Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age > Status Update

There are those who will resist this enlightenment, and those who may never advance. In The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin speaks for this trend with his sobering observation that: ‘At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.’

"The idea of common ground between the reformations of religion and of science was surreptitiously replaced by a different story about an inevitable and long-standing conflict between science and religion. As evidence of this conflict, the Preliminary Discourse identified what would become two recurring tropes in subsequent repetitions of this new narrative: the flat earth myth and the Galileo affair. The fact that the imagined scientific heroes of Enlightenment had, for the most part, urged the complementarity of science and religion was either silently ignored or countered with a rewritten history. Newton’s piety and predilection for writing works of theology and biblical chronology was a particular problem, given his status as an icon of the Enlightenment. Accordingly, efforts were made to distance Newton’s metaphysical and religious commitments from his science and to refashion Newtonian physics into a weapon that could be deployed against religion – directly contrary to what Newton himself had intended."

"The connection of science to social progress, along with a thesis of the retrograde influence of all forms of Christianity, was central to the Enlightenment propagandists’ sense of their own place in the story of human progress. Arguably, their narrative, like Hume’s identification of miracles with barbarism, also become integral to modern, secular self-understandings. As Dan Edelstein observed, this Enlightenment model of history is ‘the story we tell ourselves about our values, our government, and our religions’. However, it was and remains a ‘master narrative of modernity, even a myth’. Because this myth is vital to the identity and self-understanding of those who originated it, and who continue to perpetuate it, it tends to be resistant to the demythologising efforts of historians."

"Lessing is well known for having articulated an apparent difficulty associated with arriving at necessary truths from the contingent facts of history. The principle associated with his name is that ‘contingent truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason’. Lessing confessed that this was an ‘ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and earnestly I have tried to make the leap’."

"But there is a general issue towards which Lessing’s dictum gestures. The problem is how apparently contingent and inherently nonrational temporal processes might somehow yield rational outcomes – at the level of doctrines, concepts, and forms of social and economic order. More generally, this is a question of how a succession of contingent historical events might be understood normatively as ‘progress’. Following the advent of the theory of evolution by natural selection, the related question of the capacity of human cognition to arrive at truth arises in the form of Darwin’s ‘horrid doubt’: ‘whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy?’"

"The idea that history moves towards a particular end either draws on the unacknowledged motivating force of providence or amounts to an importation into secular time of a Christian conception of the eschaton. Progressive philosophies of history, on this view, are essentially crypto-theologies of history. If this is true, it follows that our confidence in the superiority of naturalism as an approach to the world is, in fact, indebted to the religious assumptions upon which the idea of progress was original founded."

Marxism "was Christian eschatology ‘perverted into secular prognostication’ and exhibiting all ‘the basic features of a messianic faith’. Literary and social critic Walter Benjamin made the same point with his arresting image of ‘the mechanical Turk’. (The mechanical Turk was a device constructed in the late eighteenth century which to all appearances was an ingenious chess-playing automaton. In reality, it was controlled by a concealed human operator.) Benjamin implied that Marxist theory, while ostensibly opposed to religion, continued to draw upon the hidden power of theological concepts now disguised beneath the veil of secularity. For the trick to work, the theological agency had to remain hidden. Yet, shattering this illusion and bringing this hidden agency to light becomes necessary at a certain point."