Science as the new ‘Natural Law’

The philosophy of scientific government had resulted in the horrors of two World Wars and the specter of centralized, tyrannical government. But that science could free mankind was still in the offing in the postwar period. And why not? 

As John F. Kennedy put it in one of his last speeches in 1963, “Science is the most powerful means we have for the unification of knowledge, and a main obligation of its future must be to deal with problems which cut across boundaries, whether boundaries between the sciences, boundaries between nations, or boundaries between man’s scientific and his humane concerns.”
 
The focus on science had radically shifted. Science had begun, in the Francis Bacon philosophy, as an aid toward the betterment of man’s material conditions; it had morphed over time into an aid toward the betterment of man’s moral condition, though not the source of morality itself. But now, with God out of the picture and the collective implicated in the worst crimes in human history, science was handed the task of creating a new morality, a new law. The existentialists had reduced human purpose to creation of subjective truth; science provided the last remnant of objective truth in Western thought.
 
Nature, then, was the answer; investigation of nature became the purpose.
 
The legacy of Western thought had relied on natural law—the idea of universal purposes discernible in the universe through the use of reason. Nature was seen not as a justification for behavior, but as a hint toward a broader pattern in creation: things were designed with a purpose, and it was the job of free human beings to act in accordance with right reason in achieving that purpose. What we ought to do was inherent in what is: a hammer was made for hammering, a pen for writing, and a human for reasoning. Human beings could reason about the good, and then shape the world around them to achieve it.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

Uprooted from the World

Reinhold Niebuhr observed that the self draws its substance from three basic sources: family, community, and craft. Connections to each of these sources are now either strained or lost to the modern self.
 
First, the family is besieged not only by the plague of divorce and the huge increase in single-parent households generally but by the stresses and strains of life that exact their toll on the marriages that do manage to survive in the modernized world. Families that function together, and that do so with a set of common moral values, are becoming an endangered species. The significance of this change in the context of our discussion is that families have traditionally served as the chief conduit for the transmission of values from one generation to another, and now this conduit is breaking down. The new generation is inheriting a set of values and expectations that is so thin and pale as to be quite unsatisfying. Hungry for additional tutoring in the meaning of life, the young are turning first to the larger culture. Then, unsatisfied with the ambiguous and contradictory moral messages imparted by the popular media, they are turning inward in their search for signals about the meaning of life.
 
Second, modernization is progressively erasing geographical distinctions as a means of defining community. The modern individual is almost wholly rootless, bereft of any psychological connections to place. To be sure, the new freedom from various parochialisms is in some sense exhilarating, but it does not come without a price. Those who belong everywhere can also be said to belong nowhere; they have been emancipated from the small town only to become anonymous, unconnected in our large world. Where the self wanders the earth as a vagrant, belonging nowhere, something that is profoundly intrinsic to being human has been lost.
 
Third, the self's connection to craft has also been seriously diminished by modernization, leaving many people perpetually dissatisfied with their work. In some case, machines have severed the link between the worker and the work. In other cases, layers of bureaucracy have severed personal links between ideas and products. In still other cases, the kind of work that is required by modernized societies is inherently undignified or boring, and the old virtue of taking pride in one's work becomes harder and harder to realize.
 

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 

The Total Rejection of Tradition

Political emancipation from the oppression of the past (a key theme of the French Revolution) meant a total abandoning of the political, social, and religious ideas of the past. One of the reasons why Enlightenment thinkers placed such a high value upon human reason was that it relieved them of the need to appeal to tradition for ideas; any ideas worth knowing about were accessible to reason alone.

The Enlightenment thus represented a radical rejection of tradition. Reason required no supplementation by voices from the past. The waning of the influence of the Enlightenment in recent decades has been an important factor in encouraging the emergence of a new interest in and respect for tradition in Christian theology.

- Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, p126

The Hole After World War II

The world survived World War II. Not only did the West survive—it got freer, richer, more prosperous than ever. Human wealth expanded exponentially. Life spans increased.
 
But there remained a hole at the center of Western civilization: a meaning-shaped hole. That hole has grown larger and larger in the decades since—a cancer, eating away at our heart. We tried to fill it with the will to action; we tried to fill it with science; we tried to fill it with world-changing political activism. None of it provides us the meaning we seek.
 
By the end of World War II, European optimism was dead and buried beneath six feet of human ash. The philosophies of the Europeans—Enlightenment ideals about the value of human beings and the need to move beyond God or Greek teleology—had ended in tragedy. Hitler claimed ideological forebears in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche;1 Stalin took his cues from Marx; the eugenicists took their ideas from Darwin and Comte. The post-Locke Enlightenment project had been a Tower of Babel, with the common goal of supplanting reason for religion rather than seeking the congruence of the two. As the tower began to challenge God, its builders went to war with one another, speaking languages all their own. And then the tower fell, and the land was left barren.
 
Europe had buried millions of its sons and daughters; the West had placed its bets on mankind, and reaped the whirlwind.
 
But God did not return. Magna Carta, the first great charter of Western liberties, was signed by King John in 1215, and set limits to monarchic powers based on “regard to God and for the salvation of our soul, and those of all our ancestors and heirs, and unto the honour of God and the advancement of his holy Church.” Religious practice remained the norm in Europe until the advent of the middle of the twentieth century. Then, as the children born around World War II reached adolescence, religious observance plummeted.
 
Faith in human reason, too, had waned. After the catastrophic insanity of not one but two Great Wars, the Biblical warning not to place faith in princes had been proved prescient. The Enlightenment hope in mankind’s collective capacity to better itself had collapsed.
 
Without God, and without the collective, all that was left were individuals. Alone.
 
Thus, the philosophy of existentialism came to the fore.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.