A Short Note on Scidolatry
A wise and otherwise insightful political commentator was a lamenting the downfall of the Isle of Britain to the paynym savages, Moors, and Mohammadins, Communists and Jacobins currently overwhelming and dismantling that most august cradle of Western Liberty and rule of law, home of Milton and Shakespeare and Blackstone. He knew something was wrong, but could not put his finger on the source. He thought that it might be indeed the idolization and the glorification of science and reason in the modern era. He seemed not to realize that communism is a religion that speaks in the name of science and reason even while destroying science and reason. See Leninism or Lysenkoism for details.
Science and reason are useful tools when properly subordinated to Christian metaphysics. However making science into an idol, worshiping science, both destroys science and destroys worship.
Reason by definition, is rational, and all rational things have boundaries. Boundaries separates what is from what is not. Reason is helpless in areas, and touching on topics, that are beyond reason. Reason can be used to deduce truths that must be true once a spiritual mystery of revelation is revealed to man. But reason cannot know revelation, by definition, since revelation consists of those truth revealed by the Supreme Being from beyond the edge of the human world, beyond the reach of reason.
Science, used in its modern sense to mean natural philosophy, is an empirical study attempting to identify useful versus useless mathematical models of physical actions. The identification of a model as useless takes place on two fronts. First, the model is exposed to empirical verification of measurable predictions. When the predictions fail the model is discarded. Second the model is examined for its parsimony. If the model makes more assumptions that are needed to explain the results, the model is simplified or discarded. Both these rules require the models to be subject to skeptical scrutiny.
If science has made to an idol, if the pronouncements are taken on authority, as if revealed by Prophets, science halts. If science is upheld as a matter of consensus, and the unlikely alternate theory is discarded, not because it is untrue, but because it is unpopular, then science halts. Science made to serve social or political agendas is prostitution.
Worship is sacrifice. Christ has made all sacrifices into the one sacrifice of the crucifixion which is revisited every sacrificial Mass by the church founded by Christ. To place anything whatsoever on the altar of Christ, and to remove the Eucharist, is an action not just absurd blasphemy, but also of remarkable unreason. Unreason, because it’s substitutes false for true. It treats as a god something which is not a god. Science can solve technical problems, but it can make no comment on moral problems, political problems, artistic endeavors. It cannot raise the dead, nor comfort the widow.
It is no coincidence that the vast majority of those who elevate science to the divine status by making it the lodestar of their lives revile the sacrifice of the mass but condone the sacrifices of human lives and dignity to mass deception, mass appropriation, mass murder, abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, sexual perversion, and every enormity that befouls the singular memory the 20th century.
Human reason is a storytelling faculty. When the story is literal, we call it a scientific theory. When the story is figurative, he refers to those deeper topics that can only be understood in figurative ways, such as the truth told in myths.
Only one myth is also literally true. It is the central myth of Christendom, by which I mean, the central myth of Western Civilization. If the central myth is distorted or diseased, or the nonliteral parts of the myth are forgotten, or the literal parts of the myth are warped and distorted, then the myth ceases to reflect reality.
The civilization based on a false myth is false, and fails. A civilization based on a true myth is true, and flourishes.
Any merely secular analysis of the ills overtaking the West will only ever touch the surface of the matter. Mr. A Square of Flatland, witnessing an invading sphere from Spaceland, will wrongly see it as an expanding circle, and never guess the whole volume involved.
There’s no secular answer to spiritual failure. Christ is the answer.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
