Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

To begin with, the findings of science imply that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the genesis of the world, life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. We know that we live on a planet that revolves around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, possibly one of a vast number of universes. We know that our intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with the nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small. We know that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are. And we know that we did not always know these things, that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including many we hold today.

In other words, the worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of a knowledgeable person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. The scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics. By exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, science forces us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet. For the same reason, it undercuts any moral or political system based on mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, struggles, or messianic ages. And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions—that all of us value our own welfare, and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism (chapter 23), which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral imperatives we face today.

Though science is increasingly and beneficially embedded in our material, moral, and intellectual lives, many of our cultural institutions cultivate a philistine indifference to science that shades into contempt. Intellectual magazines that are ostensibly dedicated to ideas confine themselves to politics and the arts, with scant attention to new ideas emerging from science, with the exception of politicized issues like climate change (and regular attacks on scientism).²⁰ Still worse is the treatment of science in the liberal arts curricula of many universities. Students can graduate with a trifling exposure to science, and what they do learn is often designed to poison them against it.

The most commonly assigned book on science in modern universities (aside from a popular biology textbook) is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.²¹ That 1962 classic is commonly interpreted as showing that science does not converge on the truth but merely busies itself with solving puzzles before flipping to some new paradigm which renders its previous theories obsolete, indeed, unintelligible.²² Though Kuhn himself later disavowed this nihilist interpretation, it has become the conventional wisdom within the Second Culture. A critic from a major intellectual magazine once explained to me that the art world no longer considers whether works of art are “beautiful” for the same reason that scientists no longer consider whether theories are “true.” He seemed genuinely surprised when I corrected him.