enlightenment” back to his original piety. “Oh me! What derangement! How mad I was, when I even threw out the gods because of Socrates!” (“The Clouds,” line 1476, p. 175). The play concludes with Strepsiades seeking to engineer Socrates’ demise by burning down his little school.

34. Some indeed demand that even the impossibility for anything to be and not to be at the same time shall be demonstrated, but this they do through a want of education; for not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1006a5-12).

To be aware of the necessity of the fundamental reliance which underlies or pervades all empirical statements means to recognize the fundamental riddle, not to have solved it. But no man needs to be ashamed to admit that he does not possess a solution to the fundamental riddle. (Strauss, 1968, pp. 211-212)

35. Wilson singles out Kant in particular as being most relevant to the issue of the philosophical distrust of science.

Not enough scientists and not enough religious believers would seem to have absorbed the message of Kant—namely, that the human mind . . . is a doer, not just a contemplator. This does not mean that there is . . . no universe of science to explore, or no God for the soul to worship. Indeed, it was in the United States, not previously noted as a hotbed of philosophy, that these truths began to dawn, towards the close of the [nineteenth] century. (Wilson, 1999, p. 202)

36. “The philosophy of science, however you might call it, is inca-pable of giving an account of its own necessity at all. Practical usefulness is nothing to the theoretical case” (Strauss, 1979, pp. 111-118).

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Bio

Colin D. Pearce holds a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. He has published in a variety of journals, including the Canadian Journal of Political Science, The Journal of the History of Ideas, Interpretation, Perspectives on Politics, The Kipling Jour-nal, The Simms Review, South Carolina Review, Clio, Appraisal, The Explicator, and Quadrant. He was the William Gilmore Simms Professor at University of South Carolina in 2004 and is past president of the South Carolina Political Science Association. He has taught at a number of universities and colleges, most recently at the University of Guelph-Humber and the University of South Carolina Beaufort.

Future Technoscientific Education: Atheism and Ethics in a Globalizing World

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