Taylor, Secularity, Science

So, I'm approaching the halfway point in Charles Taylor's massive, wonderful work, A Secular Age. I'm generally a quick reader, able to rip through texts briskly. As I tell my graduate students, though, some kinds of writing demand that even the speediest reader slow down.

Taylor's is definitely one of those slow-it-down works. This is the magnum opus a senior-level super-scholar like him spends a decade or more producing, and such an epic-but-detailed study requires time and thought from readers. It's the kind of book that, as I read it, I can tell that it's re-shaping the deep structures of my thinking about present-day evangelicalism. Again, I'm only halfway through it, but I can't help but write/rave a bit about it to hash out some of his thoughts for myself.

As the title suggests, Taylor's interested in secularity (he mostly limits his scope to Western culture). He defines secularity not as the simple absence of religious belief nor even (pace the neo-athiests) as conscious rejection of religion. Instead, secularity as he defines it consists of religious belief becomes an option--an increasingly unusual or unpopular one--among an ever-growing range of belief options. By religion or faith, Taylor means (I simplify) a view of the human life-world shot through with the understanding or assumption of a particular dimension or significance (a "fullness" in his terms) to existence that transcends the material world.

How did it come about, he asks, that this assumption of a beyond-the-material, religious dimension of life enjoyed a default status in the 1500s but has in the 2000s become merely an option--and an increasingly discredited one at that? Drawing on a lifetime of study in history and faith, Taylor revisits and revises well-received narratives about the gradual displacement of faith in (mainly Western) culture. Specifically, he refutes two predominant, common-sense explanations for the present-day secular age.

First, he criticizes what he calls the "subtraction story" of secularism, in which post-Renaissance Humanity gradually sheds its primitive, constraining skin of superstition and mysticism, revealing a pure core of ever-maturing (scientific, naturalistic, materialist) reason. Thus, present-day secularity=humanity - religion.

Second, he departs as well from what might be called a replacement narrative, in which the energies previously devoted to religious faith and practice aren't so much shed as transformed by and subjugated to reasoned, scientific naturalism.

Both of these stories, Taylor contends, ignore the extent to which the historical victors in these struggles--the pure core of human reason finally freed from the jail of superstition; or the ever-indomitable figure of naturalistic science--are themselves products of historical processes. The triumph of secular reason occurs not out of some obvious philosophical superiority over faith but because historical processes in Western culture brought about different modes of thought about humanity, about knowledge, about society, about the world--all of which changed the ground rules for what constitutes a legitimate or illegitimate belief.

Or, to tackle this from a different angle: in the present, "science"--meaning materialist, observable-data, no-supernatural-explanations-allowed processes for knowledge--enjoys an unprecedented degree of assumed superiority over other modes of inquiry (e.g., religious or metaphysical modes). I say "science" in scare quotes to designate that this concept refers not to a specific methodology practiced by scientists but more to a general category at work in the social imaginary. If you want truth, nothing delivers today like "science." Why is this so?

For some proponents of "science" (or "reason"), science fully deserves its hard-won reputation for epistemological superiority. It really is better than any other mode of knowledge or study. Or, rather, a particular field or sub-field of study is considered better, more rigorous, more respectable, to the extent that it resembles the practices constitutive of "science," i.e., eschewing supernatural or non-material mechanisms a priori, producing knowledge as quantifiable and accumulative data sets, using inquiry modes that are independently verifiable by different investigators using the same experimental conditions, etc.

Now--lest I be misunderstood--I do not dispute that "science" as so defined works like gangbusters for a number of inquiries. If I want to know what causes influenza (and how to stop it), why stars go nova (and when/if ours will) , or what kind of seatbelt saves the most lives in a front-end car crash--give me science, please. Experiments, controls, repetition, peer review--all of these components of scientific processes produce (at their best) beautifully consistent, usable knowledge-sets. I can create a vaccine to avoid getting sick. I can rest assured that Sol has billions of years left to it. I can choose the safest seatbelt. In these and other fields, science compellingly sets up and passes the test of "does it work? does it produce results?"

But, as Taylor and numerous other historians have noted, the perceived superiority of "science" hasn't stayed restricted to such material questions. Throughout the nineteenth century, the scientific criterion for inquiry crept into and reshaped the groundrules for a number of disciplines that ask less concrete questions--history, law, sociology, psychology, aesthetics, philosophy, and politics. In all of these and more, scholars and researchers scrambled to standardize their practices, to make them resemble this new kind of inquiry that had proven so useful in other arenas.

Such science-ization has proven less successful for the fields of religion and theology. Unlike, say, an anthropology of religion or history of theology, theology per se typically holds as foundational certain warrants that are incompatible with "science," e.g., the existence of God. For this very reason, some thinkers--the neo-Atheists like Richard Dawkins, for example--consider theology (or religious belief more broadly) a non-starter. It isn't, can't be, "scientific" because its very practice, inquiry into and about the supernatural, violates naturalistic precepts. Not scientific=not reasonable=irrational/discredited.

Now, I'm just getting to the part where Taylor deals with the 19th century, where many of these changes I've skimmed over take place. I've not yet read his treatment of that century or of the next, and I can hardly wait to read his lengthy rumination on/response to these developments and their present-day incarnations. But, were I to guess at his response to the religion=not science=compromised equation (which he presages throughout), I would imagine he would point out that that equation only proves compelling from the same vantage point that legitimates science in the first place. That is, religion fails a legitimacy test only when the game is "how scientific is it?" But the notions that the how-scientific-is-it criterion is A) clearly and naturally identifiable as a selfsame concept over time; and B) automatically--always and everywhere--superior to other criteria--these are imminently contestable.

Science's self-evident definition and superiority are new assumptions, new players on the philosophical field. As such, these assumptions don't get to declare themselves victors simply by changing the game's rules for everyone else ("Only purple teams can score points. Purple team wins!").

That's my guess at Taylor's conclusions, anyway. I'll update when I read them for myself.

More later,

JF