Stop asking questions, damnit.

In 1575, Jerome Wolf wrote a letter to Tycho Brahe in which he observed, “No attack on Christianity is more dangerous than the infinite size and depth of the universe.”

Following the destruction of medieval superstition by revolutionaries like Copernicus, Galileo and Magellan, the intellectual community had to come to grips with how ill-informed Bible-based education had left them. For over a thousand years scripture stood as a complete, definitive source of knowledge. If it wasn’t in the Bible, it wasn’t worth knowing.

But as knowledge progressed it became obvious that not only was there a great deal of information missing from the Bible, but that it was functionally useless as a fountainhead of useable concepts. It could not be trusted. According to scripture, the world was flat, Jerusalem was the center, and the sun circled a mountain in the north. Not only does the Bible conveniently fail to mention the Earth’s position in the solar system, its rotation, and its true size, it has nothing to say about the vast distances between the stars. Beyond just the pure factual errors, there is no sense of proper age and size. 6000 years is all it offers, and there is no indication of anything but Heaven and Earth.

It was this vast gulf between what observation revealed and what he had been taught from religious authorities that motivated Wolf’s statement. How could God’s word be taken seriously if it left humanity so ill-equipped to understand the universe?

Yet today most religious people wouldn’t share Wolf’s discomfort. That sense of visceral conflict, with respect to the size of the universe, is completely gone. But why? Is it that we now have a better understanding of the Bible? I would argue that very little has substantively changed in the actual text or our understanding of its original meaning. No, we impose our advanced scientific knowledge on the ignorant document. Children who grow up in a world described primarily by science interpret the Bible to match that knowledge.

If the size of the universe no longer threatens Christianity, there are plenty of recent scientific discoveries that do. You could easily rewrite Wolf’s letter substituting evolution for “size and depth.” And every branch of science has conspired to ridicule the notion of a 6,000 year old planet. If Christianity is to survive as anything more than a cult, it will stop battling against these issues as it abandoned geo-centrism and infinity.

But this serves as a perfect model to understand the most fundamental difference between those that have promote the scientific method and those that seek to advance religion over science. One camp endevors to gain knowledge, the other holds that they are currently aware of everything worth knowing.

The recent re-popularization of the theist-atheist debate is striking for the complete lack of new arguments from the theist camp(I will use that term for brevity, acknowledging that there are deists in the world, but they don’t compose the majority). They quite literally advance the same positions that Hume dealt with 250 years ago. But this is precisely the point: they cannot develop new arguments because they deny the possibility of learning. They will forever be in the reactionary position. Science moves forward, often discovering facts that contradict religious documents, and theists can only complain about the results. They will not develop a new tool or instrument capable of viewing God, so they are stuck with what they have.

Thus they must construct their barricades around the areas that science has yet to enter definitively: how did the universe come into existence? How did life originate? Where does morality come from (arguably, science has given us a solid explanation for morality, but I will be charitable)? Theists jump on the lack of certainty in these areas as evidence that science itself is fatally flawed.

You’ll notice D’Souza using some slight of hand in this article to make a similar point. There are, he asserts, simply facts or concepts that are forever beyond the reach of science. He uses a Kantian argument holding that our experience of reality is not necessarily true reality to back his claim. According to Kant, we can only discuss the world we experience, and there is a world beyond our senses. There is no rational reason to conclude that these two versions of reality match.

I don’t want to delve too deeply into Kant (I remember getting caught in that quicksand as an undergrad), but I will say that there’s also no reason to think that the world isn’t as we experience it. Kant’s claim falls into a more general category of global skepticism that was popular among the modern philosophers. I could likewise maintain that there’s no way for me to prove that I’m not a brain in a vat in some laboratory and my experience of this world is being fed to me by scientists and computers stimulating my brain.

To this whole class of claims I simply say, fine, I suppose it’s possible, but whether it is or isn’t, in this world I experience, the scientific method yields results and religious belief doesn’t. Whatever actually happens to be the case, I am far better off basing my ideas on sturdy evidence than simply taking old fairy tales on faith: Antibiotics work, homeopathy doesn’t, science builds structures that stand, and prayer has no tangible effect. And, most importantly, there's still no evidence for or good reason to believe in God.

D’Souza makes a much slicker move, however. He uses this broad skepticism of reason to justify a belief in God. From an argumentative standpoint it’s ridiculous: the failure of one system does not necessarily entail the truth of another. The positive idea of God has to be substantiated with its own set of claims. It doesn’t simply materialize when a criticism of science is advanced any more than Mormonism becomes the true religion when we prove that Norse mythology was false.

But beyond that, there is a disgusting arrogance in D’Souza’s argument. The scientific method and rational inquiry, he claims, have limits. There are things it can never prove. And you know what? He just happens to be privy to all such knowledge. I could ask how, exactly, he knows about God and why the faculty that enables this knowledge is exempt from the Kantian limitations on human perception, but I am more struck by the preposterous conceit required to hold that view. He has gained through a special divine relationship what the generations of scientists who saved us from nature’s wrath by building a fortress of knowledge one tiny brick at a time can never know. He doesn’t need to test these ideas, prove them against critical reality, no, he simply knows.

But that is the most intellectual rendering of the anti-science argument. D’Souza is shrewd. Unlike many of his theist brethren, he has staked out a position that won’t be directly destroyed by scientific innovation. If you say that, for example, science can never tell us how life originated, you run the risk of being contradicted. If, however, you posit the existence of a magical world beyond science (one that conveniently never interacts) you can always maintain its existence. The failure of every real world iteration of faith can be dismissed and the central claim clung to.

But even with that rhetorical shrewdness D’Souza has defined his spiritual world as beyond science. He is thus constrained by the same inability to generate new arguments. His view is beyond progress, so it is stagnant. Though slightly more clever, D’Souza’s view essentially represents the notion that those subjects on which science hasn’t spoken, define its necessary, and eternal limitations.

History, however, shows that the unexplained areas of science lead to the most promising advances, not the collapse of the pursuit itself. But most importantly, those “gaps” in scientific understanding represent the venues for gaining future knowledge. Most scientists find them exciting and cannot wait to move ahead. But religious folk have decided they represent unanswerable questions that only a concept of god can fill. So they have built their bulwarks in front of those subjects, hoping in vain that adventurous minds will simply stop asking questions.

So where does this leave us? The theists have essentially announced that they posses sufficient knowledge, no progress is possible. Science has failed, and they understand God, so there’s no reason to move ahead. Adopting that stance means that you will never generate a new argument, and as we can see, there hasn’t been a new argument for God’s existence in many centuries.

And this midset has bled into politics. There are obvious problems on both sides of the aisle, but there is a basic difference, at least with the contemporary political groups. Currently, the left happens to be the party that operates on a model of identifying problems and searching for solutions. Too many Americans don’t have health care, the environment needs fixing, and the economy is harming the middle class. Then solutions are discussed and argued for. The American right seems to have two basic operating mandates: deny they are any problems and complain about potential solutions.

The examples are endless. We have McCain arguing that economy was fine, right-wing luminaries bragging about our very flawed health care system, and endless examples of shills pretending that global warming is a myth (no link for those fools). All of these positions require one to ignore evidence obtained by reasoned inquiry, whether the conclusions of climate scientists or assessments of our health services.

Just as theists claim to already know everything important, the political right believes that they have already discovered the perfect political/economic system. Simply place your faith in the free market and all will be fine. Any restrictions or regulations on market forces are a move away from the ideal. Thus, all progress is negative.

In order to sustain this idea you have to deny the existence of any complications and criticize any potential changes. Thus, like the anti-science groups, they have decided that progress is impossible. All there is to achieve has already been achieved.

Moving forward it’s important for political figures on the left to understand this basic fact of the right. “Bipartisanship” can never be reached with a group dedicated to objecting to all of your ideas—even the ones you’ve yet to express. My advice would be to simply allow them to throw tantrums and complain. Just like science will continue to yield useful results, a reasoned approach to governance will make life better. The progress-deniers can just die out, complaining as they fade away.