Posted by
Rob on Monday, November 27, 2006 3:49:29 PM
Recently the anti-Templetons had a meeting in which they attempted to clear the air concerning the relation of science to religion.
The meeting was not pretty. This is akin, of course, to holding a meeting on why there are too many meetings, or yelling in a crowded theater, "Don't Panic!". So what were you expecting, reasonable debate about the necessity of Reason?
The NYT, of course, does its best to spin this as Christian deconstruction, but if there was any deconstruction going on, it was clearly secular. Not that the Templeton prize is a particularly Christian prize to win, or that many of its laureates have not been secular. But there is a sense in the 21st century that we have left the good old days of the Modernist 20th, when reason was acknowledged king, and skepticism was an unalloyed virtue. If ever one needed proof that we are in a post-Modern century, this would provide it, that is, if suicide bombings in Baghdad were not enough. The noise and confusion are all proof that Modernists lack a central directive, a unifying paradigm, a shared worldview, like we used to have in the 20th century.
For those of you with my advanced stage of senilty, what exactly was the 20th century about? Man trying to be God.
"It's probably the closest to God that we'll get," said a high-energy physicist last week in The Guardian, one of the few unabashedly retro-20th century newspapers left, describing his attempt to discover the
Higgs boson. A boson. This has to be up there with receiving the Divine Directive from an angel named Moroni. The sad truth is, he's probably right.