The apparent manifestation of the "unscientific backlash," as we will call it, directs us back to our concern with the New Synthesis of faith and reason. It's quite obvious that these two world-views have time and time again established paradigms in every field of human activity; that they have been all-too-often paraded as mutually exclusive criteria for Truth, despite the intrinsic mutual dependency that exists between them; and that contemporary social phenomena evidence a strong inclination towards the reconciliation between their adherents. All that is left to be done is to bring some of these exemplary phenomena to light, so that the hypocrisy that feeds the perpetual battle between the two might be exposed and eliminated.
Reason in Faith: Let's begin with the adherents of faith. The Roman Catholic Church is the most influential faith-based institution in the world, and as such represents the greatest threat to reason that has ever existed: I refer you all to the fates of Galileo and Descartes, whose scientific milestones were assailed with the stinking muck of heresy, insubordination and atheism before finally reaching their public's awareness. More importantly, I ask you to examine the "dogma" that stands as a prerequisite to the "profession of faith": it includes such bizarreries as Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception and Resurrection After Death. Obviously, none of us were there to witness these miracles - we are instructed to accept them upon faith alone.
But then what, according to the instructors, is this faith? From what I have seen, their "faith" consists of argumentation, syllogism and vast cobwebs of cold, calculated, often circular - reason. Take a listen, if you will, to the subterranean rumblings emanating from the caves of the Vatican: you will hear an army of apologentsia, devising rudimentary Aristotlean equations in order to prove that Christ rose from the dead, after having been conceived by a Virgin. They are out to devise geometrical proofs for the very mysteries that are to be accepted upon faith, and the laboratories in which they work are of a decidedly Frankenseinean nature.
It should be clear to anyone without conceptual cataracts that the miracle-mystery dogmatism of the Catholic Church is nothing more than a crooked spinning wheel of social control, designed to keep even the most astute intellects occupied so that the political pressure-cooker might go on boiling undetected. But what concerns us here is the fact that reason has been employed to buttress faith - even in cases where the faith has gone bad. Despite their cries against the scientific community for trying to introduce reason where reason doesn't belong, the bedrock of Christian dogmatism is being reinforced with logical rebar.
Faith in Reason: The scientific community represents humanity's immense investment in the power of reason; let us then address their method, for as we will discover, faith plays a critical role therein.
The first assumption - that reason is capable of arriving at Truth - is an assumption which must be accepted upon faith alone. There is no way to prove that the products of reason are in any way congruent with what we call Truth, no more than we can prove that Truth actually exists independent of human consciousness. The attempt to drive out faith from the scientific realm is a pipe-dream; if this purging were actually realized, the vast bodies of knowledge that science has accumulated would fall into the same irreparable senselessness in which the theologians anguish daily. We require an immense amount of faith in our own reason to even arrive at the possibility of employing the scientific method.
The second assumption - that the Truth arrived at by reason is justified by experimentation - is also a faith-based assumption. In order to assert that, for instance, the theory of relativity correctly predicts the bending of light around high-mass astronomical bodies, one has to put a great deal of faith in one's eyes and instruments - how else would we then know that we are even witnessing an eclipse? What in the hell would the term "observation" mean, if we didn't trust the proper functionality of our cornea-lens-retina-nervous-system combo? The entire undertaking which we call "experimentation" has been constructed on these two basic assumptions - that reason leads to Truth, and that our observations of the world are reliable. And I thought I heard the scientists say that assumptions were to be left to the religious..?
The Backlash of Irrationality: It is clear (I hope) that the two most prevalent world-views, pronounced the one by the other to be antithetical and mutually incompatible, are indeed intertwined in ways that would lead us to believe that they are in fact mutually dependent - i.e. faith cannot exist without reason, and vise versa. The eventual synthesis of these two perspectives has already begun - has been underway, perhaps, since their conception - but is being achieved through a number of successive oscillations, at the extremes of which one of the two is demonized, and the other glorified. At the moment, as I stated in a previous post, we are witnessing a shift away from the cold logic of the twentieth century to a more aesthetic perspective that values the multifarious, the vague, and the ability to interpret. What I hope to have shown here is that, even during the periods of extreme faithfulness (during which rationality is demonized), there is a great deal of rationalization employed in the service of faith; and conversely, that when rationality is held to be the only method of attaining Truth (to the exclusion of belief), there is much faith required to justify that position.
I cannot at this point determine whether or not these two tendencies will ever coalesce into one unified paradigm from which we may move beyond their respective limits; nor can I really imagine what such a paradigm might resemble, or what will be raised up against it as the New Antithesis. All I can ask - and I ask this of the Scientist, the Priest, the Politician and the Everyman - is that the idea of a synthesis be seriously entertained. With all the current limitations on knowledge and epistemology, it seems reasonable to assume that an alternative criteria for Truth would be welcomed.
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