“Science has taken away our religion,” he laments. And what sort of religion is it that he longs for? One in which “the human race was the point, the heart, the final cause of the whole system. It placed our selves definitively upon the universal map.”… “We were the end, the purpose, the rational axle around which the great aetherian shells rotated.” He longs for “the universe of Catholic orthodoxy” in which “the cosmos is shown to be a machine constructed around the drama of salvation”—by which Appleyard means that, despite explicit orders to the contrary, a woman and a man once ate of an apple, and that this act of insubordination transformed the Universe into a contrivance for operant-conditioning their remote descendants.
By contrast, modern science “presents us as accidents. We are caused by the cosmos, but we are not the cause of it. Modem man is not finally anything, he has no role in creation.” Science is “spiritually corrosive, burning away ancient authorities and traditions. It cannot really co-exist with anything.”… “Science, quietly and inexplicitly, is talking us into abandoning our selves, our true selves.” It reveals “the mute, alien spectacle of nature.”… “Human beings cannot live with such a revelation. The only morality left is that of the consoling lie.” Anything is better than grappling with the unbearable burden of being tiny.
In a passage reminiscent of Plus IX, Appleyard even decries the fact that “a modern democracy can be expected to include a number of contradictory religious faiths which are obliged to agree on a certain limited number of general injunctions, but no more. They must not burn each other’s places of worship, but they may deny, even abuse each other’s God. This is the effective, scientific way of proceeding.”
But what is the alternative? Obdurately to pretend to certainty in an uncertain world? To adopt a comforting belief system, no matter how out of kilter with the facts it is? If we don’t know what’s real, how can we deal with reality? For practical reasons, we cannot live too much in fantasyland. Shall we censor one another’s religions and burn down one another’s places of worship? How can we be sure which of the thousands of human belief systems should become unchallenged, ubiquitous, mandatory?
These quotations betray a failure of nerve before the Universe its grandeur and magnificence, but especially its indifference. Science has taught us that, because we have a talent for deceiving ourselves, subjectivity may not freely reign. This is one reason Appleyard so mistrusts science: It seems too reasoned, measured, and impersonal. Its conclusions derive from the interrogation of Nature, and are not in all cases predesigned to satisfy our wants. Appleyard deplores moderation. He yearns for inerrant doctrine, release from the exercise of judgment, and an obligation to believe but not to question. He has not grasped human fallibility. He recognizes no need to institutionalize error-correcting machinery either in our social institutions or in our view of the Universe.
This is the anguished cry of the infant when the Parent does not come. But most people eventually come to grips with reality, and with the painful absence of parents who will absolutely guarantee that no harm befalls the little ones so long as they do what they are told. Eventually most people find ways to accommodate to the Universe—especially when given the tools to think straight.
“All that we pass on to our children” in the scientific age, Appleyard complains, “is the conviction that nothing is true, final or enduring, including the culture from which they sprang.” How right he is about the inadequacy of our legacy. But would it be enriched by adding baseless certainties? He scorns “the pious hope that science and religion are independent realms which can easily be separated.” Instead, “science, as it is now, is absolutely not compatible with religion.”
But isn’t Appleyard really saying that some religions now find it difficult to make unchallenged pronouncements on the nature of the world that are straight-out false? We recognize that even revered religious leaders, the products of their time as we are of ours, may have made mistakes. Religions contradict one another on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods.
Science has brought many of us to that state in which Nathaniel Hawthorne found Herman Melville: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.” Or Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “They had not persuaded me, but they had troubled me. Their arguments had shaken me without ever convincing me… It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires.” As the belief systems taught by the secular and religious authorities are undennined, respect for authority in general probably does erode. The lesson is clear: Even politics] leaders must be wary of embracing false doctrine. This is not a failing of science, but one of its graces.
Of course, worldview consensus is comforting, while clashes of opinion may be unsettling, and demand more of us. But unless we insist, against all evidence, that our ancestors were perfect, the advance of knowledge requires us to unravel and then restitch the consensus they established.
In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.
If you lived two or three millennia ago, there was no shame in holding that the Universe was made for us. It was an appealing thesis consistent with everything we knew; it was what the most learned among us taught without qualification. But we have found out much since then. Defending such a position today amounts to willful disregard of the evidence, and a flight from self-knowledge.
Still, for many of us, these deprovincializations rankle. Even if they do not fully cant’ the day, they erode confidence—unlike the happy anthropocentric certitudes, rippling with social utility, of an earlier age. We long to be here for a purpose, even though, despite much self-deception, none is evident. “The meaningless absurdity of life,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, “is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.” Our time is burdened under the cumulative weight of successive debunkings of our conceits: We’re Johnny-come-latelies. We live in the cosmic boondocks. We emerged from microbes and muck. Apes are our cousins. Our thoughts and feelings are not fully under our own control. There may be much smarter and very different beings elsewhere. And on top of all this, we’re making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves.
The trapdoor beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall. We are lost in a great darkness, and there’s no one to send out a search party. Given so harsh a reality, of course we’re tempted to shut our eyes and pretend that we’re safe and snug at home, that the fall is only a bad dream.
We lack consensus about our place in the Universe. There is no generally agreed upon long-term vision of the goal of our species—other than, perhaps, simple survival. Especially when times are hard, we become desperate for encouragement, unreceptive to the litany of great demotions and dashed hopes, and much more willing to hear that we’re special, never mind if the evidence is paper-thin. If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?