philosophy
religion

Is Secularism the Root of Society’s Ills?

Physicist, Author
Philosophy, University of St. Andrews
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Lawrence Krauss

Physicist, Author

March 20th, 2020
I appreciate Prof. Haldane’s efforts to define and clarify terms, always the hallmark of a good philosopher. Nevertheless, having done so, he then muddies the waters. While he is absolutely correct that neither he nor I chose the questioning title of this exchange, I, at least, tried to address it.
Although Prof. Haldane never addresses the question directly, I infer that he does not contest my claim that Secularism is not the root of society’s ills. On this therefore there seems no debate. Instead, he addresses a peripheral issue: the possibility that religion might help relieve some of these ills.
Before addressing this, I will comment on a confusion I detect in his discussion of secularization vs. secularism. While philosophers are not scientists, one would hope they would nevertheless be guided by empirical evidence when evaluating the truth value of claims. Prof. Haldane is correct that I do think that some version of secularization, defined as he has—the claim that as society becomes more scientifically and technically sophisticated it becomes less religious—is true. He then suggests that our opinions on this matter differ. However, in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts”. The fact is that there has been a monotonic decline in surveyed religious affiliation in essentially all Western countries as science and technology has increasingly permeated them. Indeed, in his own country, only 15% of adults now consider themselves as Anglicans, and 9% as Catholics, according to a survey in 2017. 53% of adults describe themselves as having no religious affiliation whatsoever, up from 48% in 2015, and 31% in 1983. He may not like it, but religion, at least organized religion, in his country is on the wane, just as it is throughout the industrialized West.
Now to return to the thrust of his argument, I agree with Haldane that thoughtful people often possess varieties of existential anxiety, self-deception, weakness of will, and emotional disorder, which I take it to be what he views as the basis of society’s ills. Moreover, we agree that these are evolutionary traits that appear to be part of the human condition, or ‘species pathologies’, as he puts it.
But he then argues, without any basis I can discern, that these evolutionary inheritances are not ‘natural’ but ‘spiritual’ and require ‘spiritual remedies’. Without bothering to define spiritual, he does connect it to ‘supernatural’, which he argues relates ‘to God and the gift of grace in countering the effects of sin and nourishing the soul’. Beyond presuming the existence of God, the statement implies some objective existence of, or at least meaning for, ‘sin’, ‘grace’, and ‘soul’. These are ill-defined at best, and in the case of soul and grace at least, likely non-existent.
I nevertheless agree completely with his concluding statement, that if some form of religion credibly explained society’s ills and postulated credible remedies for them, it would be unreasonable to keep it distinct from ‘the organized life of society’. However: (a) there is no evidence that it does or ever has, and history appears to imply the opposite, and (b) if it did, we would call it science.
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