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CHAPTER XII

THE WORSHIP OF REASON

He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. -Job 5 : 1 3

       Christianity has sometimes displayed a genius for supporting the right position with the wrong reasons. It thereby does a disservice both to itself and to the truth which it defends, for people will assume that its affirmations are as faulty as the reasons it gives in their support. An outstanding example is its attitude toward the behavior and morals of non-Christians, Regrettable though these may be, the appropriate reaction is not simply to pronounce judgment and hurl anathemas. A far more responsible and painstaking procedure is called for, one which is based upon the distinctively Christian analysis of human nature. As was established in Chapter IV, the proper definition of man is “religious animal,” “homo religiosus,” a view which rests squarely upon an analysis of human freedom and all that it entails.

       In every act of choice there is at least a tacit reference to some standard of value external to oneself. This source from which a man takes his values, whatever it may be, functions as his “god.” In this functional sense of the word no free agent is without his “god.” The particular set of values with which it furnishes him governs his specific decisions and in this way determines the quality of his entire life. He has no choice between atheism and theism but only a choice between gods. And every god stamps his worshiper with his own trade-mark. The crucial question for every human life therefore is: Which is the true god? Not until this question has been settled can one designate the other “gods” as idols and their worship as sin.

       It is therefore futile to object to pagan or “secular” values on the grounds that they are sinful. They are only sinful if the gods which sponsor them are false. The appropriate Christian reaction is therefore not indiscriminate denunciation but a careful examination of the claims of these gods and an expose of their shortcomings.

       With characteristic wisdom the Bible’s primary criticism of pagan nations is that they “know not the Lord.” If they did, they would behave differently, or would at least acknowledge a criterion by which their conduct could be judged. Until they do, it is futile to rail

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against them. With the children of Israel, on the contrary, to whom the Lord has made himself known, it is entirely otherwise. They do have the “right” criterion but fail to live up to it. They acknowledge a frame of reference within which “our sins testify against us” (Isaiah 59 :I z ) . The ultimate sin for those who have known the true God is of course apostasy. To transfer allegiance from Yahweh to Baal is both the worst offense and the source of all other transgressions. No language is too strong for the prophets in their campaign against a “faithless generation” gone “whoring after false gods:” But they reserve it for those who know better.

       At the present time many theologians are keenly aware of the Church’s tendency to forget the wisdom of the prophets and instead to belabor with moral strictures a generation which stands outside a Christian frame of reference and for which the word “sin” is consequently meaningless. The tendency today is to recognize that “sin” is relative to the “God” a man worships. We are rediscovering where the issue really lies. Men’s value judgments, though supremely important, cannot be debated on their own merits. They are derivative from men’s ultimate allegiance. Life is recognized today, as it has not been for several hundred years, as a battle of the gods.

THE DUPLICITY OF ALL FALSE GODS

       At one point, however, contemporary thinking has not yet caught up with the Bible. Having traced men’s values to their origin in ultimate commitment, it is diffident about adducing any criterion for distinguishing false gods from the true one (see Appendix). Here again the prophets were wiser than we. They knew that the truth must have some reason to commend it. Aware that the individual’s value judgments are relative to his god, and therefore not directly debatable, they never doubted that the true God would vindicate himself. The classic picture of this prophetic confidence is Elijah’s charge to an apostate people: “If Yahweh be God, then follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” He then proposes a very concrete test by which the false gods are exposed as frauds. This is the basic prophetic method of dealing with idols: to show that they cannot deliver on their promises. They entice their worshipers with glittering prospects and then visit them with cruel disillusionment. As Elijah taunts the priests of Baal: “Cry aloud; for he is a god: either he is musing, or he is gone aside, or he is on a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth

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and must be awaked.” (1 Kings 18:27.) Because of the prophet’s confidence in what the true God can do, he welcomes a test by which his impersonators can be unmasked.

       An idol is a mountebank par excellence. The devil really is the father of lies. The worshiper of a false god is always foredoomed to betrayal. The story of Eve’s temptation is a perfect illustration. When she allowed herself to be persuaded that her true interest lay in trust the serpent’s word instead of God’s, she brought about her own undoing.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise (all false promises implanted by the serpent), she took the fruit thereof, and did eat. (Genesis 3:6.)

       Pagan philosophers and poets have stumbled upon this tendency of men to make unto themselves false gods and thereby destroy themselves. Before they can fit it into the pagan thought-world, however, they must first transpose it into something entirely different. By the time it has been digested by their impersonal categories it comes out as the famous “tragic view of life,” according to which all human greatness necessarily runs amuck. Whether due to the jealousy of the god, as in some Greek drama (the original “tragedy”), or to a built-in metaphysical necessity, as in a philosopher like Schopenhauer, human frustration is held to be an ultimate law of life. Devotion to the good involves a man in hideous evil ( like Creon in Antigone); the highest wisdom inflicts its possessor with blindness (Oedipus); exceptional natural ability brings upon a man his own destruction (Ajax).

       It is understandable that nations who “know not the Lord” should regularly arrive at the “tragic view of life.” Within their own frame of reference it is about as close as they could come to an awareness that idolatry, rather than an inscrutable Fate, is responsible for human catastrophe. For the Bible, on the contrary, only devotion to the wrong “good” results in evil; only wisdom directed to mistaken ends turns into blindness; only natural ability in the service of false gods issues in destruction.

       Failure to distinguish clearly between the biblical and tragic views as mutually exclusive alternatives can lead to all manner of confusion and mischief. The following lines are a perfect illustration:

There is a . . . tragic law which controls the historical process, the law which ordains that human greatness utterly fall. There is human greatness

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in history . . . there are creative spirits and even some which have the power of knowledge and understanding. But just in being great and powerful and righteous they touch the divine sphere, and they become arrogant, and they are brought to nothing. They are without roots; they wither; the divine storm blows over them, and they vanish. That is the subject of Greek tragedy. That is the message of the prophet to the nations of the world. They are all subject to the law of tragic self-destruction . . . .¹

       The difference between the tragic and the biblical view, which the foregoing passage obscures, can be quite clearly stated. For the former the downfall of human greatness is automatic; for the latter it is due to misplaced allegiance. In the technical sense of the word it is not at all “tragic” because not necessary. In the more popular sense of the word it is all the more “tragic” for being avoidable. The real pathos of human life is that it can be so great, while men continue to make it so miserable, for themselves and for each other.

       The professional pessimist sees one half the picture, the professional optimist the other. The former calls the latter superficial and is in turn pronounced defeatist. Each possesses a distorted fragment of the Christian truth. The Bible’s realism exceeds that of the worst cynic, for it knows what man has done to God. At the same time its hope surpasses the wildest utopian fantasy, for it has concrete experience of what this same God will do for man.

       An entire book could be devoted to this subject without exhausting it. For present purposes it suffices to expose the inner dynamics of idolatry by means of one full-dress example and then to cite more briefly in the following chapter additional illustrations of the same pattern.

THE RECORD OF THE GOD OF REASON

       No idol, in ancient times or modern, has had a more consistent appeal than Human Reason. Lest this be misconstrued as an assault upon reason, let the chief characteristic of idolatry be emphasized once more. It always visits its victims with the opposite of what they expect. A critique of the idolatry of Reason is therefore undertaken, not in disparagement of intellect, but in its defense. The present

¹Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), pp. 19f. My italics. The distinction between a Christian and a tragic view of life is persuasively drawn by Reinhold Niebuhr in his Beyond Tragedy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938).

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analysis will therefore argue that, when Reason is deified, its worshipers are led into blind irrationalism. If this can be demonstrated, the obvious implication is that the goal of complete reasonableness can only be achieved in a context of allegiance to the true God. Men may then take seriously the prophetic warning:

They that fashion a graven image are all of them vanity . . . Who hath fashioned a god, or molten an image, that it profiteth for nothing? . . . He falleth down unto it, and worshippeth, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me, for thou art my god . . . They have no knowledge that carry the wood of their graven image, and pray unto a god that cannot save . . . He feedeth on ashes. A deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand? (Isaiah 44:9,10,17; 45:20,21; 44:20).

       Preliminary to examining the signs of our own times, it may be instructive to glance at four other epochs in history when Reason was exalted to divine status. Consider, for example, the very birthplace of rational knowledge, the source from which the founders of modern rationalism took their motto: classical Greece. And, of all Greece, consider its most enlightened city, Athens, home of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. And, of Athenian history, consider the Golden Age of Pericles and the years immediately following his death. Of this period a contemporary scholar has recently written:

The next thirty-odd years witnessed a series of heresy trials which is unique in Athenian history. The victims included most of the leaders of progressive thought at Athens - Anaxagoras, Diagoras, Socrates, almost certainly Protagoras, also, and possibly Euripides .... All these were famous people. How many obscurer persons may have suffered for their opinions we do not know. But the evidence we have is more than enough to prove that the Great Age of Greek enlightenment was also, like our own time, an Age of Persecution - banishment of scholars, blinkering of thought, and even . . . burning of books.

This distressed and puzzled nineteenth century professors, who had not our advantage of familiarity with this kind of behavior. It puzzled them the more because it happened at Athens, the “school of Hellas,” the “headquarters of philosophy,” and, so far as our information goes, nowhere else.²

        Or turn to the chapter of modern history known as the Age of Reason. The fountainhead of this century of enlightenment was France and its culmination a movement designed to put into prac-

²P. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951) , pp. 189f.

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tice the ideals of the great French philosophers-the same movement which unleashed an outbreak of hysteria and barbarism which shocked the civilized world, a Reign of Terror in which reason was swallowed up by passion. We miss the point of this unflattering episode if we forget that it was carried out in the name of Reason. No sooner had Roman Catholicism been banished from the churches throughout France than a new religion was officially installed in the same buildings. Known explicitly as the religion of Reason, it encouraged such rites as the famous incident in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in which an actress from the opera, costumed as the goddess of Reason, received the homage of her worshipers. Statues of the saints gave way to busts of philosophers; the priest was replaced by the sage. History has preserved a sample of the kind of invocation addressed to this new deity:

Divine Reason .... thou who governest the destiny of men and empires, pray accept the homage which we come to render unto thee today . . ³

       There was also a Revolutionary catechism, with a new version of the creed: “I believe in a Supreme Being, who created men free and equal, to love, and not to hate, each other, who prefers to be honored by virtue and not by fanaticism, in whose eyes the most pleasing form of worship is the religion of Reason and Truth . . .”⁴ It is worth noting that this testament of sweet reasonableness concludes with a declaration of loyalty to the new republic and a ringing oath of destruction to all its opponents.

       Consider a third example. In the first forty years of the twentieth century one single nation enjoyed the acknowledged intellectual leadership of the world. Its language was indispensable to anyone specializing in the sciences, philosophy, or scholarly pursuits generally. Yet in the space of five years this same language had made itself despised in most of Europe as the language of brutes and tyrants who had perverted their brilliant intellectual achievements to the irrational, diabolic service of “blood and soil.”

       And finally, although today’s most obvious threat to rational endeavor is world Communism, it is sobering to recall that the Communists pride themselves on being the most scientific nation on earth. Karl Marx claimed to have stripped off all remnants of “bourgeois sentiment” and to have set up at last a “realistic” philosophy based

³Cited by A. Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1904), pp. 104f.

⁴Ibid., p. 110.

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upon the hard, cold facts of science and technology. And yet their blind devotion to this idol has led the present generation of Communists into absurdities and monstrosities without parallel in history. In the unforgettable lines of a former Communist:

The necessary lie, the necessary slander; the necessary intimidation of the masses to preserve them from shortsighted errors; the necessary liquidation of oppositional groups and hostile classes; the necessary sacrifice of a whole generation in the interest of the next - it may all sound monstrous, and yet it was so easy to accept while rolling along the single track of faith.⁵

       The record is clear. When reason is exalted to divine status, it generates the seeds of its own destruction. What hidden logic is responsible for this? The answer is not far to seek. If we have not yet found it, this is because we are sitting on it. We suffer from the blindness which the idolator must always induce in himself before he can really put his trust in so transparent a counterfeit.

SOPHISTICATED NONSENSE

       In our day the form taken by the worship of Reason is the deification of Science. The present purpose is simply to show that the Bible is being vindicated before our eyes. To that extent, it is definitely on the side of science and against its own suicidal tendencies. In the following paragraphs the scientist will be allowed to speak for himself. It goes without saying that the discussion concerns issues and not personalities and that by no means all scientists deify their method, nor do those cited do so consistently. Christians have so frequently made the mistake of attacking science itself, instead of its deification, that it is necessary to make this distinction quite clear. Science as an instrument in the service of man can be one of the greatest blessings on earth. It becomes an idol, however, the moment one says, with Bertrand Russell, “What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.”⁶ The deception which underlies all idolatry can be detected beneath the surface of this statement. For there is no scientific means whatever of establishing its truth! It is therefore quite evidently in contradiction with itself. If one is going to enunciate an article of faith, one might at least make it consistent. But one of the hallmarks of idolatry is the falsehood on which it rests. As

⁵Arthur Koestler in The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 61.

⁶Bertrand Russell, op. cit., p. 238.

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Isaiah so vividly puts it, “He feedeth on ashes. A deceived heart hath turned him aside that he cannot . . . say, ‘There is a lie in my right hand.’” (Isaiah 44:20.)

       If the biblical analysis is correct, then the result of such self-deception will be the opposite of what the devotee intends. In the present case it will turn out to be extremely unscientific. The hidden self- contradiction in Russell’s statement leads one to anticipate precisely such an ironic outcome. It authorizes a method to dictate in advance the kind of question a man may raise and the limits to which his answers must conform. Indeed, reality itself, as far as man may know it, has been tailor-made to fit the advanced specification of a preconceived method. This amounts to the patently unscientific practice of torturing the facts to fit the theory.

       The deification of science in our time is frankly stated by several of its devotees. One of them asks: “It comes down, then, to this: shall we put our faith in science or in something else?”⁷ He answers his rhetorical question thus:

In our time and for some centuries to come, for better or for worse, the sciences, physical and social, will be to an increasing degree the accepted point of reference with respect to which the validity (Truth) of all knowledge is gauged.⁸

The same confession of faith is made even more explicit by another contemporary writer:

Men bet their lives on it (science) as they do on other gods, and on the record, it functions no less divinely than any other believed to shape human ends. On the record, “God” is no less fitting an appellation for this . . . than for any that churchmen so name and require laymen to bet their lives on, worship, and adjure.⁹

       This faith reduces itself to faith in a method. Its practical implications are readily apparent. As one of its adherents declares, the scientific dogma includes the refusal even to entertain any question which the sacred method cannot answer: “The motive is to find an answer that meets the requirements of a scientific answer.”¹⁰ Here is science

⁷George A. Lundberg, op. cit., p. 114.

⁸Ibid., p. 36.

⁹Horace M. Kallen, Democracy’s True Religion (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1951), p. 10. Although the context is not clear, it is possible that the author is referring here to science in partnership with democracy.

¹⁰G. A. Lundberg, op, cit., p. 19. See also Max Otto, Science and the Moral Life (New York: The New American Library, 1949), p. 155.

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become a religion. The same enterprise which can render unlimited service to man by examining the subject matter to which its method corresponds slips into the role of tyrannical false god the moment the individual scientist decides that no other subject matter may be legitimately investigated. All the great issues of human life, all the questions that make it interesting and worth while, are suppressed. They all require qualitative judgments; in the last analysis, judgment of good and evil. But the scientific method is able to cope only with quantitative subject matter, with what can be measured. The truth has a long last laugh at the expense of this idolatry. For the refusal to make qualitative judgments, including judgments of value, turns out to be fatal to the entire rational enterprise. Without some qualitative principle of selection the scientist is unable to distinguish the important data from the unimportant. All facts are in themselves of equal value. It would be “partial” to rank some higher than others. The determination to maintain “scientific neutrality” leads to the preoccupation with trivial detail and thus partly justifies the layman’s common-sense suspicion of academic activities. Although the scientist himself may be unaware of the absurdities into which his “impartiality” betrays him, it is painfully evident to the Chinese author, Lin Yutang, who writes:

It is easy to see why the Chinese mind cannot develop a scientific method; for the scientific method . . . and inductive reasoning, carried over to human relationships .... often results in a form of stupidity not so rare in American universities. There are today doctoral dissertations in the inductive method which would make Bacon turn in his grave. No Chinese could possibly be stupid enough to write a dissertation on ice cream, and after a series of careful observations, announce the staggering conclusion that ‘the primary function of sugar (in the manufacture of ice cream) is to sweeten it’; or after a methodical study in ‘Time and Motion Comparison on Four Methods of Dishwashing’ happily perceive that ‘stooping and lifting’ are fatiguing; or that, in ‘a Study of the Bacterial Content of Cotton Undershirts’, ‘the number of bacteria tends to increase with the length of time garments are worn.’ . . .

       This sort of stupidity . . . could really be arrived at, I think, just as correctly by a moment of Chinese common sense and ‘intuition’. The best cartoon I have ever seen in Punch is that of a congress of behaviorists, who after passing a number of pig-‘subjects’ through a test, with a thermometer in the snout and a pearl necklace dangling in front, unanimously resolve that pigs do not respond to the sight of jewelry.¹¹

¹¹Lin Yutang, My Country and My People (New York: A John Day Book, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935), pp. 86f. The author documents his quotations from the Teacher’s College Record (Columbia University, February 1930), p. 472.

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       These observations ought to silence the favorite reply of contemporary devotees of Reason. When confronted by the repeated fiascoes into which this idol has historically beguiled its worshipers, they argue that a sufficient effort has never yet been made. The noble pioneers of Reason were defeated in times past by the lingering forces of ignorance, superstition, and vested interest. To desert them at this hour would be a “failure of nerve.” We must rally round Reason to insure that this time it will triumph at last and so vindicate its martyrs of the past. As Lin Yutang’s remarks clearly demonstrate, the irrationalities of an Age of Reason are due, not simply to a residue of “prescientific thought-ways,” but to a direct consequence of the dictatorship of science itself. It has remained for the twentieth century to contrive a brand of nonsense to which less “advanced” cultures are happily immune.

MAN THE VICTIM

       Unfortunately, when the consequences of idolizing science are applied to the big questions of human nature and destiny, something terrible happens to man’s understanding of himself. His freedom is repudiated, since science could never discover it; his judgments of good and evil are reduced to expressions of appetite, since this is measurable; and human motivation is transformed into a complex set of conditioned reflexes. Two quotations from contemporary scientists illustrate this perfectly: “To a scientist, the motives of a stone rolling down hill or of a boy murdering his father are simply the full set of circumstances resulting in either event. These conditions are equally subject to scientific investigation in both cases.”¹² The man of science consequently strives to be as ethically neutral as possible:

There is perhaps no better introduction to the meaning of science in our time than the study of the scientific attitude of Francis Bacon .... He was a scientist in the whole temper of his mind .... He was a far truer scientist than some whose laboratory genius has won them recognition as great scientists in the twentieth century, yet who quickly return to unscientific obscurantism when faced with ethical or religious problems. That he was almost utterly lacking in ethical dependability has often been pointed out. He did not hesitate to demean himself, to prosecute his talents, or to betray his friends, if this promised to secure him advancement ....

¹²G. A. Lundberg, op. cit., p, 19.

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It is very doubtful if a more unemotional human being ever existed than Francis Bacon. He was as nearly pure brain as it is possible for a man to be .... Kuno Fischer has accurately characterized him: ‘If there were a thermometer to measure intrinsic force of human passions, we should find, in the case of Bacon, that the degree of warmth belonging to his heart stood very close to zero.’

       This lack of emotional warmth, which was responsible for his most flagrant defects of character and for that conspicuous trait which David Hume described as his ‘extraordinary facility in helping himself,’ also made him the more perfect intellectual machine. It fitted him the better to take part in what he called the ‘disinterested observation of nature.’ He exemplified in his own person the ethical neutrality of science; the recoil of science from every consideration of the wished-for or the ought-to-be; the concentration of science upon the study of what is, has been, or is bound to come. He was, as it were, science itself.¹³

       This description beautifully illustrates what happens when man tries to deny his own nature. He is that creature who, because he is free, must make value judgments. His only choice is the choice between values. He cannot remain “neutral.” Whereas Christianity regards this characteristic of man as the precondition of his highest fulfillment, most other philosophies are ashamed of it, as an obstacle to “scientific objectivity,” and try to suppress or transcend it. If the Christian contention is true, however, then the attempts to suppress value judgments will backfire. He who worships at the shrine of “neutrality” will in fact become unscrupulous. An imagined objectivity, adopted in the name of impartial reason, provides the excuse for unprincipled conduct. Remarking upon exactly the same phenomenon in the age of Greek rationalism, Professor E. R. Dodds remarks:

The new rationalism did not enable men to behave like beasts - men have always been able to do that. But it enabled them to justify their brutality to themselves, and that at a time when the external temptations to brutal conduct were particularly strong. As someone has said in reference to our own enlightened age, seldom have so many babies been poured out with so little bath-water.^l4

       Of course, such an outcome is far from the intentions of today’s men of science. This is precisely what gives the situation “its irony and its urgency.” They would die if their right hand knew what their left hand was doing. In some parts of the world scientists already have died because it did not.

       With the bath of bigotry and superstition goes the baby of ethical

¹³Max Otto, op. cit., pp. 77f. My italics.

¹⁴E. R. Dodds, op. cit., pp. 191f.

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awareness. Having arrived at scientific maturity, we have outgrown the primitive need to make judgments of good and evil. This constitutes an open invitation to unbridled lawlessness and particularly to the tyranny of man over man. To put it in a formula, relativism is the prelude to absolutism. The twentieth century is noteworthy for both these “-isms” at once. On the one hand, speaking with the authority of science, it declares the relativity of all moral judgments. On the other, it has seen the moral vacuum filled by the mushroom growth of political absolutism surpassing anything in previous history. The major contributor to relativism was science. The principal victim of the ensuing absolutism is, likewise, science. What happens to science in totalitarian countries needs no elaboration. The result of laboratory experiments are dictated in advance by party theory. The scientist who cannot arrive at doctrinally correct results is punished.

       As an alternative to such a fate, the devotee of science may advocate instead his own version of totalitarianism. He recognizes no moral scruple against it and, in fact, is impatient with the irrationality and inefficiency of the masses. Hence he may be tempted to write of the “technically obsolete paraphernalia” of traditional democratic processes and to declare:

The mere fact that I, personally, happen to like the democratic way of life with all its absurdities . . . and that I may even find it worth-while to go to any lengths in defense of democracy of the type to which I am accustomed are matters of little or no importance as touching the scientific question at issue. My attachment to democracy may be, in fact, of scientific significance chiefly as indicating my unfitness to live in a changing world. To accept this simple notion is perhaps a cost of social science that few are willing to pay ....

       A similar attitude toward the conclusions of social scientists is suspected of being authoritarian, as indeed it probably is. A lot of nonsense has been spoken and written about authority in recent years. We need to recognize that it is not authority as such that we need fear but incompetent and unwisely constituted authority . . . . ¹⁵

If what men really need is to be ruled by “competent” authority, it is obvious who the twentieth-century successor to medieval authority is. The scientist steps forward as the modern version of Plato’s philosopher-king.

       Unlike Caesar, some scientists apparently are not at all diffident about accepting such a role. Professor B. F. Skinner, in his recent book Walden Two, outlined with a completely straight face his con-

¹⁵G. A. Lundberg, op. cit., pp. 39, 46, 51f.

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ception of the ideal society. It is an autocracy in which such a power is exercised by a scientist able to control precisely all the thoughts and actions of its citizens. As Joseph Wood Krutch said of man’s lot in this ignoble utopia:

His desires, tastes, convictions and ideals are precisely what the experimenter wants to make them. He is the repository of no potentialities which can ever develop except as they are called forth by circumstances over which he has no control. Finally, of course, his happy condition is the result of the fortunate accident which determines that the “engineer” who created him and, indirectly, will create all his progeny, was an experimenter whose random conditioning happened to produce, not the monster who might just as likely have been the first to seize the power that science offered, but a genuinely benevolent dictator instead.¹⁶

       It was just such a nightmare as this against which Aldous Huxley sought to warn the world twenty years ago in his satire Brave New World. Mr. Krutch observes ironically that it is as though Professor Skinner had read Brave New World without seeing the point.

       Perhaps the most distressing tribute which the idol of science exacts from its devotee is the sacrifice of his rightful human heritage as a free, evaluating individual, for whom to live is to exercise his discriminating and critical faculties. The man who carries this graven image from the laboratory to the hearth resolutely sets out to remake his every reflex into the image of his god. He becomes undiscriminating, literal-minded, matter-of-fact, lacking in subtlety or humor - in short, insufferably dull. One such victim remarked, after the curtain had fallen on Hamlet, “Why does he say, ‘I am dead, Horatio,’ when he is obviously still alive?” This is the lost generation of whom the president of the Carnegie Foundation has said:

Higher learning has fallen for the ‘cult of objectivity, (which) has resulted in a generation of irresponsible intellectuals, of men without convictions’ . . . The average history textbook, for instance, ‘which so often determines the tone of classroom instruction, is chiefly a recital of fact . . . objective, non-controversial, a record of events. It recounts what happened . . . but often fails to ask why it happened (or) what the meaning is . . .

       ‘The implication is that education which takes a detached view of life and society, that never leads students to face issues . . . tends to produce men and women who are spectators rather than actors . . . Surely the effective citizen must be willing to stand up and be counted, to make a commitment, to throw his weight on the side of truth . . .

       ‘Pursuit of the truth is undoubtedly the highest function of the uni-

¹⁶J. W. Krutch, op. cit., p. 62.

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versity, but that is not synonymous with scientific research. It refers to search for reality, for meaning, for ultimate answers . . . Commitment to certain basic assumptions is a necessary starting point in the quest for truth. . . .’¹⁷

FALSE GOD, FALSE PROMISE

       The deification of science is thus exposed as self-defeating on three different levels. In the very bastion of rationality, the American university, it has a tendency to magnify the trivial, the tedious, and the inconsequential. On the level of society as a whole it lends itself to the kind of totalitarianism whose first aim would be the prostitution of science. On the personal level, most horribly of all, it helps to rob man of his birthright. By foisting off upon him the machine as his ideal to imitate, it converts him into a puppet ready to dance to the dictator’s command. By means of an unconscious propaganda, it instills into modern man the fatal belief that he is, in fact, no more than a bundle of conditioned reflexes. The consequence of this belief is a complete contempt for the very rational process which postulates it. Joseph Wood Krutch has captured in the space of several sentences the suicidal effect of this kind of rationalism:

One might almost as well give up the whole enterprise of thinking if one never permits oneself to say, “I am convinced of so and so,” without adding immediately, “But of course I recognize that it is either certain or at least highly probable that I would not be convinced of anything of the sort had it not happened that my social or individual conditioning had made it inevitable that I should be.”

Yet it is actually some such radical distrust of all human reason that is encouraged by the pronouncement sometimes made by men who may not really wish to produce any such effect and may not actually hold deterministic theories in their most extreme form.¹⁸

        The victim of this triple self-defeat exhibits the telltale symptom of all idolatry. He remains unperturbed when these suicidal tendencies are pointed out to him. Having once committed himself to his god, he is loath to acknowledge the glaring discrepancy between its promises and its performance. Rather than grant that his loyalty has been misplaced, he prefers the grim satisfaction of knowing that he has done his “duty” - even where this “duty” requires him to walk the plank. Hence the astonishing reaction of some scientists when

¹⁷Dr. Oliver C. Carmichael, as quoted in Time magazine, December 1, 1952, p. 47.

¹⁸J. W. Krutch, op. cit., p. 203. My italics.

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the inevitable result of their own “theology” is pointed out to them. They declare with a fatalistic smile that no mere human sentiment must be allowed to impede the requirements of Science. Thus does enlightened twentieth-century man unwittingly repeat the primitive follies which he imagines himself to have outgrown. He is willing to lacerate himself, even to immolate his whole society, in the appeasement of a totem of his own concoction.

       Despite its modern dress, this is no new god. It claimed a sizable share of victims in biblical times. Their epitaph was written by St. Paul: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22.) The biblical message to our men of science might run something like this: “You have launched a gigantic undertaking in search of rationality and knowledge. May your enterprise prosper, and may the Lord bless it. But remember that, in the moment in which you make it an end in itself, it will trick you into sophisticated stupidity.” The handwriting is on the wall. It requires no Daniel to read it.

APPENDIX

       There are three reasons why contemporary theologians are reluctant to argue for the superiority of their own God. The first is the fear of presumption, lest “finite man” claim to know what is supremely true. This is another example of “ideology of conscience,” which abandons the question of true-or-false in the hope of finding an intellectual formulation which will guarantee the virtue of whoever utters it. Whenever truth is trifled with in this way, it gets revenge. Whoever makes use of an argument in order to insure his own virtue is saying, in effect, “Holier than thou,” to anyone who challenges it. He is thus delivered into the very fault which he set out to avoid.

       There is a second reason why some contemporary theologians hesitate to adduce reasonable grounds for declaring the Christian God to be the true one. They fear lest any reason in God’s favor would both subject him to an alien criterion and also constitute an “ulterior motive” for believing in him. This contention, like so many other emphases in contemporary theology, is unconsciously borrowed from the mystical tradition. It is descended directly from the maxim of St. John of the Cross: “A blind man, if he be not totally blind, will not commit himself wholly to his guide.¹⁹ Rational argument is thus

¹⁹Cited by P. E. More, op. cit., pp. 59f.

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actually regarded as an impediment to pure faith. Theologians who would prefer to believe without reason, rather than with it, are consequently at pains to prove that the Christian God is utterly irrational, accessible only by a “leap of faith.” They thereby give their case away. They have an undeclared argument of their own. The irrationality in which they take such satisfaction is just as much an “ulterior motive” as any reasonable argument.

       There is a third and final reason why contemporary theologians are reluctant to discriminate between gods. It is the fear of religious fanaticism. If a man can prove that his God is the true one, they argue, he will feel justified in imposing his belief upon others. This, however, is only an argument of expediency, and, like all such arguments, it turns out to be inexpedient. For, if no ultimate allegiance has any reasonable claim to superiority, then “the master race” or “the party” is quite as acceptable as any other god. There is no reasonable ground upon which to oppose them. The argument thus turns out to be self- defeating. It must either acquiesce in the conquests of a Hitler, and thereby in its own liquidation, or, if it does oppose him, it must do so for no good reason. In which case it has committed suicide. For the active suppression of a given set of values, simply because they are “not mine,” was the very mistake which the argument set out to avoid. Christianity has the answer to this problem. Although it claims to know the truth, this truth itself includes a prohibition against conformity by compulsion. Whenever Christian practice violates this injunction, it stands condemned by its own principles.

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