I always liked Carl Sagan’s appreciation, summed up in the sub-title of “Demon-Haunted World”, of “Science as a Candle in the Dark”.
“Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”
To Gato’s point above (about the odds against which the Enlightenment rationalists squeeked through with the notion of a secular state in the U.S. constitution) should be added the howling disproportion of forces against which the scientific materialist worldview ever gained as much ground as it did! In light of the developments even over the few years since Sagan’s death, one must certainly part company with the social democratic school of Marxism, or vulgarized Darwinism, which presented, human progress as some inevitable and unstoppable force of history.
Sagan’s paragraph above is amazingly prescient about the whole current period. I can’t imagine a Sagan or a Stephen J. Gould (how sorely their voices are missed!) discussing skepticism and secularism, as Dacey does, as though the criminal U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t happening, let alone advocating tearing down the wall of separation.
Nothing is more foreign to a truly scientific approach, in my view, than the kind of effete intellectualism that ‘plays with concepts’ as if they had no relationship with the real world…
(A ps to Gato: Your posts are interesting, but they would be easier to read if you threw in the odd paragraph break!)
