They dethroned her in the nineteenth century. They told themselves they were cleaning house, removing superstition from the temple of reason, liberating inquiry from the dead hand of dogma. What they did not notice, because it takes generations to notice this kind of thing, is that when you remove the question that orients all the other questions, you do not get purer science. You get science without a compass. You get inquiry without a destination. You get the most technically proficient, directionally lost institution in human history.
— A. C. Rosenthal
The Queen They Dethroned (Opens new window)
From the same essay:
The orderliness of the universe is not something physics discovers. It is something physics assumes. And the history of that assumption leads directly to a specific intellectual tradition rooted in a specific doctrine of creation: that the universe was made by a rational God who embedded rational order into it, and that human minds, made in the image of that God, are capable of reading that order.
…
What Oppenheimer was describing when he said knowledge cannot be pursued without morality is precisely the architectural claim the medieval university made when it placed theology at the top. The governing question cannot be separated from the generating questions. Not without consequences. Not without producing, eventually, knowledge that does things its producers have no framework to evaluate and no authority to restrain.
…
But here is the problem the deflection does not answer. Kant’s framework rests on the premise that human beings are ends in themselves, possessed of a dignity that cannot be reduced to their usefulness. Where does that premise come from? Kant himself is not entirely clear on this. What is clear is that the premise does not follow from the naturalistic account of human beings that the secular university increasingly treats as its baseline. If human beings are the product of undirected evolutionary processes, then human dignity is not a discovery. It is a choice. A useful fiction. A story we tell each other because it produces better social outcomes than the alternative.
…
Why did the scientific revolution happen in Christian Europe?
…
Rodney Stark, who is a sociologist and not a theologian, spent a career documenting this puzzle and concluded that the answer is precisely what the medieval theologians would have predicted: that the Christian doctrine of creation is the necessary precondition for the scientific enterprise as Western civilization developed it. The conviction that nature is orderly, consistent, and intelligible is not a discovery of science. It is an assumption science requires in order to begin. And that assumption is theological in origin.
…
The modern university has inverted this. Technique is primary. Character is elective. And the graduates it produces are not, by and large, people whose technical capacity is governed by a formed moral account. They are people whose technical capacity is real and whose moral formation has been left to chance, to family background, to whatever cultural inheritance they happened to absorb before the university got to them and began the process of treating those inherited moral frameworks as private matters that have no place in serious inquiry.
…
This is what it means to dethrone the queen. It does not mean that the other disciplines stop working. It means they stop being oriented. The physicist can still do physics. The economist can still do economics. The engineer can still build. But none of them has an institutional authority above their discipline that is asking, on behalf of the whole, what this is for. What kind of world we are building. What kind of human beings we are producing. Whether the direction we are running is a direction worth running in.
As censorship increases also consider using email and text messages to send links.
Leave a Reply