Cults, cults everywhere. All supported by really-smart people and progressives. One thing to love about Melanie Phillips is her precise and apposite non Politically-Correct writing. She eschews PC Fascism for reality, trading in cults for rationality, and supine prostration for independence and enquiry. She is quite similar to Orianna Fallaci, the former lioness of Italian truth-telling who set the record straight in many books about what Islam truly represents. In her work 'The World Turned Upside Down' Phillips rightly demolishes the bastard ideologies which were birthed out of the poorly named 'Enlightenment'. It is no exaggeration to state that from Hume and Rousseau, through Hegel and Darwin, we come to Eco-Fascism, the multi-cult cult, and irrational ideas about life, humans and society [see here for a review of her book and her detailed destruction of the Eco-Fascist cult].
The Enlightenment of course was not monolithic. There are various strains and national variances during the 17th and 18th centuries at work – the French, Scottish and English being the most notable and all focused on different aspects of 'liberating' man and installing reason. Even though many good concepts flowed out of the Enlightenment it was at its core a movement which was obsessed with demonizing medieval Christianity and divorcing man from metaphysics. That was the thrust of the effort. Most if not all of the Enlightenment 'thinkers' felt that reason was the new religion, and that any form of faith in a higher divine essence, or in the mysteries of life or the soul, had to be expunged. This is simply neo-paganism, wrapped up in a theological certitude that science can explain everything – when we all know that it can't. As Phillips states;
“What Darwinism and environmentalism also derive from the vision laid down by Comte and Bacon, who reduced everything to a materialist worldview, is their ruthless subordination of evidence to a prior unchallengeable idea. All are ideologies, and as such they block the path to true enlightenment. Environmentalism uses science to betray science....Darwinism, meanwhile, is not so much science as materialism applied to biology....As Karl Popper has argued, Marxist theory of history and Freudian psychoanalysis are not science at all but pseudoscience....People who refused to see these verifications were unbelievers.”
The Enlightenment was a reductionist set of theories centered around natural materialism, or the physical world of the 5 senses. There is much that is good about such a theory. But not everything in life is either materialist or reductionist. Science cannot explain everything. Huge gaps exist in the theology of Darwinism. The origins of life and of the universe cannot be explained by scientists. The first causations of what constitutes our natural 'laws' have not been discerned nor proven by the scientific method. The belief that only rationality is important, and that only reason can exist to explain our world and thus be used to organize our society is rather ironically, completely irrational and even mystical. It is thus more of an act of faith to believe the 'Big Bang' theory, than it is that a divine essence originated both the universe and life – the great clockmaker to paraphrase Newton. As Phillips points out;
“The mathematician David Berlinski has written...that physicists were so alarmed by the theological implications of the Big Bang that they immediately tried to block off this dangerous line of thought altogether by suggesting that although the universe had a beginning, there was no beginner...'Quantum cosmology is a branch of mathematical metaphysics. It provides no cause for the emergence of the universe and so does not answer the first cosmological question, and it offers no reason for the existence of the universe, and so does not address the second.'”
Cause and effect. If you don't recognise both you don't have science but mysticism. Islam is an intellectual and social disaster precisely because it denies free will, enquiry and the linkages of cause and effect. Everything is done because Allah wills it. You have no impact on cosmic, natural, or social order. Only Allah does. This denial of rationality is also rampant in modern 'progressive' theologies such as atheism, Eco-Fascism, Marxism and Statism. All of these deny rationality, free will and robust methods of debate and enquiry.
“Atheism, by contrast, holds that the world comes from a random and therefore irrational source, so that reason is an accidental byproduct....To a scientific naturalist by contrast, the cosmos can be understood by a rational mind only if it was not created by a rational mind.”
Materialism has to be reductionist. It must deflate all ideas down to a simple, dialectical paradigm. It must develop a theory which excludes all else. In doing this it must by nature be intolerant and despotic. Thus Darwinism must of course completely exclude a primary cause for the effect and creation of life, and cover the glaring holes in evolutionary theory with a belief that eventually science will find an answer, or that the chance combination of molecules over million of years had to create life without offering any empirical or experiential proof. Likewise Eco-Marxist reductionism focuses on one natural chemical Co2, and completely ignores the 1 million other variables of climate generation. Co2 is coincidentally linked to modernization and Western man; and in order to remake society in a neo-pagan guise, the Warmists demand a reduction of the modern world, and the imposition of an irrational cult – headed by an elite – in order to appease the materialist and quite impersonal force of Mother Earth. This is quite similar to Islam which elevates the unknowable power of Allah as the only cause and effect of existence. The Eco Fascists have simply substituted Gaia for Allah.
As Phillips laments, the world is decidedly turned upside down. Atheistic irrationality is now classified as secular reason and progression. Divorcing Church from the State is an important exercise in creating a modern, innovative and rational society. But the Enlightenment did not divorce the Church from the State. It simply replaced the Catholic Church with the cult of dialectical materialism. The effects have been profound.
Secular atheism does not lead to reason. It promotes the opposite. Even scientists, who see first hand that rational logic cannot explain everything, are turning to theological explanations:
“These discoveries have led an increasing number of scientists and other thinkers to believe that matter could have arisen only through a governing intelligence. Sir Roger Penrose, professor of mathematics at Oxford, says that the balance of nature's laws is so perfect and so unlikely to have occurred by chance that an intelligent Creator must have chosen them.”
We can have intelligent debate on the interstition between science and theological cosmology. Life, the beginning of time, human creation, the 'perfect balance' of nature's laws should be open to both theological and scientific elaborations. What the Enlightenment and its offspring of reductionist materialism have promoted however, is the supremacist role of 'reason' and 'science' over all else. But as Phillips so eloquently writes, both of these concepts are manipulated, abused, and tortured to give ideologies, politicians and cults the 'scientific' validity they so ardently crave.
As Phillips convincingly details, reason was developed in the West as a byproduct of Judeo-Christianity premised in part on elements of Greek rationalism. When you surgically remove the main animating force for reason in our world – namely J-C culture – you are in effect neutering reason and elevating neo-pagan atheism as the cult which is now merged with the state. Secular progressivism is neither intelligent, coherent or even moral. Phillips' work is an excellent compendium of why destroying the basis of our civilization has turned our world 'upside down'.