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Queensland Education Minister backs Cardinal Pell: 'Secular Experiment Failed' : Comments
By Hugh Wilson, published 9/7/2009Why would Queenslanders need to move beyond the thinking of the 1870s, when our mines are open, our farms produce food, and we have tourism and foreign students?
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My cosmology has no need of a deity either. But while “Philosophy and ethics do not depend on the existence of a deity”, neither do they necessarily exclude one—whatever it might be. Neither can science say what is "true" or “untrue”; indeed, science uses rather a crude approach to the phenomenal universe, with great success, though its theories are becoming more and more arcane in response to seemingly infinite complexity. In my conception there’s no need of a god that I cannot conceive, moreover one that is inseparable from traditional/scriptural notions of him. The numinous belongs to what I don’t know, and I’m persuaded that this ignorance (human ignorance) dwarfs the so-called Enlightenment (what we do know, or think we know) in extent. But I’m getting off track. None of this is to deprecate the advances you allude to. I see you’re now calling it a “physical paradise” (I struggle to dissociate “paradise” from its Edenic etymology), by the way, but what other kind of paradise is there in a secular world view?
My point was pointing-up the ethical problem of the “paradise for some”—that paradise is exploitative and unsustainable, at least until we invent food synthesisers ala Star Trek, and less invasive, less toxic modes of production.
The more interesting angle, for me, is the perceived spiritual void at the centre of secularism. Human beings seem desperately to need to invest in some notion of ultimate meaning (a psychic hangover caused by centuries of religious binging?), and here secularism fails them utterly (spare me the Saganesque rhapsodies about the grandeur of it all—another form of mysticism). I disagree that secularism has “won”, and different polls will tell you different things about church attendances. My sense is that the vast majority are as loopy as ever over deities, more or less, or anything metaphysical. Of course we have capitalism and commodity culture to cater for secularism’s deficiencies—drugs and multi-media provide our transcendental diversions.
I’m afraid that the human race is ultimately irrational—but then who’s to say that the universe is rational? That may be a secular conceit.
Squeers