The anti-Enlightenment

Not long ago my old boss, Bill Maher, was a guest on “Larry King Live,” when, in one particularly vitriolic outburst, he declared that his well known and oft-voiced contempt for religion came from his belief that “religion is the antithesis of science.”

This, of course, would come as a big shock to the millions of scientists, such as Albert Einstein, who were not only deeply religious, but who saw in each new scientific discovery only further proof of God’s existence. After all, as the saying goes, if there’s a clock clearly there has to be a clock-maker.

Further, it would take one of those impossible coincidences that the Modern Liberal relies on so heavily to explain how it is that the two most religious nations in the Western World – the United States and Israel -- are also arguably the world’s two most scientifically and technologically advanced.

In fact, with just the slightest bit of thought, Maher himself would have to recognize the abject silliness of his protestation, for if he were to stub his toe or feel a little tightness in his chest, I doubt he would order his driver to take him to the “Atheists’ Hospital of Greater L.A.” but instead would scream “take me to Cedar Sinai” (or the Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University or Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New York.)

While Maher’s claim that religion is antithetical to science is also easily debunked every time one drives past a university like Notre Dame, Brigham Young or Brandeis, it does serve as yet more proof that it is Maher’s own philosophy – the philosophy of Modern Liberalism that so dominates today’s Democratic Party – that is the antithesis of science.

After all, when being “politically correct” supersedes being factually correct, when conclusions are drawn not for their scientific value but to advance a political agenda,
we have moved beyond the realm of science to what Victor Davis Hanson calls the “post-Enlightenment” and which I argue is truly the anti-Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment saw a quest for dispassionate truths. This quest is antithetical to the agenda of the Modern Liberal who sees truth itself as the enemy. This is because the central tenet of Modern Liberalism is that it is the quest for truth that is the root of all evil.

The “thinking” is that, if no one ever thought they were right there would be nothing to fight about and with nothing to fight about, surely there’d be no war. Without war there would be no poverty or the need for crime and thus mankind would finally live in the utopia they envision.

In “The Closing of the American Mind,” Professor Allan Bloom’s effort to understand the lack of scholarship amongst his students, Bloom says that they believe that “the study of history and culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; man always thought they were right and that led to wars, persecution, slavery, xenophobia, racism and chauvinism.” Bloom continues that, with the Modern Liberal, “the point (now) is not to correct the mistakes (of the past) and really be right; rather it is never to think you’re right at all.”

The positions the Modern Liberal takes, then, aren’t based on the effort to be right but rather to undermine these convictions in others.

Maher’s mindless hatred of religion is paralleled by the left’s mindless acceptance of the non-scientific myth of global warming. This agenda-driven canard, whose purpose is to undermine the belief in the truth of America’s exceptionalism by turning America’s greatness – her productivity, ingenuity, creativity and prosperity – from evidence of her exceptional rightness into proof positive of her evil, is so devoid of scientific fact that the only way to sustain the lie is by intimidating dissenting voices, offering up hysterical scenarios, engaging in pure demagoguery and even threatening the lives of some of the nation’s leading scientists.

This “culture war” is not a battle of ideas. It’s a war against truth being waged by the left in the hopes of creating a utopia devoid of war, poverty, crime and injustice. Since religion is the effort to be right morally and spiritually while science is the effort to be right in the physical world, it is not surprising to find the left so passionately against both.