Category Archives: Secularization

Why the Plausibility of Unbelief?

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A question that has haunted me for years is this: why do modern people feel that God is absent from their daily experience of the world and themselves? In much of my reading over the last decades I’ve looked for an answer to this question. I recently read an excellent book that directly addresses this issue: Joseph Minich, Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age (2023). Minich attempts to explain why, in contrast to premodern people, moderns don’t sense God’s presence in the world. Perhaps I will review this book in the future. It is not an easy read!

In the course of making his argument, Minich quotes a section from Max Weber’s 1917 essay “Science as a Vocation.” In that section, Weber addresses the subject of the difference between how modern people experience nature and their own lives and how premodern people experienced them. He focuses on two experiences: (1) whereas premodern people experienced nature as mysterious and active, we expect everything to be rational and mechanical; (2) whereas premodern people as they approached death after a long life could feel fulfilled and satisfied, many modern people feel like they are missing out on future goods. Death seems arbitrary and meaningless. Listen to the great German sociologist:

Weber on the Disenchantment of Nature

“Scientific progress is … the process of intellectualization which we have been undergoing for thousands of years.

“Let us first clarify what this intellectualist rationalization, created by science and by scientifically oriented technology, means practically. Does it mean that we, today, for instance, everyone sitting in this hall, have a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist than has an American Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly. Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may ‘count’ on the behavior of the streetcar, and he orients his conduct according to this expectation … The savage knows what he does in order to get his daily food and which institutions serve him in this pursuit. The increasing intellectualization and rationalization do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.

“Now, [concerning] this process of disenchantment, which has continued to exist in Occidental culture for millennia, and, in general, this ‘progress,’ to which science belongs as a link and motive force…do they have any meanings that go beyond the purely practical and technical? You will find this question raised in the most principled form in the works of Leo Tolstoi. He came to raise the question in a peculiar way. All his broodings increasingly revolved around the problem of whether or not death is a meaningful phenomenon. And his answer was: for civilized man death has no meaning. It has none because the individual life of civilized man, placed into an infinite ‘ progress,’ according to its own immanent meaning should never come to an end; for there is always a further step ahead of one who stands in the march of progress. And no man who comes to die stands upon the peak which lies in infinity. Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died ‘ old and satiated with life ‘ because he stood in the organic cycle of life; because his life, in terms of its meaning and on the eve of his days, had given to him what life had to offer; because for him there remained no puzzles he might wish to solve; and therefore he could have had ‘enough’ of life. Whereas civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become ‘tired of life’ but not ‘satiated with life.’ He catches only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit brings forth ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by its very ‘progressiveness’ it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness.”

Thoughts on Disenchantment

Concerning the first issue, disenchantment of nature, modern people tend to treat nature as we treat our own technology. Because our creations come from the human mind—even if not my mind—we believe we could understand them if we tried. No human creation is utterly alien and mysterious. We have been seduced by a superficial understanding of natural science into thinking nature is simply a highly complex machine rather than a deep mystery. Given time, we could understand it as clearly as we see through our own creations.

Concerning the second issue, the meaninglessness of death, I get it. Sometimes I feel something like what Abraham may have felt. I have passed through many stages of life already and, as I grow older, I feel content that this life will be enough. At other times, I feel as though I’ve only tasted a little bit of what may come to be in the future after centuries of technological progress. Hence, I feel sadness at my insignificance and therefore meaninglessness.

Perhaps we moderns cannot fully re-enchant and recover the magic and glory of nature. But I believe that discovering why we moderns don’t often experience a divine presence in nature and our lives is the first step in the process of recovering our sense of God’s presence. The second step is to return to nature with new eyes viewing it not as a machine but a living work of art and a theater of divine beauty. Others include rediscovering the meaning divine providence and omnipresence and learning to worship.

Galileo, What Hast Thou Wrought?

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Today we continue our study of how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of intelligent people. The previous essay explained why no one before 1500 could have comprehended the modern dichotomy between the external appearances of such things as the male and female bodies and their internal reality. At the conclusion of that essay, I promised that in the next part “we will see how the architects of the scientific revolution—Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, et al.—destroyed confidence in the reality of forms and souls and replaced them with atoms, space, and machines. The appearances no longer reveal the reality of things. Creation is emptied of spiritual reality, meaning, purpose, moral law, and beauty, all of which are transferred to the inner subjective world of the human mind.” We begin that saga with Galileo Galilei.

Galileo Versus Aristotle

Students of nature before Galileo assumed that the way things appear to us reveals something about their inner reality and that the inner reality of things manifests itself truly in their external appearances. The meaning, purpose, beauty, moral law, and value we experience in our minds also exists in nature. The goal of Aristotelian science was understanding how all these qualities are embedded in the natures of the things themselves. However, by the time Galileo (1564-1642) came to maturity in the early seventeenth century, such thinkers as Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) were already complaining that the doctrine of forms contributed nothing to our empirical understanding of things. Mysterious forms, whether they are real or not, cannot be clearly thought and have no value for making predictions, discovering laws, and creating technology. And for reasons I do not understand, achieving these goals had become the driving force of the emerging scientific revolution.

Galileo and the Mathematization of Nature

Galileo believed that applying mathematics to nature was the only way to achieve his practical goals. Numbers and mathematical operations are clear and simple, and when we see the value of a mathematical expression or equation, we become certain of its truth. To understand nature, argued Galileo, we should set aside questions about its mysterious inner nature, the ways it appears to us, and the way it makes us feel; these are irrelevant to achieving the goals of the new science. We will then be free to work out the mathematical laws of nature’s movements and transformations. At last, we can understand nature as clearly as we understand mathematics!

Unforeseen and Unintended Consequences

To modern ears, Galileo’s philosophy of science and his revisions to the scientific method sound familiar and innocent. Whatever Galileo’s intentions, however, his innovations produced a profound moral and religious revolution. For by limiting science to knowledge that can be expressed in mathematics, Galileo, Descartes, et al, broke decisively (1) with the traditional belief that things reveal their inner reality in their outward appearances, and (2) with the corresponding belief that the inner worlds of things in nature are intelligible and mindlike in a way similar to the inner world of the human mind.

The Distinction Between Primary and Secondary Qualities

Perhaps Galileo and other pioneers of the scientific revolution could have narrowed science to what can be understood in mathematical terms without postulating an alternative to Aristotle’s intelligible forms as the cause of the way things appear to us. But they did not exercise such restraint. Instead, they replaced Aristotle’s inner forms and souls with imperceptible material atoms or corpuscles, which possess only mathematically measurable properties: shape, movement, mass, velocity, etc. In ways Galileo and Descartes cannot explain, these material particles cause us to experience the world in a human way. By distinguishing primary qualities (material, mechanical, and mathematical) from secondary qualities (psychological, organic, and qualitative), they drove a wedge between the way human beings experience the world and the world as it is apart from human perception. The only bridge between the two is mathematics. Listen to Galileo, Descartes, and Locke drive this point home:

“To excite in us tastes, odors, and sounds I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow or rapid movements. I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds. The latter, I believe, are nothing more than names when separated from living beings, just as tickling and titillation are nothing but names in the absence of such things as noses and armpits” (The Assayer, 1623).

“The properties in external objects to which we apply terms light, color, smell, taste, sound, heat and cold—as well as other tactile qualities…are so far as we can see, simply various dispositions in the shapes, sizes, positions, and movements of their parts which make them able to set up various kinds of motions in our nerves which are required to produce all the various sensations in the soul” (Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy, 1644; Quoted in Cottingham, A Descartes Dictionary, p. 149).

“These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz. solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e. by bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colors, sounds, tastes, etc. These I call secondary qualities”(John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1698, II. 8)

Oh Galileo! What Hast Thou Wrought?

Galileo convinced the world that the variety and obscurity of the natural order could be reduced to the clarity and certainty of simple mathematical equations. Modern advances in understanding the mathematical laws of nature and the explosion of technological innovation rely on this supposition. But at what cost?  God’s glorious creation has fallen silent, emptied of spiritual reality, meaning, depth, mystery, purpose, moral law, and beauty, all of which have been transferred to the inner subjective world of the human mind. But how can we continue believing in the reality of meaning, depth, mystery, purpose, moral law, and beauty, if we think of them as existing only in the human psyche? They seem to be hanging in midair with no confirmation in common experience or foundation in an enduring reality.

Aristotle and all the ancients believed in the likeness and harmony between the human world and the natural world. This belief seemed reasonable, obvious even, because humans are part of the natural world. Galileo, Descartes and others split them apart, dividing the qualities we experience into the objective (real) and subjective (psychological) spheres. Human beings became islands of mind in a sea of mindless matter. It was inevitable that this division would become intolerable…that the human mind and soul would be reunited to nature by reducing them to something simpler. Sooner or later some thinker would do to the human soul what Galileo had done to the solar system.

And that “someone” was John Locke.