Locke v. Davey: Imposing Secular Dogmatism

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3171.html
Locke v. Davey: Imposing Secular Dogmatism
by Bruce Walker
26 February 2004
The manufactured illusion of a schism between science and religion is based
upon the mistaken, or perhaps dishonest, precept that science is a pure,
unitary whole.


The Supreme Court has now ruled in a lopsided seven to two decision that the
State of Washington may deny scholarships to students studying divinity.
This decision solidifies decades of judicial pogroms against certain types
of faith. Although this decision will be presented as just another of the
increasingly bizarre extra-legislative steps necessary to separate church
and state, it is exactly the imposition of dogma upon American society.

Science is faith and theology is science. Knowledge of reality requires
belief. Ancients properly understood that religion is simply a method of
explaining nature. It is not just that religion was a variation of science,
religion was science and science was religion.

The manufactured illusion of a schism between science and religion is based
upon the mistaken, or perhaps dishonest, precept that science is a pure,
unitary whole. The famous trial of Galileo, for example, was based not upon
theological disagreements but upon scientific disagreements.

Ptolemy had presented the world with a scientific theory to describe the
movements of stars and planets. His system was accepted because it was a
very successful model, not because it supported any critical aspect of
Judeo-Christian theology. Copernicus proposed another scientific model. Both
these models were imperfect, but intellectually rigorous.

Galileo refined the Heliocentric Theory -- and the word "theory" is
crucial -- but even his refinement was inaccurate. It was fundamentally
flawed in the supposition that the sun was the center of the universe and it
failed experimentally to provide answers to several serious problems.
Galileo was wrong.

Today much of what we call "science" is simply theory. Quantum mechanics,
for example, has several different explanations for reality at the subatomic
level. Mathematical models are useful, but imperfect, predictors of reality
at that level. Quantum mechanics actually "works" only at the scale of our
perceptions, the ordinary world which we observe.

Relativity is also simply theory. Einstein proposed his special and his
general theories of relativity to explain the paradox of the nonsensical
barrier of the speed of light. His theory works very well, but it is hardly
perfect. Einstein is simply Ptolemy -- someone who has the best working
system for explaining the perceivable world.

This is precisely what religion does: it explains reality at our level. If
it fails, then it is imperfect religion and imperfect science. The effective
operation of religion in history is very persuasive empirical evidence of
the scientific validity of religion. Most of the giants of science have been
deeply religious.

Indeed, a good case can be made that religion is better science than
science. Religion explains the creation of Creation, which science does not.
Religion explains the absurdity of quantum mechanics, which science does
not. Religion explains the future of the future, which science does not.
Religion explains the birth of life, which science does not.

Indeed, many, perhaps most, areas of science lack any scientific consensus.
Will the universe expand to an entropic death or implode into a massive
black hole? Scientific opinion swings about every five years on that
subject. Does the universe diverge into an almost infinite number of
alternate universes every nanosecond? Scientists disagree.

One of the few real certainties in science is that religion profoundly
improves scientific inquiry. Why? It allows a foundation for observation; it
provides a system of integrity; and it provides a purpose for inquiry
itself. Religion is the indispensable foundation of our very notion of
truth.
When the judiciary demands that government can no longer support religious
study as a form of education and intellectual activity, then government has
declared Secular Dogmatism the official state faith.

If this seems far fetched, consider what government now gleefully supports:
consciously profane "art," history courses which describe religion as hokum,
the presentation of evolution by natural selection as Official Truth
(despite so many gaping holes that if Darwinism did not savage religion, it
would have long ago been discarded as infantile pseudo-science) and social
studies courses which propound preposterous explanations for human thought
and sentiment.

The noxious faith of Secular Dogmatism provides none of the safeguards of
religious faith. There is no natural mechanism to prevent the descent of
humanity into a lightless dystopia. Official persecution of religion means
that all of the many different manifestations of Judeo-Christian faith are
obligatory victims. Diversity ends. The ongoing dialog which is the stuff of
all true science and all true religion stops.

This inevitably will lead to the same perverse intolerance within that small
part of human existence which we normally mean by "science." The Soviet
Union is an excellent example of that disintegration of real thought,
including particularly "science."

Stalin decreed that Lysenko, the dodo who proposed as Marxist "science" his
notion that developed characteristics can be passed on genetically, was
politically correct science. Any botanist or biologist who disagreed on
scientific grounds was not only deemed wrong scientifically but an enemy of
the state.

Study, research and inquiry -- no longer protected by the benevolent
structure of Christianity -- imploded. The genius of the Russian people,
which had produced great science as well as great art under the Tsars, died
with Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Lysenko.

A nation which had the fastest growing economy among the major nations on
earth and the fastest rising class of true intellectuals wilted into
atheistic incompetence (the myth that the Bolshevik Revolution led to a
better life for ordinary Russians is the most corrupt and most grimly
comical myth of the last century.)

When Eric Blair wrote his masterpiece 1984, he was describing the Soviet
Union. The common feature of this and other literary descriptions of
hopeless futures is Godlessness. Without God, man stops growing (Brave New
World notes that invention is deliberately suppressed and dreary constancy
is carefully preserved.) Without God, man stops caring. Without God, man
stops thinking.

Secular Dogmatism is a jealous, vicious and hateful faith. It no more
tolerates speculation and differing opinion than Hitler tolerated different
ideas of racial equality or Stalin tolerated contradiction of Lysenko.
Secular Dogmatism sniffs, hunts and destroys heretics, whether they are
theistic, agnostic or atheistic.

God created humanity, and He instilled within man the capacity to flourish
in any environment in which transcendent morality was acknowledged. Egypt,
India, China and Sumeria each had definite, though different, ideas of
immutable right and wrong. Every human civilization has reached civilization
with the structure of moral purpose.

It is not so much that the "right" religion is essential -- although a
compelling case can be made that the Judeo-Christian faith clearly works
better than any other -- but it is that a religion is always "right" when
the alternative is no religion.

In this new judicially decreed era of Secular Dogmatism, no religion is
permissible. Tragically, that means no science, no decency and no
civilization will be possible either. Modern universities evolved directly
out of cathedral schools of Christendom. Modern jurisprudence evolved
directly out of Judeo-Christian principles of real law.

Universities and courts, culprits in the latest crime against religious
belief, have not just slit the throat of civilization by their raging
bigotry. These two children of Judeo-Christian faith have committed suicide.




--
Atheism teaches that there is no God, hence no God-given rights. That
ideology coupled with a system that believed in the superiority of the state
at the expense of the individual was murderously synergistic.