November 19, 2008 | In: Good, True and Beautiful, Truth, Worldviews
The Dark Side of Science as Religion
A dark side can be found for anything. Certainly the Catholic Church has had its dark moments. After all, it is full of sinners. However, one can convincingly make the argument that the dark side of Catholicism is not due to its doctrine, but due to the failure of people to live up to its doctrine. When science attempts to replace religion as the source of meaning in life, the dark side becomes inherent in its doctrine. After all, for a naturalist the purpose of life stops at the propagation of the species. Naturalists are confronted with personal angst when they face death. Neither are platitudes absent from such a worldview. Telling a widow that her husband will “live in on our memories” is nothing short of a naturalist platitude. There is no afterlife, but our individual lives continue in the memories of others and in the genes we managed to hand down to the next generation. What true value can an individual life have in such a philosophy?
A scientific religion would probably have few mystics. However, one who might qualify for the role would be H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s modern Gothic horror fiction carries a single message – the universe is brutally apathetic about the individual person. His horror is often grounded in secular evolutionary philosophies – the monsters in one story turn out to be de-evolved human beings. Supernatural elements tend to be alien or demonic forces, with no recourse to supernatural Goodness in sight. Horrors go on under the surface of human awareness all the time, and the universe doesn’t care.
One story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” begins with a doctrinal statement about Truth.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
In Catholic thought, the disassociation of elements of truth leads to error. We do not read the Bible as a collection of proof texts (that is why most Catholics do not memorize chapter and verse), but as a whole. We do not support science separated from philosophy, theology and divine Wisdom. The totality of Truth leads to He who is Truth, Goodness and Beauty Himself.
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