“AN OLDER WITTGENSTEIN looked back on his younger self and realized something: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” There is a picture — a “worldview,” you might say — carried in our language like a stowaway ideology. This tacit picture frames our experience and governs our observation. How we talk shapes how we see.”
“We’re suckers for simplistic, captivating pictures, mostly because we don’t even realize that we’re being sold a “frame”; we think we’re just seeing “the way things are,” when, in fact, we are buying into a paradigm. That’s why, all too often, while trying to talk our way out of a problem we only dig deeper holes. The exercises and aphorisms that comprise Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, be it said in passing, are a response to this realization. His project is a kind of image therapy, an attempt to help us see that a picture holds us captive and then offer an alternative frame.”
“While we take “religion” and “science” to be “natural kinds,” and thus part of the durable furniture of human culture, what we name with these terms are contingent, historical emergences that have no precise precedent prior to the 17th century.”
“This is Begriffsgeschichte, a “history of concepts” that traces the birth and life of terms we now deploy without any sense of their contingent origins — that is, without any consciousness of the “picture” that is assumed by this language.”
“Harrison tracks the way religio and scientia of the ancient and medieval world come to mean something very different by the time they are translated as “religion” and “science” in early modern England. In both cases this is a move from inward virtues, habits, and disciplines to reified beliefs, ideas, doctrines, and data.”
“Ancient scientia, for example, is a different territory from what we now call “science.” The word named the intellectual habit that characterized the natural philosopher whose calling (or telos) was moral and theological.”
“Similarly, religio named a moral or theological virtue, and was bound up with right worship and a certain way of life. In contrast, the “religion” that emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries — and which we still name as such today — was an intellectualized “system of belief” collected in doctrines and propositions. Religion gets caught up in the “epistemic turn” that characterizes modernity — everything becomes a matter of what and how we know.”
“As he persuasively points out, in 17th-century England we see Christianity sowing the seeds of its own destruction. “It seems hardly necessary to point out,” Harrison writes, “that developments of this kind, while initially pursued in support of the doctrines of Christianity, were to render ‘the Christian religion’ susceptible to new avenues of criticism that focused on the rationality of its propositional contents.” The “faith” that the new science wanted to prove turned out to be one worth losing — a scaled-down system of largely deistic belief that asked little of adherents and added little to what the new “science” could tell us by other means.”
“Conversely, the emerging “new science” gained respectability by association with religion. As Harrison puts it, the benefits of this early modern collaboration were overwhelmingly one-sided: The natural sciences gained considerable social legitimacy through their sharing of intellectual territory with religion. Whether religion was a long-term beneficiary of this positive relationship is more doubtful. Arguably, religion thus construed became vulnerable to particular lines of criticism — hence the aphorism that no one doubted the existence of God until the Boyle lecturers undertook to prove it.”
“Harrison notes parallel implications in terms of utility and progress. When both scientia and religio were understood as virtues, then “progress” was synonymous with moral formation. Both natural philosophy and theology had the same telos in that sense, and the same measure. But once both are reified, progress is also externalized: knowledge that “counts” will be knowledge that is useful. And utility will be bound up with a distorted imperative to “rule” nature coupled with a newfound effort at amelioration. Progress is thus identified, Harrison rightly notes, with “an incipient Pelagianism” that is confident above all in human capabilities: Now, the philosophical regimen that had once been directed toward the moral shaping of the person was objectified into an experimental program that was indifferent to the moral character of those who pursued it. […] Self-dominion, as the goal of the natural philosophical life, is eventually displaced by the quest for a dominion over things.”
“this reified reconfiguration of progress only benefits science: “the new way of understanding progress, when applied to a reified ‘religion,’ necessarily places it at something of a disadvantage to a reified ‘science.’””
“Now even the virtues of religion will be externalized: caritas, love, will become “charity.” We’re all technocrats today precisely insofar as we trust in the partnership between government and technology to ameliorate social ills and look suspiciously at any notion of “charity” as the solution. Again, this new picture places religion at a disadvantage. Indeed, the reason why op-ed pages today can get away with excoriating religion as the enemy of “progress” is precisely because we’ve bought this contingent reframing of progress in terms of utility. Once science gets into “the truth and goodness business,” as Harrison puts it, and goodness is identified with progress, then science becomes a competitor of religion. On this point Harrison offers a parenthetical coda: “The real issue has to do with alternative conceptions of the ultimate human good [… ]and it is worth reminding ourselves that it is not a straightforward matter to adjudicate between them.””
“Our use of the word “science” — as in “science clearly shows us” — is predicated on its own myth, a little noble lie, a wink and a nod by which we agree to group an array of disparate human practices as if they constituted one thing. And what defines that “thing”? What are the parameters of “science”? Well, that it’s not “religion.” This fulfills one of the primal functions of myth: validating a view of reality and a community of practice by “othering” an enemy and threat. Yet this mythically constructed “science” lives off of the borrowed capital of the “religion” it displaced.”
“What Harrison describes as the “reification” of religion might be better described, per Charles Taylor, as the “intellectualization” of religion and the “excarnation” of Christianity whereby it is disembodied and reduced to merely a “system of belief.””
“In that sense, the internal/external dynamic might be the very opposite: when religion is reduced to a “belief” to which I give propositional assent it becomes merely “personal” and thus privatized as “inward.” This is why the reified religion of modernity yields what Depeche Mode called “your own personal Jesus,” the only religion tolerated by secular modernity, and one easily trumped and marginalized by the public authority of science.”
“But then the other shoe of Harrison’s analysis also drops: “science” is its own way of life, its own contingent nexus of practices and disciplines. There is no perennial conflict between “science” and “religion” because the phenomena didn’t exist to war with one another before the 17th century. But they do exist now, and if there is a conflict between them it’s because “science” — the myth-making “science” invoked by “ideological atheists” — isn’t content to describe the territory; it’s after your heart. Thus Harrison closes by suggesting these “skirmishes” are less conflicts between science and religion and more like “theological controversies waged by means of science.””