The Uses and Abuses of Paranoia
by David Warren - November 27, 2007
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
In my daily newspaper columns, I have recently tried the experiment of writing directly about the postmodern explosion of scientism. This pertains to discussions of global warming, intelligent design, political correctness, and many other things – but it goes much deeper. Had I a book to fill (and perhaps I do), I would follow the argument back into history. For it seems to me the chief threat to Christianity in our era does not come from Islam, nor even from the moral decadence of our society, per se. It comes from a scientistic worldview that constitutes an alternative, atheistic religion – and the fact that we are caught in the middle between it and a resurgent Islam. No general could wish to battle on two fronts.
The key article of the postmodern atheist creed is that, in the world today, science has replaced religion as the commanding authority – indeed, the only possible authority – on all questions, great or small. In theory, only empirical inquiry is allowed, philosophical thought is disallowed, and if there are any questions that science can't answer, they must not be asked. (In practice, many forms of empirical inquiry are also disallowed, if they offer a challenge to the atheist creed.)
Reviewers have noticed the religious zeal behind the angry atheist tracts that have been dominating the bestseller lists recently – by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Michel Onfray, Daniel Dennett, and so on. Yet the proposition that "God is dead" is hardly new. We have a visceral attack on all revealed religion, and even a program for an alternative scientistic religion – but one in which the destruction of all metaphysics and theology has been completed, and a bold step has been taken beyond "God is dead."
For the proponents of scientism are now effectively proclaiming that "Man is dead."
Of God, Jean-Paul Sartre could say, more succinctly than the authors listed above, "He does not exist, the bastard!" But implicit in Sartre, and in this very statement, was a continuing quasi-faith in the ontological uniqueness of man. The key point of philosophical Darwinism – that there is nothing special about man, that he is just one primate among many – is only today being fully absorbed. This is an attack upon even a "de-mythologized" form of Christianity. It is a declaration of war on the Catholic Church, which continues not only to uphold the doctrine that man is created in God's image, soul by unique soul, but to pronounce this aloud and publicly.
Strange to say, we are harvesting today seeds planted by such as Francis Bacon and René Descartes nearly four centuries ago – the one by banning final causality from his scheme for "scientific method," the other by twisting several of the received terms of scholastic philosophy in a mechanistic way. It has taken all this intervening time for the full consequences of these accomplishments to be realized, through all of which time, I have come to believe, the final battle between scientism and Christianity has been developing.
Christianity will continue to retreat until we recognize the fight we are in, and the stakes for all men – for, if man is not ontologically unique, not only Christianity but every possible form of humanism is dead.
Am I being paranoid?
This is certainly the view of several of my most intelligent and conservative non-Christian correspondents. I think of one in particular, the most articulate and outwardly reasonable, who says, apropos my worries about Darwinian scientism, and in light of my murmurings against those atheistical tracts, that Christians are paranoid. He says this good-naturedly enough, while assuring me he is not himself in the least afraid of Christianity, since it seems to him to be gently fading away. On the other hand, he admits to his own paranoia about the spread of Islam. How to answer him?
