those poor, unenlightened, scientific peoples

Future peoples will look back on what is today called the “scientific worldview” and feel that same mixture of benevolent pity and gentle mockery with which we currently look back and view the medieval worldview with its guardian angels and demons. I don’t mean that they’ll muse at how far behind our scientific information was, when compared to theirs. Everyone already expects that they will have learned more science by then and wouldn’t be surprised to time travel and confirm that that has been the case. I mean that future peoples will laugh at and mock our scientific worldview, the assumption that science can provide a comprehensive mode and means of relating to one’s universe

Future peoples with future outlooks, future spiritualities, future ways of conceptualizing the divine, and the origins of it all will marvel that there was a time when science, a discipline that deals in that one very small aspect of reality which can be observed and measured, could have written this check that it can’t possibly cash.

In the same way that we laugh at wonder-drug, cure-alls that quack pharmacists used to pedal before modern medicine, future peoples will parody and jape at how, “as recently as the 21^st century,” many people actually believed that the very important but narrow field of science was a sort of panacea for every human question.  

Three groups in our time will be spared from these future jests:

1)    The least educated, who we’re never bothered much by science in the first place.

2)    People like my Mom, who know as much as any lay person should about popular science but who have enough common sense to know its limitations.

3)    And ironically enough, actual scientists, who know better than anybody the limitations of their discipline.

That leaves people who know enough science to be dangerous but not enough to know what they don’t know.

One of the podcasts that I listen to religiously is Pete Holmes’, “You Made It Weird,” where one time fundamentalist turned spiritual seeker, Pete, interviews other comedians. And always, toward the end of the show, he asks them a few questions about faith and spirituality. In the most recent interview, Adam Conover said something that was representative of a majority of the answers that come from these comedians, a disproportionate number of whom identify as agnostic or atheist.  

After Pete had described an experience of awe and wonder that he equated with “worship,” Conover responded that he had had similar experiences but “What you call worship, I call understanding.” He then went on to speak of how learning new facts about the world inspires in him feelings of awe.

What’s interesting is that Conover is not dumb. He’s very smart. Most successful comedians are. But to say something like “What you call worship, I call understanding,” one must fundamentally misunderstand what it means to worship, what it means to understand, or both.

This statement assumes that “worship” is what we do when we know less and “understand” is what we do when we know more. But anyone who has ever really both worshipped and understood knows that these two things are apples and oranges. There is no two dimensional continuum which allows us to travel from worship on the one end to understanding on the other.

But what Conover is really parroting is the popular notion, widely held and almost never analyzed in our time, that things like “worship” are old and outmoded and things like “understanding” are new and progressive.

Almost the opposite, I would say. What he calls “understanding” reflects a very datable notion that emerged in what we call the enlightenment. It’s the notion that knowing through human reason, informed by empirical observation, is the only type of knowing that has any value. And this isn’t new at all. It is actually a two or three century old notion that reached its shelf-life right around the time of Heisenberg and Einstein when the straightforward link between observation and knowing was shattered into trillions of trillions of illogical and unobservable little zips and flashes of energymatter and timespace.

But there is always a lag time between these paradigm shattering discoveries and their adoption in the popular worldview of a given age. Centuries sometimes.

But the more central point is that the general atheistic party line of this historical age called the enlightenment reflects, in philosophy speak, not an informational problem but an epistemological problem. Epistemology is the study not of what we know but of how we come to know what we know. When that great chapter in world history called the enlightenment—of which the somewhat hackneyed atheism of our day is a hangover—decided that reason was the only faculty by which we come to relate to our universe and the divine, it was like saying let’s all start boxing with our hands behind our back or go skiing with our eyes closed.  

If this will be seen by those future-lings as an epistemological deficit of this age, then what are those faculties that they will once again embrace?

That will be part 2 of this blog.