2547068 Gnostic Scientism and the Prohibition of Questions Thomas m Lessl

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GNOSTIC SCIENTISM AND THE PROHIBITION OF QUESTIONS

THOMAS M. LESSL

Scientism, the doctrine that all lines of inquiry must be held to a scientific stan-dard, seems to come in two versions. The first and more pervasive version

might best be called methodological scientism.1 It is a vocational or professional atti-

tude that cultivates a strong prejudice against modes of inquiry that do not proceed

according to sanctioned rules of scientific inquiry. Scientism of this kind is perhaps

a species of what John Dewey once called an occupational psychosis, the kind of

vocational imperative that makes individuals choose biochemistry over literary crit-

icism, presumably because they are disposed by personality or socialization to

believe that the first can bring genuine knowledge and the second cannot. Although

some of us might think this shortsighted, it seems to be little more than a kind ofprofessional ethic, one that might in its nobler forms be called esprit de corps and

in baser forms, chauvinism. Whatever our feelings about this attitude, scientists

seem to gravitate to it, and this is perhaps for the better. If they did not harbor

strong convictions about the unique importance of their work, they probably would

not do what they do so well.

The other kind of scientism, gnostic scientism, which is the subject of this essay,

consists in the much broader and more daring belief that there is salvation in sci-

entific knowledge.2 Scientism in this sense is personal as much as it is professional,

and in line with the connotations of the term gnostic, it may be regarded as having

a religious character. If religion broadly defined is the practice ofultimate concern

that orders all other concerns, to borrow a phrase from H. Richard Niebuhr, then

the ultimate concern of this brand of religion is knowledge.3 For the modern devo-

tees of the gnostic cult of scientism, science is not ultimate merely because of its

supreme methodological potency or its unique capacity to transform the conditions

FORUM

Thomas M. Lessel is Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia in

Athens, Georgia.

Rhetoric & Public Affairs

Vol. 5, No. 1, 2002, pp. 133-157

ISSN 1094-8392


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of human existence, though it retains all of these qualities. It now has a deeper

power to transform the self into a knowing agent. For the modern scientistic gnos-

tic, science saves because it puts the human person in a right relationship to the per-

ceived grounds of its being. It is a way to achieve harmony between the self and

some ultimate reality, not a supernatural reality that would promise an eternal des-

tiny, but merely what is left as ultimate once such beliefs are discardednamely the

knowing self that transcends material nature. This notion of scientism comports

equally well with Steve Fullers use of the term to mean an imitation of science and

with Stanley Jakis assertion that it is the harnessing of science for a nonscientific

purpose.4 It represents a subtle andfor those involved perhaps as much as any-

one elsean imperceptible shift from scientific knowledge into spiritual knowl-

edge. The final product retains the impression of having scientific authorityonegrounded, as we shall see, in the neo-Darwinian paradigmwhen in fact it has no

bearing upon what has been discovered in scientific investigation at all.

It is its association with evolutionary science that makes gnostic scientism a phe-

nomenon of public discourse that is of interest to rhetorical scholars. If this spiri-

tualization of scientific symbols leans on the authority of an evolutionary world

picture, and thus on a contested arena of origins that has had considerable rhetor-

ical and public importance during the last century, it is a phenomenon that may call

into question the motives that lie behind the insistence that evolutionary science is

a necessary cornerstone of science education.5 The official reason for insisting uponthe centrality of evolution in public education frequently finds expression in

Theodosius Dobzhanskys famous assertion that nothing in biology makes sense

except in the light of evolution.6 But the presence of gnostic elements in the

thought of the scientific elites whose writings will be explored here suggests that

evolutionary theory may be more than just the keystone of biologys arch. If scien-

tific opinion leaders are attracted to evolutionary doctrine because it is a necessary

canonical expression of what is essentially a spiritual outlook, then we have a dif-

ferent sort of entity on our hands.

To put this somewhat differently, scientistic gnosticisms import as a subject ofrhetorical study arises from something notable that it shares with ancient versions

of gnostic spirituality. The discourses of both species of gnosticism mask spiritual

elitism and an ontology of radical dualism behind the ethos of something else

behind the authority of the Christian revelation in the case of ancient gnosticism

and behind the authority of science in the modern variety discussed here. Both ver-

sions of gnosticism are parasitical syncretisms that result from the intermingling of

gnostic symbols with those belonging to another worldview.7 The ancient version

derived its authority from the New Testament and the modern version from science.

But gnosticism truly considered is neither Christian nor scientific. The extreme

dualism of its ancient forms, which may have had Babylonian or Syrian origins

no one knows for surewas incompatible with the monotheism of Jewish and

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Christian belief.8 Nevertheless, because the gnostics claimed to have the authoriza-

tion of the New Testament as well as that of their own sacred writings, they insisted

that theirs was the true Christianity.

9

They supported this claim by appealing tothose elements of Christian thought that they had imported. Undoubtedly it was

the crisis that such claims introduced into the early Church that made many of the

Church fathers so vigilant in their efforts to discredit it. This effort prompted much

of the doctrinal work of such secondcentury fathers as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and

Justin Martyr, and also that of later teachers such as Origen and Augustine, who

were compelled to develop doctrinal understandings that would enable believers to

recognize where the gnostics diverged from the Apostolic tradition and from

Catholic exegesis of Scripture.

Gnostic teachers like Valentinus and Marcion drew from the authority of theChristian tradition and identified themselves as its true representatives; in a similar

fashion gnostic scientism draws its authority from science and likewise insists that

it is the voice of truth. But there is an important difference in the public authority

wielded by the new gnosticism as compared with the old. Whereas the Christian

fathers were unanimous in condemning gnostic thought as imposture and heresy,

gnostic scientism lays claim to scientific authority with impunity. Rather than

renouncing scientism as heresy, the scientific community has responded by elevat-

ing its advocates to positions of rhetorical prominence. The writers whose words are

examined hereE. O. Wilson, Carl Sagan, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, andRichard Lewontinare persons of considerable renown in the scientific culture and

avid defenders of the evolutionary paradigm whose language gives periodic hints of

gnostic spirituality. Except for Dennett, who is a philosopher, they are what we

would call public scientists, opinion leaders who have considerable power to shape

how the scientific worldview is communicated to its various constituents. This

power adds special rhetorical significance to the gnostic ideas that loom in their dis-

courses. As opinion leaders they do not merely advocate science as a way of life; they

also appeal to that segment of the larger population that is most actively interested

in scientific matters. In doing so they are introducing a spiritual motive into these

public arenas that has nothing to do with the scientific merits of the Darwinian

model to which it is tied.

But there are also more general implications concerning sciences place in pub-

lic policy that should arise if spiritual motives lie at the heart of such discourses. The

general public is asked to assume that the notoriety of these writers is due to their

scientific expertise.10 But if their popular influence arises not only from their

accomplishments as scientists but also from a spiritual vision, what does this sug-

gest for educational policies that exalt the importance of the evolutionary paradigmwhile asserting its religious neutrality? If a gnostic spirituality has taken root in the

minds of the outspoken scientific elite who embrace the neo-Darwinian paradigm,

what deceptions are biology textbooks imposing on high school sophomores when

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they follow the pedagogical advice of the National Academy of Sciences and insist

that science takes a neutral stance on religious questions? 11 They could be learning

the best scientific insights of the age, but the possibility remains that they are being

led down the path to gnosticism themselves.

The most significant of these public concerns is the place that the naturalistic

worldview of scientism should have in public education. If scientism is tied up with

the spiritual life of prominent scientists and philosophers, then its status as an occu-

pational ethic is likely to be carefully guarded from public criticism and scrutiny.

This assumption becomes especially pertinent in considering a feature that the

philosopher and political theorist Eric Voegelin regards as a hallmark of modern

gnostic discourse, its tendency to circumscribe inquiry. Like the other gnostics of

the modern age that Voegelin has examined, scientistic gnostics prohibit all lines ofinquiry that would tend to throw doubt upon their claim to possess exclusive and

absolute knowledge. This is due not merely to self-interest but also to the inherent

instability of the extreme dualism that is most characteristic of gnostic thought. In

the realm of public education this prohibition manifests in the scientific commu-

nitys militant resistance to criticism of the Darwinian paradigm. The official pre-

text for this inflexibility is the claim that evolution is the central paradigm of the

biological sciences, but if evolutionary science also serves as a prop for a dualistic

spirituality, there may be an even more vital reason for protecting it from criticism.

Since the evolutionary model provides a scientific rationale for the philosophicalposition of materialism upon which gnosticism stands, the mandate to defend it is

supremely important.

In the broader field of science studies, this criticism of Darwinisms role in pub-

lic life might be regarded as a specialized extension of Steve Fullers critique of the

internalist myth, the longstanding view taken by both philosophers of science and

scientists themselves that the scientific enterprise can be accounted for strictly in

terms of the internal history of scientific activity.12 Fuller does not say (and neither

would we) that science does not teach the things of nature with great profundity,

but only that its way of constructing knowledge cannot be understood apart fromsome examination of relevant social concerns. The relevant social concern in this

case is a spiritual one. This analysis seeks to show that the evolutionary perspective

of modern science and the spiritual posture of gnosticism are interdependent.

Consequently, the public discourses surrounding evolutionary science may be fruit-

fully interrogated both as a rhetoric of religion and as a rhetoric of science.

In sum, then, the core argument of this essay is that the discourse of scientism is a

blend of scientific and spiritual concerns and that this blending is suspected of influ-

encing the scientific cultures demand that the evolutionary paradigm should be pro-

tected from public criticism. The writers that are discussed here do not write merely

to educate their readers. They are scientist rhetors who are suspected of having

motives which reach beyond the merely educational aims of evolutionary discourse.



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Three of these writers, Wilson, Pinker, and Dennett are pivotal figures in the sociobi-

ology movement, now more frequently called evolutionary psychology, which

openly aspires to transform evolutionary biology into social theory. Sagan and

Lewontin, though not formally aligned with any programmatic mission of this kind,

have supported a similar agenda.

These five writers might ordinarily be called evolutionary naturalists, scien-

tific materialists, or positivists, but these categories fail to tell us anything about

the personal motives, psychological factors, and values that account for their con-

victions. Gnosticism does. It is a concept that turns its critical light not on what sci-

entific writers say about the world outside themselves but rather on what they seem

to be saying about themselves. Public scientists may seem to advance the traditional

Enlightenment hope that humanity might enjoy unlimited prosperity under theguiding hand of science, but this does not preclude the possibility that they might

also be promulgating something far more revolutionarya truncation of inquiry

necessitated by gnosticisms spiritual aspirations that threatens to impose itself

upon the societies that science serves.

THE MODERN REINCARNATION OF GNOSIS

While certain dangers apply to modern appropriations of the term gnosticism, a

precedent for interpreting modern thought in gnostic terms has been set by a num-ber of prominent scholars.13 The belief that the spiritual situation now wrought by

scientific naturalism is analogous to that which gave birth to ancient gnosticism was

so strongly felt by Carl Jung that he actively borrowed from ancient gnostic thought

in building the therapeutic program he hoped would cure the psychiatric maladies

of modernism.14 Hans Jonas, the philosopher most closely associated with the study

of gnosticism, recognized a similar linkage to this ancient tradition in the thought

of his mentor Martin Heidegger.15 Voegelin believed that this gnostic revival had

begun even earlier. In a little book entitled Science, Politics and Gnosticism, Voegelin

argued that a number of the leading intellectuals of the nineteenth century, KarlMarx, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Auguste Comte, should be regarded

as gnostics.16 While Voegelin would not have insisted that these philosophers meant

bygnosisthe same thing that Marcion meant in the second century, he argued that

there is a plausible similarity between the ancient and modern outlooks that justi-

fies drawing them together under this heading.17

What is especially relevant here is an insight of Voegelins that other students of

modern gnosticism have overlooked, namely the recognition that gnostic thought

is characterized by the prohibition of questions. Voegelin means by this that the

thinking of various modern philosophers is characterized by a circumscribed

notion of inquiry. Certain questions that should naturally present themselves to

minds engaged in the investigation of the world are either never raised by gnostic

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thinkers or openly dismissed. So far as science is concerned, this tendency is famil-

iar in the close association that has come to exist between positivism and the nat-

ural sciences. The embrace by scientists of the positivist belief that all questions

reaching beyond the scope of ordinary logic and empirical evidence are nonsensi-

cal has frequently been justified as a necessarily conservative and minimalist feature

of scientific inquirya kind of Ockhams razor writ large. But for nonscientists,

who are almost never positivists, such limitations seem artificial and unreasonable.

The positivists refusal to consider experiences that defy such limits, such as those

stemming from artistic experience or moral conviction, may seem laudable to the

faithful, but to outsiders it seems to undermine the very conditions of human exis-

tence in the world.

To follow Voegelin in identifying gnosticism with this feature of positivism is notto deny the value of scientific caution, nor even that the positivist framework may

describe in rough outline what scientists do. Rather, it is to suggest that the motive

force behind such curtailments of inquiry is not what positivists profess it to be

that the heroic epistemological pose of the positivists is merely a very specialized

strategy for masking a deep-seated anxiety that arises in the face of fundamental

questions, an anxiety that is rooted no less than more commonplace rationaliza-

tions of this kind in human frailty and duplicity.

To explain how the gnostic impulse leads to the prohibition of questions, two of

its constitutive features will need some dissection. The first of these is its radicallydualistic view of the world, which provokes the alienation that characterizes the

gnostic experience of the world. The second feature is the saving knowledge(gnosis)

to which the gnostic believer appeals in an effort to justify sciences freedom from

the determinism and alienation that arise from a materialist ontology. This will be

followed by a more extensive treatment of itsprohibition of questions, the necessity

of closing off inquiry in order to compensate for the essential instability of the

gnostic worldview.

DUALISM

At the very center of gnosticism is an extreme form of dualism that regards immate-

riality as fundamentally good and materiality as fundamentally evil. This radical

dualism is reflected in how the ancient gnostics conceptualized both the human and

divine personalities. The true God for such thinkers would have no dealings with the

corrupt materiality of the cosmos and thus had to be regarded as having nothing to

do with the natural realm. Accordingly, in the gnostic system of Marcion this stark

divide between spirit and nature was projected upon the Bible, dividing its one God

into twoa New Testament deity who is utterly spiritual and utterly remote, and a

lesser Demiurge, the God of the Hebrew Bible, who was responsible for the cre-

ation.18 The Christ of gnosticism could have nothing to do with the world created by



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the Old Testament God since the latters hands were soiled by materiality. For this

reason the gnostics repudiated the Christian doctrine of the hypostatic union. Jesus

could not be fully man and fully God but instead had to fall on one side or the other

of the material-spiritual divide. And so he was deemed an eternal spirit but not a

man of flesh.19

The gnostics believed that while the human pneumaparticipates in the same

immaterial nature as God, it also was imprisonedindeed doubly soboth in a

dungeon of flesh and in the larger prison of the material cosmos. The result of this

was the unbearable tension ofalienation, the gnostic spirits sense of utter estrange-

ment from the natural world and from the psyche, the material aspect of con-

sciousness.20 It was the recognition of this posture of estrangement or alienation in

ancient gnosticism that inspired Jonas to interpret this religious movement of post-classical antiquity in light of Spenglers theory of historical cycles, as being contem-

poraneous with the postmodern disquietude of existentialism.21 Both periods

invited extreme forms of alienation, in Jonass view, because their respective spiri-

tual crises forced individuals to resign themselves to spiritual isolation within a hos-

tile universe. Such a crisis arose in late antiquity as the cosmic religions of paganism

declined under the dominion of the Roman emperors.22 Formerly the cosmopoli-

tan spirituality of the local cults had linked the individual to the community, and

the areteof the community in turn was projected back out upon the cosmos. But

the atomized citizens of the Roman world found this impossible; for them nosimilar linkage between nomosand cosmoswas possible. Because the imperial cul-

ture of Rome was only imperfectly able to emulate the cosmos-building power of

the local cults, the vitality of the pagan cosmos waned and the plausibility of a rad-

ically alien universe was enlarged. Gnosticism was one of the spiritual forces that

pushed into this spiritual breach; Christianity was another.

A similar spiritual breach arose, according to Jonas, at the onset of modernity as

the emerging Copernican revolution introduced a universe without an intrinsic

hierarchy of being, one that leaves values ontologically unsupported. The self in

such a universe is thrown back entirely upon itself in its quest for meaning andvalue. Meaning is no longer found but is conferred.23 Strictly speaking the dual-

ism that results from the modern scientific universe is different from that of the

ancient gnostics, but its spiritual consequences are the same. The modernist may

not believe that the creation is the work of a world-immanent Demiurge, but she

does believe that it is the product of forces completely indifferent to the human self.

In other words, the Demiurge of late antiquity has been displaced in the new gnos-

ticism by the evolutionary blind watchmaker of Richard Dawkins fame.

If the dualism in scientistic rhetoric has been overlooked, this is probably

because scientists profess to believe in a unified framework of naturalism, but such

a view is not really possible without sacrificing the integrity of the scientific ratio-

nality from which it is supposed to derive. Scientific modernists persist in believing

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that some part of human consciousness must remain independent of the harsh

determinism of the natural universe. The scientific self must always remain unde-

termined, lest it should be discovered that science is itself nothing but one more

irrational creation of the Darwinian Demiurge.

Whether grounded in the older supernatural dualism or that produced by mod-

ern materialistic skepticism, the dominant conceptions of nature that have emerged

in both periods exhibit the same alienating features. The common denominator is

a world that is utterly indifferent to human concerns. Both depict the world as such

becauseto use a more modern parlanceboth regard nature as a closed system

that gives no place to the human spirit. As Jonas describes the world of the ancient

gnostics, the blemish of nature lay not in any deficiency of order, but in the all

too pervading completeness of it.

Far from being chaos, the creation of the Demiurge, that antitype of knowing, is a

comprehensive system, governed by law. But cosmic law, once regarded as the expres-

sion of a reason with which mans reason can communicate in the act of cognition, is

now seen only in its aspect of compulsion which thwarts mans freedom. The cosmos

of the Stoics is replaced byheimarmene, oppressive cosmic fate.24

As already noted, some of the gnostics of late antiquity reacted to this view of the

cosmos by dividing the Godhead in two. The oppressive order of material causalitywas attributed to a Demiurgic being associated with the God of the Old Testament,

an evil and world-immanent deity responsible for creating the corrupt world of

materiality. The God of the New Testament, conversely, had to be utterly divorced

from the natural world and regarded as the creator of that same spiritual reality in

which the alienated consciousness seeks refuge. So far as this division exists out-

wardly between spirit and matter, it follows that an analogous division should exist

inwardlyone that pits body against spirit so as to make human nature participate

in this division. Because of its materiality the body is enslaved to nature, the God of

darkness, but the spirit is drawn to the source of its being in the God of light. Theancient gnostics sought to redress this duality by outlining a salvation that would

situate them within the realm of pure spirit. This necessitated that they interpret

Christs resurrection, not as a sign of the promised reconciliation of body and spirit

as understood in Apostolic Christianity, but as an event foreshadowing humanitys

escape from the prison of the flesh.

Because both modern and ancient gnostics are susceptible to dualistic convic-

tions and to the alienation that coincides with this, their discourses betray similar

patterns of thought. But now this dualism does not seek to colonize a biblical

worldview but rather one constructed by modern science. Thus, for the influential

sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, humanitys alienated condition arises as a necessary

consequence of its evolutionary history:



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The most distinctive qualities of the human species are extremely high intelligence,

language, culture, and reliance on long term social contracts. In combination they

gave earlyHomo sapiensa decisive edge over all competing animal species, but they

also exacted a price we continue to pay, composed of the shocking recognition of the

self, of the finiteness of personal existence, and of the chaos of the environment.

These revelations, not disobedience to the gods, are what drove humankind from

paradise. Homo sapiensis the only species to suffer psychological exile.25

Wilson here acknowledges something that his Darwinian view ought to deny,

namely that human consciousness transcends nature. Without assuming that the

mind is independent of nature, he could not say in any meaningful sense that we

experience psychological exile, a phrase that betrays the underlying dualism in histhinking. In order to suffer the exile of alienation the human self must simultane-

ously reside in two worlds. Wilson does not have to presume the existence of polar-

ized Manichean deities in order to acknowledge this. The natural fault line that runs

between consciousness and materiality is sufficient to drive him to such a position:

natural evolution creates consciousness; consciousness in turn finds itself estranged

from nature by virtue of the awareness that the self is subjected to a chaotic world

that belies the godlike aspirations of the human will.

As Wilsons allusion to the Genesis story suggests, the Judaeo-Christian and

gnostic paths diverge at that point where the biblical view turns toward a moralexplanation of humanitys alienated condition. In the biblical account, the fall

comes both as enlightenment and disobedience. Even though this primordial event

is depicted as having a cognitive dimension, its character as evil depends upon its

volitional aspect, the deliberate disobedience of eating from the tree. Thus for the

Christian, separation from the ground of being brings about not only self-aware-

ness but also guilt, a recognition of the moral failing that causes this rupture.

Understood as the consequence of human volition exercised in fatal opposition to

a sovereign God, the rupture of the world that is depicted in humanitys exile from

the garden is not ontologicalas it is for the gnostic thinkerbut ethical. Humanbeings are not truly divided from reality; they are merely in denial.

Since ethical explanations of this kind are unacceptable to scientific materialists,

they are more likely to gravitate toward dualistic accounts of alienation, even though

this contradicts the physicalism they otherwise espouse. Since there can be no such

thing as disobedience in Wilsons materialistic world, he must naturalize alienation

by treating it as an evolutionary step that has led human consciousness beyond the

reach of natural law. The price of this step, the shocking recognition of the self, of

the finiteness of personal existence, is psychological exile, not guilt. Consciousness

cannot abide a natural world that is utterly indifferent to it, and so it can only press

on with what evolution has begun, the intellects conquest of nature. The alienation

that humans now suffer signifies for the evolutionary dualist the mere growing pains

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of an initial separation. It is not to be remedied by going back to paradise but by

bringing the separation to completion. The solution is to complete the process, to

attain the fullness of knowledge that through science will turn separation from

nature into the mastery of nature.

To describe this dualism in more metaphorical terms, it might be said that the

scientific gnostic regards the material world as the domain of an evil god of matter

who is utterly indifferent to human wishes and welfare. By contrast, it is the benev-

olent god of consciousness who overcomes the material world. Still, all of conscious

experience cannot be good, since some of its voices counsel acquiescence to this

finite condition. Only those aspects of thought which descend from spirit rather

than the soulfrompneumarather thanpsyche, to couch this in the terminology of

the older gnosticsenable human beings to overcome their enslavement to mate-riality. Thus it is not surprising that Wilson would argue that religious conscious-

ness is a product of materialistic evolution and that scientific consciousness is not:

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biol-

ogy, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by

genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually

compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will

never acquire both in full measure.26

Those familiar with rhetoric of this kind will recognize in Wilsons phrase about

the uncomfortable truth of science a much-repeated platitude. So understood,

scientific knowledge is necessarily uncomfortable because it defies nature.

Wilsons pneuma is the scientific consciousness that alone produces knowledge

capable of transcending materiality. Thus the scientist suffers the discomfort of

accepting that which goes against what evolution has conditioned human beings to

seek. Science is heroic because of its Promethean defiance of nature; religious con-

sciousness, by contrast, represents the cowardice of slave religion, to use Nietzsches

term, because it refuses to set itself over nature.27

In the writing of other gnostic scientists this dualism is equally evident, even if

not explicitly acknowledged. For Carl Sagan this aspect of human consciousness is

explicitly based in an evolutionary hierarchy: the battle of the new and old brains.

The evils of aggressive behavior, territoriality . . . and the establishment of social

hierarchies arise from the old brain, the R-complex, and limbic systems that

humans have inherited from their reptilian and mammal ancestors. Virtue, on the

other hand, is made possible by the more recently evolved neocortex.28 On the sur-

face, this might seem to express a dualism of matterthe old brain is the root of evil

and the new brain the wellspring of virtue. But upon closer inspection the reader will

discover that it is not in this neurological hierarchy that virtue ultimately lies but in

the will of the conscious spirit to bridle the reptilian and mammal brains and to



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enable the purely human brain to power the human destiny. Redemption cannot

occur through the mere presence of the new and improved brain. The neocortex has

already existed for ages and has not by itself brought the old brain into submission.

Redemption instead occurs through a triumph of the rational spirit, which disci-

plines and guides the neocortex towards its virtuous destiny. Ultimately evil is rooted

in the blind determinism of evolution itself; there is no way for evolution to rip out

the ancient interior of the brain because of its imperfections and replace it with

something of more modern manufacture, because the brain must function during

the renovation.29 Evolution has tied the new and old brains together into a singular

neurological matrix, so something else has to intercede to enable the virtuous func-

tions of the new to overcome the sinister functions of the old. That this is a tran-

scendent spiritual power is made evident by the fact that Sagan embraces thecharioteer metaphor from Platos Phaedrusto explain it.30 In the cerebral cortex is

liberation, Sagan declares; no longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can

change ourselves.31 But this power of the cerebral cortex is likened to that of the

noble horse in Platos myth, which requires the guidance of a charioteer, the tran-

scendent nousof rationality. The neocortex is now under the command of a scien-

tific charioteer who is capable of subduing the ignoble reptile brain and of

harnessing the potential of the new brain for its upward climb.

In How the Mind Works, an encyclopedic survey of evolutionary psychology,

Steven Pinker s allegiance to this kind of dualism is betrayed by an interesting omis-sion, the fact that he reduces every arena of human cognition to the evolutionary

mechanism that created itexcept science. He has an evolutionary explanation for

warfare, courtship, monogamy, child rearing, infanticide, music, art, philosophy,

and religion, but nowhere in the 600 pages of his book does he explain how science

can be accounted for by an evolutionary mechanism. The mind that is reduced to

the mechanistic explanations of evolutionary psychology throughout the book is

clearly not the mind of the scientists who reveal these secrets. Thus Pinker is

forced to believe that there are two minds, againpsycheandpneumawe might say,

the first which is a survival mechanism of evolution and the second which is a sci-entific mind that alone escapes the deterministic slavery of evolution.

GNOSIS

That Pinker would be silent on the implications of evolution for science is not sur-

prising. If science is to be saved from the devouring reductionism of the Darwinian

leviathan, it must be treated as knowledge of a different order from that brought

forth by evolution. Science must be gnosis, the singular experience of consciousness

that enjoys immunity from the deterministic powers of natural evolution. For the

ancient gnostic elite this true knowledge was set off from merely profane knowledge

by appeal to mysticism. It could not be communicated, and only the initiated could

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lay claim to it; all other cognitions were agnoia, mere illusions promulgated by the

profane natural order. Since mysticism no longer provides a viable position for

gnostics who are also scientists, the distinctive gnostic status of scientific knowledge

is preserved merely by silence, through the prohibition of questions, the system-

atic avoidance of any philosophical reflection that would draw attention to the

incongruous dualism that supports this faith.

The character ofgnosisas world-defying knowledge is illustrated in the unusual

twist put on the biblical story of Eves temptation by one group of ancient gnostics,

the Naaseens. Members of this sect treated the biblical serpent as a hero, as a kind

of Promethean character who acted in tragic defiance of the Demiurge when he

urged Eve to reject the proscription against eating from the tree of the knowledge

of good and evil. The serpents aim, according to this revisionist exegesis, was notto destroy humanity but to free it from the prison in which it had been held by the

world-immanent deity.32 This reading turns the biblical concept of evil on its head,

making self-idolatry the basis of salvation rather than the precise cause of human-

itys moral predicament. Such reasoning follows logically from gnosticisms radical

dualism: if evil arises from enslavement to materiality, then whatever would free the

self from its grip will have ultimate value. For spirits trapped in an indifferent world

of material causation, the serpents invitation to be like God is not a temptation

but rather an imperative, an expression of knowledge that, by virtue of its world-

transcending power, is thought to free the self from its earthly prison.A world that disregards human interests will be evil to dualists of all stripes,

whether they regard it as the work of an incompetent Demiurge or an order created

by the impersonal algorithms of Darwinian selection. In either case whatever is

godlike in human nature will be put forward as having rightful dominion. Thus it

is not surprising that the modern secularists idea of humanitys place in the uni-

verse would not differ much from that found in ancient gnosticism. Nor is it sur-

prising that we should find in one of its ancient texts, The Gospel of Phillip, a

critique of religion that could easily be mistaken for the work of Feuerbach or

Nietzsche:

For in the beginning God created man. But now men created God. That is the way it

is in the worldmen make gods and worship their creation. It would be fitting for the

gods to worship man.33

Any form of dualism that makes the creation evil will treat its maker as an impos-

toreven a maker purported not to exist. However, this neither solves the deep-

seated problem of alienation nor satiates the attendant desire for mastery of the

world. Becoming an atheist does not silence the whisper of the serpent. Instead the

temptation to taste the fruit that would make us like God becomes the primal com-

mandment. Rather than seeing the human predicament as one that arises from sin



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or guilt, gnostic thinkers regard the fallen condition as the product of a failure to

overcome the duality that places one part of the human self in the sphere of materi-

ality and another part in the realm of consciousness. Thus E. O. Wilson agrees with

the gnostic Naaseens in asserting that self-idolatry is our greatest virtue. It is because

we have original sin, he writes, that we are betterthan angels. Whatever good we

possess we have earned, during a long and arduous evolutionary history.34

It has already been noted that the desire to make original sin the cardinal virtue

was a characteristic expression of ancient gnostic thought. Subjection to the worldly

order was the ignorance or agnoia, which imprisoned the spirit, and thus the gno-

sis, which saved a person by enabling her to defy this order, could not be one of its

parts. To know nature is to overcome agnoia, to be able to abolish its power over the

human self. In accordance with this pattern of reasoning E. O. Wilson and MichaelRuse repudiate traditional moral principles as mere illusions imposed upon fallen

humanity by the evolutionary Demiurge. Since morality is not derived from the

higher abstractions of evolutionary science, it is merely a false consciousness to

which we have been enslaved by the world:

In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our

genes to get us to cooperate. . . . Furthermore, the way our biology enforces its ends is

by making us think that there is an objective higher code, to which we are all subject.35

Two trademark features of gnostic doctrine are evident in this passage, the rejection

of ordinary ethical experience as an agnoiafoisted upon run-of-the-mill people by

evolution, and the insistence that only the gnostic elite understandthe truth of the

matter. Wilson and Ruse presume to be in possession of the saving gnosisof science,

which can supplant traditional ethical beliefs with an enduring code of moral val-

ues. This morality discounts the manifest experience of conscience in favor of a

more detachedview of the long-range course of evolution. Scientific gnosisalone

enables people to see beyond the blind decision-making process of natural selec-

tion and to envision the history and future of our own genes against the back-ground of the entire human species.36

But Wilsons faith in the transcendent power of scientific knowledge is only pos-

sible because the skepticism that supports such arguments is applied inconsistently.

Wilson claims a power for science that his own evolutionary determinism would

seem to belie, an ability to overcome the folly of inbred consciousnessas if to say

that his own ethical judgments are not of this world. Such a position is logically

incompatible with the determinism of the evolutionary doctrine that he espouses.

But Wilson advocates it anyway, and in doing so ends up arguing a position that is

virtually indistinguishable from that of classical gnosticism in its claimed posses-

sion of a mystical gnosis, a form or quality of ethical knowledge over which he

claims control but for which he cannot account.

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This contradiction is an inevitable hallmark of gnostic rhetoric. In his book

Darwins Dangerous Idea, the philosopher Daniel Dennett simultaneously presents

himself as a hard-core believer in evolutionary determinism and also as a champion

of Nietszchean voluntarism. As a determinist Dennett subscribes to the idea, popu-

larized by Richard Dawkins, that ordinary thought is merely an accumulation of

memes, particles of information analogous to genes which have been encoded

in human consciousness through a process of cultural selection. He is similarly in

league with Wilson and Ruse in presuming that moral beliefs have no real substance

of their own. As memes they are merely cultural inventions, symbolic analogues to

the adaptations selected for in the processes of ordinary physical evolution. Dennett

informs his readers that normative concepts-for ought and good and truth and

beautyare among the most entrenched denizens of our minds, and that ourexistence as us, as what we as thinkers arenot what we as organism areis not

independent of these memes.37

On the face of it, such a position on the nature of mind is true to the evolution-

ary determinism that Dennett embraces, but it is important to understand that

when gnostic thinkers make such statements they are always excepting themselves.

A dualistic worldview requires a dual standard. The gnostic cults of antiquity

accomplished such a rationalization by claiming that the elect had been initiated

into certain mysteries, but the rhetoric of scientism declares that this freedom from

the illusions of false consciousness arises from the gnosisof evolutionary science.Science provides the secret knowledge of the mysteries of origins that liberates the

new gnostics from enslavement to the conditions of their own origins. Thus while

Dennett is famous for saying that Darwinism is a universal acid that eats through

just about every traditional concept, clearly he makes an exception for his own per-

spective: science as the dispenser of this acid is singularly immune.38

While Dennett asserts that evolutionary theory is a universal algorithm, he is

careful never to turn its formulas back on science itself. At one point in his book he

describes faith as a meme that discourages the exercise of the sort of critical judg-

ment that might decide that the idea of faith was, all things considered, a dangerousidea.39 But if thought consists of memes conditioned by evolution, science ought

to be subject to this formula as well, as just one more product of this process of cul-

tural determinism. However, his readers never learn what kind of meme science is

because he has quietly set science apart from nature. Dennett unwittingly discloses

this dualistic position in a very telling criticism of those who challenge the Artificial

Intelligence (AI) research program. He asserts that opposition to AI research arises

from the same motive as public opposition to Darwinism because both of these

fields strike a fundamental blow at the last refuge to which people have retreated

in the face of the Copernican Revolution: the mind as an inner sanctum that science

cannot reach.40 But if Dennetts hopes for AI research were realized, one might

suppose that the scientific mind would be reduced to its causal determinants as



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well. Clearly Dennett does not seem to believe this. After all, if it is science that is

reaching into the inner sanctum of the mind, then science is not subject to this

reduction. Science represents consciousness on a different order. By segregating an

inviolable scientific consciousness from ordinary activities of thought, Dennett

enters in upon the classic formula of gnostic dualism, the asserted possession of a

special knowledge reserved only to the initiated.

THE PROHIBITION OF QUESTIONS AND THE RHETORIC OF

DARWINIAN POSITIVISM

Having outlined the main patterns of gnostic rhetoric, we may now bring into focus

what has only been hinted at thus far, the inevitable prohibition of inquiry that isadvanced in discourses of this kind. In discussing this feature of modern gnostic

behavior, Voegelin cited evidence showing that certain creators of philosophical sys-

tems (notably, Marx, Nietzsche, Comte, and Hegel) recognized that their constructs

would collapse if exposed to the scrutiny of basic philosophical analysis, and so they

simply disallowed such questioning. Setting aside speculation about whether scien-

tific gnostics in fact recognize that they are guilty of such duplicity, this analysis will

merely cite evidence suggesting that this problem lies very close to the surface of

their discourses.

Although spiritual motives may reasonably be posited to account for the fact thatadvocates of scientism prohibit philosophical reflection, the primary explanation

offered here will be found in the recognition that positivism, scientisms ideological

support structure, is highly unstable. It can only persist through a careful regulation

of inquiry that bars certain kinds of philosophical reflection at the door. Because

scientific gnostics assume for themselves powers of thought that are inconsistent

with the evolutionary naturalism they embrace, they are forced to evade any exam-

ination of the conditions of such knowledge. Classical positivism rationalized this

prohibition by insisting that philosophy had not been abandoned at all, that it had

merely undergone an evolutionary metamorphosis which had transformed it intopositive science.41 The new Darwinian positivism of Wilson, Sagan, and Dennett

does much the same, but now in the language of evolutionary science rather than

by constructing an evolutionary philosophy of history such as Comte, Saint-Simon,

and Marx did.

Philosophers continue to repudiate scientistic claims, but they do so discretely in

academic books and essays that do not threaten their hold upon the scientific com-

munity. Religious discourse that raises many similar objections is much more public

and therefore much more threatening. Thus it is frequently in the context of address-

ing the issue of religious belief that scientific gnostics reveal their commitment to the

prohibition of questions. An interesting illustration of this can be found in the tor-

tured reasoning that evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker uses to dismantle the

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importance of inquiry about religious convictions. As Pinker puzzles over the fact that

96% of people believe in God, he dismisses on evolutionary grounds the common

answer of skeptics that people take comfort in the thought of a benevolent shep-

herd, a universal plan, or an afterlife. This is because it only raises the question of

why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plainly see are false.42 Here

is the characteristic dualism of gnostic thought. Pinker wants to presume that delu-

sory religious convictions coexist alongside a different order of mental apprehension

which plainly sees that such beliefs are false. But while this comment asserts that

religious beliefs are known to be untrue, Pinker seems to contradict this claim a few

pages later:

The problem with the religious solution was stated by Mencken when he wrote,Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth

knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What

gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he

infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws?43

Having first said that people knowthat their own religious claims are false but believe

them anyway, Pinker now says that God is simplyunknowable, and that religious

questions therefore should not be raised. Although it is always possible that Pinkersinconsistency may merely reflect sloppiness in his reasoning, it could also be a sign

of his a prioridetermination to rule out religious inquiry. A second contradiction is

embedded in his invocation of the principle of persistent intellectual curiosity to

justify this ban would seem to suggest the latter explanation. If religious thought is

disqualified because it opens up new enigmas whenever it lands upon any expla-

nation, the same could easily be said of science. Scientific explanations are no less

likely to spawn enigmas. What caused the big bang? Is this the only universe that

could exist, or are there a multitude of universes with different physical laws and evo-

lutionary courses? How can consciousness exist in a world that is thoroughly mate-rial? Pinker in fact openly acknowledges what he calls the enigmas of consciousness,

self, will, and knowledge, and at one point declares that he would accept the

Darwinian explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.44

If religion should be outlawed because it piles up baffling enigmas, then we

should expect Pinker to reject science as well. The fact that he does not would seem

to suggest that a deficiency of intellectual curiosity is not really what troubles

Pinker about theology. Perhaps this inconsistency merely reflects an implicit recog-

nition of what might be at stake if these religious questions were taken seriously.

Since the gnostic God is the knowing self, no God who is wholly otherwho chal-

lenges this deification of the human spiritcan be admitted into the discussion.

Traditional religious claims therefore must be foreclosed as unknowable or false so



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that the gnostic may preserve the all-encompassing jurisdiction of scientific knowl-

edge which defends against alienation.

For Sagan the occlusion of religious questions is exercised through equivocation

and word play. Sagan avoids any serious inquiry into religious questions simply by

dressing science up in the play clothes of spirituality and pretending to have addressed

the issue.

Spirit comes from the Latin word to breathe. What we breathe is air, which is cer-

tainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary impli-

cation in the word spiritual that we are talking of anything other than matter

(including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of

science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatiblewith spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.45

Of course science is compatible with religion, because religion is nothing but

chemistry.

In saying this Sagan makes use of the root fallacy to create the appearance of

opening a door to religious questions, but he never really steps away from natural-

ism at all. He has made certain in advance that what he states in the next passage

will not mean what it seems to say:

When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages,

when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that

sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the

presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage

such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science

and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.46

This acknowledgment of religious consciousness is mere flattery, for what Sagan

gives here with one hand he has already taken back with the other. Having alreadyestablished that spiritual experience is nothing more than chemistry, he can safely

talk about it without having to consider whether it has any serious meaning. The

religious experience he talks about here is a phenomenon for which there is no cor-

responding noumenon. Sagan can safely praise religious experience because he has

already established that it has no referentat least none such as traditional reli-

gionists would suppose. If Sagan means spirituality in a truly religious sense in his

closing sentence, he does so only by a kind of verbal bait-and-switch.

In commenting on Sagans rhetoric in a review of The Demon-Haunted World:

Science as a Candle in the Dark, the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin strips off

the mask of pretended openness to religious questions. He boldly asserts what

Sagans equivocations merely seem to betray: even though there is no truly rational

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basis for choosing scientific materialism over religious revelation, we should do so

anyway.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to

an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take

the side of science in spiteof the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spiteof

its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spiteof the

tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we

have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.47

One might suppose that this commitment to materialism was predicated on the

great effectiveness of science in explaining the natural world and the correspondingallegation that religion is weak and other-worldly. But that is not it at all. As

Lewontin goes on to explain materialisms necessity, he gives a reason that has no

bearing on scientific work. The real reason for scientists inflexible materialism,

Lewontin admits, is simply that it forecloses religious questions:

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a

material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are

forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investi-

gation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how coun-terintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism

is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.48

Lewontins closing suggestion that theism would undermine science is falsified

both by history and by current demographics which show that religious belief con-

tinues to coexist comfortably with the scientific vocation. If nearly 40 percent of

practicing scientists in the United States are traditional monotheists, as Edward

Larsons survey research has demonstrated, supernaturalism cannot truly be imper-

missible.49 Surely Lewontin also knows that traditional theism, from the MiddleAges down to the present, has assumed that the operations of nature are regular and

law-like on the whole, in spite of also assuming Gods freedom to miraculously

intervene in nature.50 Perhaps Lewonton is unaware of this. But even if this were so,

the firmness of his own atheistic convictions ought to preclude any fear of super-

natural belief: if there is no divine foot to get in the door, it should not matter how

widely it is opened. Even if others believed that at any moment the regularities of

nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen surely Lewontin does not

believe that this will happen. So why must materialism be absolute?

Clearly the prohibition of an alternative to materialism must have some purpose

other than protecting the scientific enterprise from contamination. Lewontin began

his review by recounting an episode in 1964 when he and Carl Sagan went to Little



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Rock, Arkansas, to debate a local creationist on evolution. The failure of the scientific

community to put down the perceived threat of creationism was thought by Sagan to

be a failure of education, something that could be remedied by the kind of popular-

ization for which Sagan would later became famous. But Lewontin rejects this belief

and instead puts this failure down to the deficient power that creationists possess.

Religious belief, he argues, is the last stronghold of the rural dispossessed. If only they

could take hold of the same power that is held by the elite culture, they would be

able to abandon their religious beliefs. It is not the truth that makes you free,

Lewontin says in closing. It is your possession of the power to discover the truth.51

This raises an important question. If the truth cannot make you free but only the

power to discover truth, does this mean that the search for truth can be discarded?

Is it merely a rationalization for something else? Lewontin has already said that thea prioricommitment to materialism determines that only an apparatus of investi-

gation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations are allowed. In

light of this admission, the power he is talking about need only be the power to

predetermine what will count as truth, not the power to discover the truth. The

possibility of any inquiry that considers whether the presuppositions of naturalism

are the best avenue for the pursuit of scientific investigations is precluded.

It follows then that when Lewontin uses the word free he does not mean intel-

lectual or political freedom in its usual liberal sense as the rejection of tradition

and arbitrary authority. Having rejected the modern ideal of open inquiry guidedby the independent operation of reason, he has apparently taken what might best

be called a postmodern turn. Lewontin clings, at least in part, to the Enlightenment

belief that happiness is found in personal liberty, but this is no longer the liberty of

independent thought. Rather it is the spiritual liberty of an unencumbered will.

While it might seem odd to find a scientist of Lewontins caliber so openly link-

ing himself to an outlook more focused on science as power than on science as rea-

son, this merely shows that Lewontin is a more discerning student of the philosophy

that guides the other scientific thinkers whose rhetoric was surveyed here. What is

truly odd is the fact that Lewontin would acknowledge the unscientific drift of sci-entific naturalism and yet not to be bothered by its ominous implications for his

own vocation. Sagan and Pinker may be beguiled by their own rhetoric, but

Lewontin flaunts these contradictions with evident zeal.

SCIENTISMS GNOSTIC SHADOW

One important assumption of this essay is that the terms that secularists give to

describe their own belief systems may not summarize the fullness of what is truly at

work in their thinking. Apart from this presupposition, it has been customary in reg-

istering dissent against such intellectual fashions to presume that this should be done

on secularist terms. It is easy to assume that positivism, naturalism, materialism, and

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the like are nonreligious positions, but to do so is to simply accept these positions on

the secularists own terms without exploring the actual patterns of thought that are

displayed in their discourses.

It was earlier noted that the advocates of scientism whose words are examined here

are prominent and respected voices in the scientific culture. That these elites would so

uniformly exhibit gnostic patterns of thought is telling. If the scientific leadership is

uniformly headed in this direction, whence go the followers? Is there a more general

movement of thought that is gradually ebbing toward such a position under the influ-

ence of an irresistible gravitational attraction? If so, to where are we being pulled? As

a kind of working answer to this question, we might assume that what has been

observed here is sciences own version of the postmodern turn, that perhaps scientific

materialism and postmodernism are merely two different responses to a singularintellectual and spiritual crisis. Although the term postmodern is rife with difficul-

ties and complexities, in general terms it represents a logical endpoint to the project

of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment hope was that a naturalistic world view,

once authorized by science, could free human beings from the obligations and inhi-

bitions that coincide with belief in a God who has sovereignty over human affairs.52

But by the end of the nineteenth century, sensitive observers of the Enlightenment,

the most notable of whom was Nietzsche, recognized that scientific rationality is

bartered away in the very process of making a commitment to such freedom. If nat-

uralism did not spare God, it would not spare science either.The postmodern turn represents the abandonment of scientific rationality in

exchange for nihilism and its attendant urge to make the world over through the

will-to-power. For these descendants of Nietzsche and the romantics it is the exer-

cise of creative genius, not scientific reason, that is exalted. But in spite of the fact

that the rising tide of postmodernism is itself a logical consequence of the

Enlightenment, science cannot openly follow this path. It must deal in its own fash-

ion with the contradictions of naturalism. What has here been called gnostic scien-

tism is an alternative way of finding such an equilibriumif we dare call it

thatwhich is analogous to that found in postmodernism. It salvages a sense ofrationality by arbitrarily dividing reason from nature, and it then covers its tracks

through the prohibition of such philosophical or religious questions as might draw

attention to this self-deception.

The willingness to mask such contradictions suggests that the rhetoric of scien-

tism has as much to do with the spiritual needs of a powerful segment of this cul-

ture as with the aspirations of science itself. Scientific investigation proper, being

largely uninfluenced by the ideological movements that have circulated round

about it, continues to go forward under its own intellectual and technological

steam. Nevertheless, many leaders continue to urge a scientistic ideology upon the

world, insisting that it must be embraced if a robust scientific culture is to be

maintained. It is easy to imagine the practical considerations that may drive this



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ideology: if science can claim a monopoly on inquiry, it will be entitled to monop-

olize the institutional resources of learning as well.

The central place of such arguments in the scientific culture is nothing new.53

Neither is the spiritualization of scientific knowledge a new phenomenon.54

Moreover, if scientism can be couched in language that appeals to a spiritual motive,

then its monopolistic claims will have an unassailable sanction. Thus the marriage of

scientific imperialism with gnostic scientismor at least with some other spiritual-

ization of sciencemay be inevitable. If scientific knowledge is the only kind of

knowledge worth having, then Wilson is correct when he declares that science is

religion liberated and writ large.55 Sagan is also right when he asserts that sciences

unique possession of built-in error-correcting machinery demands that it should

rule over every arena of judgmentthe traditional moral domain of religion as wellas biochemistry and astrophysics.56 Dennetts prediction that the universal solvent

of evolutionary naturalism will flow freely across the modern landscape, dissolving

every antiquated religious system that falls in its path, offers no guarantee that evo-

lutionary naturalism will not aspire to become the thing it seeks to destroy. Dennetts

ominous suggestion that resistant religionists may need to be put in cages in this

new world of scientific naturalism offers no guarantee that a different species of reli-

gionists will not remain on the outside to tend his zoo.57

The conventional habit of polarizing the aspirations of science and religion is

governed by what may very well be a false assumption, the belief that religious aspi-rations are discretionary and can be voluntarily set aside. Under the spell of secular-

ism, modernity has succumbed to the widespread belief that religious convictions

are electivethat religious belief is something that some persons have and that oth-

ers do not. If it is instead assumed that religiosity is as inevitable a feature of human

culture as politics, art, and custom, then it is appropriate to ask what kind of reli-

giosity appeals to those who inhabit a culture of scientism. Half a century ago

Reinhold Niebuhr suggested an answer similar to what is proposed here when he

surmised that modernisms pretensions of final truth are always partly an effort to

obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge, lest we fallinto the abyss of meaninglessness.58 Where the profane quest for certain knowledge

puts the very idea of knowledge in doubt, sacred instincts rise in defense, proclaim-

ing a faith that is against all faiths but that hopes to turn back the nihilistic shadows

that creep across the modernist landscape.

NOTES

1. This is the approach taken by Tom Sorell, Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science

(New York: Routledge, 1991).

2. I use the term salvation here not in its Christian sense as the promise of eternal life but to denote

a general feature of religious thought: its ubiquitous search for remedies to a perceived rupture

between the self and what counts as ultimate reality.

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3. This is J. Budziszewskis paraphrase of H. Richard Niebuhr. The Revenge of Conscience(Dallas:

Spence Publishing, 1999), 50.

4. Steve Fuller, Concepts in the Social Sciences: Science (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press,

1998), 3031; Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God(Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1978), 218.

5. John Angus Campbell, Intelligent Design, Darwinism, and the Philosophy of Public Education,

Rhetoric & Public Affairs1(1998): 469502.

6. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution, The

American Biology Teacher35 (1973): 12529; See also the National Academy of Sciences recent pub-

lication Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science(Washington, D.C.: National Academy

Press, 1998). The overarching explanatory power of the evolutionary paradigm is offered here as the

main reason justifying its centrality in the biology classroom, but the writers also slip in the notion

(p. 6) that evolution also teaches a silent message as a moral exemplar instructing us to accept the

probability of change in the world.

7. In calling ancient gnosticism parasitical I am of course taking the traditional view of Christian

history, which supposes that there is such a thing as an Apostolic tradition and that the Catholic

view of Christian doctrine that emerged in the third and fourth centuries represents an affirmation

of this tradition. Many scholars take exception to this view. So far as gnosticism is concerned, the

most influential of these has been Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels(New York: Random House,

1979). For a refutation of Pagels views see Wayne Seely Flory, The Gnostic Concept of Authority and

the Nag Hammadi Documents(Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1995), 10127.

8. See Robert Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity(New York: Columbia University Press, 1959);

see also Henry A. Green, The Economic and Social Origins of Gnosticism (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars

Press, 1985), 2174, 26165; Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis, 2d ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983),

28992. Because of its close association with Christianity, early gnosticism has traditionally been

regarded as a heresy brought about by Hellenistic influences within the early Church, but it may

have predated Christianity. Robert Grant believes that gnosticism originated in Judaism during the

first two centuries of the common era and that its spiritual appeal arose from the demoralization

that followed upon the collapse of Jewish Apocalyptic hopes. Though in general agreement with

Grant, Henry A. Green and Kurt Randolf attribute its rise to the more general social and economic

conditions that were brought about by Roman domination.

9. Gerald Hanratty summarizes the various positions that scholars have taken on the origins of gnos-

ticism. Studies in Gnosticism and in the Philosophy of Religion (Portland, Oreg.: Four Courts Press,

1997), 1822. While most scholars believe that gnosticism had pre-Christian origins, none of itsextant texts predate the origins of Christianity.

10. John Lyne and Henry F. Howe have shown that scientific expertise is sometimes not grounded in

technical acumen at all. See The Rhetoric of Expertise: E. O. Wilson and Sociobiology, Quarterly

Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 13451.

11. National Academy of Sciences, Teaching about Evolution.

12. Steve Fuller, Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents(London: Westview, 1989), 1320.

13. The popularity and breadth of meaning that this term has achieved during the last several decades

makes me a bit embarrassed to use it. One writer, Michael Allen Williams, has recently written a

book-length argument for dismantling the term gnosticismas what his subtitle calls a dubiouscategory. Williams, although speaking strictly of the gnosticism of late antiquity, proposes that the

stretching of this term to encompass so large a number of ancient religious groups obscures their

distinctive qualities. Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for Dismantling

a Dubious Category(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).



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14. For a basic introduction to Jungs applications of gnosticism see Carl C. Jung, Psychology and the

Occult, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967).

15. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity,

2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Hill: 1963), 32040.

16. Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays(Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1968). The

last of these philosophers, of course, was an important intellectual ancestor to the contemporary

scientists named here.

17. Stephen McKnight identifies Voegelins notion of gnosticism with the hermetic mysticism of the

Renaissance. While McKnight agrees that there indeed are gnostic elements in contemporary scien-

tific thinking, he has suggested that the features of the scientific worldviews of Marx, Freud, and the

positiviststhe thinkers Voegelin treated in his bookare more akin to the hermeticism of various

Renaissance figures than to the gnosticism of antiquity. Hermeticism, a neopagan religious move-

ment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is most often associated with characters such as

Paracelsus, Ficino, Pico, Bruno, and Fludd. It provided a positive rhetorical impetus to science byaligning it with an emerging interest in pre-Christian magic, but it eventually lost its place to the

mechanistic philosophy of Newton and Descartes. In contrast to the magical conceptions of the her-

metic world, the gnostic religions that are known from the history of early Christianity embraced a

form of dualism that regarded the material world as evil. Consequently, gnosticism of this kind was

distinctively anti-scientific. None of the writers whom I will examine in this essay are opposed to sci-

encequite the contraryand so in this one regard the scientific philosophy of our own day is not

gnostic in the purest sense. If McKnight and Voegelin are right, the gnostic elements of the early sci-

entific movements may not have disappeared. They may have merely gone underground, becoming

a part of the subconscious baggage of modern scientific thought. Stephen A. McKnight, Eric

Voegelin and the Changing Perspective on the Gnostic Features of Modernity, in The Allure ofGnosticism: The Gnostic Experience in Jungian Psychology and Contemporary Culture, ed. Robert Segal

(Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 13646.

18. My source is Irenaeus, quoted at length in Robert M. Grant, ed., Gnosticism: A Source Book of

Heretical Writings from the Early Christian Period(New York: Harper, 1961), 4546.

19. See Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism: New Edition (New York: Harper-Collins, 1994), 4345.

20. Alienation is Jonass term for this condition. Jung would identify the psyche with the unconscious

mind. For a biographical reflection on how the gnostic integrates conscious and unconscious expe-

rience see his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1963), 17099.

21 Jonas, Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism, 120. Postmodernity here is not Jonass word but my

own. I take the liberty of calling it such based on the assumption that the more specific existential-

ist alienation that Jonas describes is akin to the nihilistic reaction against modernism that we now

find in postmodern invectives against the materialistic reductionism of the Enlightenment.

22. Jonas, Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism, 125; see also Giovanni Filoramo, A History of

Gnosticism, trans. Anthony Alcock (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 2037.

23. Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 323.

24. Jonas, Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism, 122.

25. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience(New York, Alfred Knopf, 1998), 22425.

26. Wilson, Consilience, 262.27. It is in making this division within consciousness that the materialism of the scientific gnostic

breaks down. If alienating knowledge comes from the natural realm, this would imply that the sav-

ing power of gnosiswould have to come from elsewhere. For the true materialist this is a logical

impossibility, but since only dualism will relieve alienation, it becomes a psychological necessity.

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28. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence(New York:

Ballantine, 1977), 6280.

29. Carl Sagan, Cosmos(New York: Random House, 1980), 279.

30. Sagan, Dragons of Eden, 83. This platonic dualism is also suggested by the title of the chapter in

which he discusses this hierarchy: The Brain and the Chariot.

31. Sagan, Cosmos, 27879.

32. Hanratty, Studies in Gnosticism, 30.

33. Hanratty, 29.

34. Wilson, Consilience, 106.

35. Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, The Evolution of Ethics, New Scientist17 (October 1985):

5052.

36. Edward. O. Wilson, On Human Nature(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 19697; ital-

ics mine.

37. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwins Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life(New York: Simon

and Schuster, 1995), 366.

38. Dennett, 63.

39. Dennett, 349.

40. Dennett, 2067.

41. Auguste Comte does this by simply collapsing philosophy into science and science into nature. He

claims that human beings can only know invariable relations of succession and resemblance that

are the laws of nature, and thus in the future, knowledge will be concerned only with the the

establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts, the number ofwhich continually diminishes with the progress of science. Comte evades the epistemological ques-

tions that normally surround science by simply making science itself a product of these natural

laws. The same laws that science discovers explain how science works. The Positive Philosophy, trans.

Harriet Martineau, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, 1893), 1.

42. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works(New York : Norton, 1997), 55455.

43. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 560.

44. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 565, 162.

45. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark(New York: Random House,

1995), 29.

46. Sagan, Demon-Haunted World, 2930.

47. Richard Lewontin, Billions and Billions of Demons, Review of The Demon-Haunted World:

Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan, New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997, 2832.

Italics in original.

48. Lewontin, 31.

49. This figure is based on Edward Larson and Larry Withams replication of James Leubas 1916 sur-

vey of scientists religious beliefs. Larson found only a 3 percent increase in scientific atheism in the

last 81 years. Larson and Withams findings were reported in Nature, April 1997.

50 This is evident even in the thinking of William of Ockham, the one medieval thinker that modern

science still lauds. See William J. Courtenay. Nominalism, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 9,Mystery ReligionsPoland, ed. Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1987), 15558.

51. Lewontin, 32.



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52. This became an official doctrine of the positivists. See F.M.H. Markham, ed. and trans., Henri

Comte de Saint-Simon: Selected Writings (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 2127; Auguste Comte,

Republic of the West: Order and Progress, a General View of Positivism, trans. J. H. Bridges (Stanford,

Calif.: Academic Reprints, 1953 [1848]), 863.53. This appears to have been the driving force behind the scientistic movement of the nineteenth cen-

tury, which was instrumental in the creation of the modern science-centered universities of Europe

and the United States. See especially Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devils Disciple to Evolutions

High Priest(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997). Desmond (25659) seems to suggest that for

Thomas Henry Huxley, the greatest rhetorical figure in this movement, evolutionary argument was

as much a propaganda tool for this cause as it was a pillar of the emerging biological sciences.

54. Positivism was proclaimed in the nineteenth century as the triumphant unification of all learning

under the canopy of empirical science, but both Comte and Saint-Simon also declared it to be the

new Catholicism. See Comte, 355444; Markham, 2127.

55. Wilson, Conscilience, 6.



58. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, vol. 1, Human Nature

(1964; New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1941), 185.

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