It's common as dirt on leftish blogs, making fun of creationism, The Rapture, apparitions of the Blessed Virgin in some food product. What could be more obvious than the ignorance and credulity of the presumed idiots and lunatics who believe in such things? What could possibly be more worthy of ridicule and derision by the science based Jesus-bashers who are also as common as dirt on leftish blogs. Ignored in the jocular fun that accompanies that tedious and daily routine is that those things are not believed in by many, probably most, religious folks. Religious folks witnessing the low bill vaudeville act find assertions of these beliefs a personal embarrassment due to the frequent associations made between any form of religious belief and the most risibly superstitious aspects of religion. How people can be made ashamed of things they reject is a curious thing, one that might make an interesting blog post, I'll give it two paragraphs.
Looking at it analytically, that association between a specific religious superstition and those who reject it is not a real thing, it is an invention made by a third party, who generally claim to hold no faith of that sort, generally for their anti-religious polemical and ideological purposes. They associate people who reject a belief in apparitions of the Blessed Virgin in tortillas with a belief they don't hold. Which, in a rational analysis, would be a clear violation of logical coherence, but atheist polemics are seldom an example of logical coherence.
What harm comes from a belief in The Rapture or a visitation by the Blessed Virgin while cooking, seldom comes into the consideration. If that question is brought up, some extremely rare instance of harm might be asserted, though it's never been an actual, documented instance of maiming or death, in my experience. Which strikes me as an important matter. The harm that comes from holding one superstition as compared to holding another one is something that is seldom considered. But it's obvious that, through their different results in real life, not all superstitious beliefs have the same presence in the real, observable world. A belief that a tortilla is a manifestation of the reality of The Virgin Birth (which I don't happen to believe in) is certainly different from the superstition that real believers are required to handle poisonous snakes or drink rat poison. And even those, obviously, harmful superstitions hold far fewer intrinsic harms than many of the more reputable superstitions that are more widely held. The superstition that investors have more of a right to the ownership of manufacturing than those who produce the wealth is one such belief. More widely agreed to will be the observation would be that the belief in the superiority of white Europeans to other groups of people is demonstrably more homicidal, Though, probably less acceptable is the observation that is especially true in its most developed, science based manifestation. The body count of scientific racism is in the many millions as compared to the comparable numbers from snake handling. And even that most malignant of widespread superstitions may be dwarfed by the superstitions that imperil the entire human and all other populations. I am going to deal with the one of those which is almost universally held by educated people.
In one of the numerous brawls I've gotten into with atheists on leftish blogs there was one I had at Eschaton a few years back that actually made me think through this situation. The issue began, as I recall, with someone saying that morality was irrelevant to mathematics and science. Which is probably something most people would agree with. For some reason the first things that came to my mind were the involved mathematical calculations as to how much coal would be needed to fuel the crematoria at Auschwitz depending on the continual burning of human fat to effect fuel efficiency It was mentioned, as I recall, in Deborah Lipstadt's defense against David Irving's libel charge. The mathematics of conservation of coal by the continual burning of the fat of murdered humans is mathematics, as it really exists in the real world, observable by documentation, history and science. It is more real than the abstract and useful invention of imaginary numbers. Its creation was as clear an example of doing mathematics as it is possible to cite and its immorality is clear. That mathematical act was profoundly immoral, either through malignant intent or the frequently even greater moral atrocity of clerical indifference. In bringing up this clear example of mathematics as proof that, indeed, morals were entirely relevant to mathematics, that the mathematics involved existed in that context, alone, that those calculations were motivated by some of the clearest moral atrocities in recent history, a brawl ensued. Making mathematics too real is, apparently, not welcome in the "reality community". Other brawls related to that issue were also had.
The belief that mathematics and science have some existence independent of human minds is one of the most widespread superstitions among educated people today. Which is rather astounding as neither of them exist anywhere else. Neither of them exist without human thought, they are the products of a clear historical development in human culture with many of the inventors of them, especially in the case of mathematics, though frequently also in science, being nameable. Neither of them have any existence apart from the human beings, individually and socially, who contain them. Especially after the early 20th century the idea that either one can be believed to have an existence not intimately tied to human minds is the rankest superstition, more obviously false than that the Blessed Virgin might, for some mysterious reason, appear in the scorch patterns in a tortilla. You would have to entirely deny the clear human component of that miracle to achieve a similar level of nescience in the matter.
The presumed compartmentalization that keeps mathematics and science separate from human greed, human selfishness, human cruelty and depravity is an even clearer superstition. It stems from an agreed to fiction that is supposed to remove those from the formal literature of science, an agreed to fiction that frequently has been far more effective in denying their presence than in actually maintaining the purity of science from those most unscientific pollutions. In no other science has that been as true as in science dealing with living beings, especially people, In no other alleged life sciences is that more true than in those allegedly dealing with behavior and cognition. The history of science is replete with violations of its purity pledge and as replete with resistance to having that violation pointed out.
Pure mathematics is generally to be thought of as having some pure existence aside from its applications, which is a denial of the context in which all of mathematics can exist. It is one of the hardest and clearest of facts about it that all of the mathematics we have today is intimately tied to its historical origins in measuring and counting very real, very concrete objects. The work of the pure mathematician today uses knowledge gained in what, I'm afraid, many of them would consider somewhat vulgar exigencies. There is no amount of intellectual refinement that can change that fact. Nor could it possibly be. The interaction of human minds and the very concrete manipulation of things in the real world are the ultimate evidence relied on to judge the correctness of mathematical assertions and methods. Pure mathematics is a concept steeped in one of the most transparently false mythologies in human culture.
And the artificiality of the purity of pure mathematics ignores the economic, social and political contexts in which its very existence is possible. The creation of pure mathematics is possible only through the maintenance of the mathematicians who work at some remove from the creation of their own food, clothing and shelter, not to mention the offices and conference facilities that they depend on. Their very need for colleagues similarly maintained insures that pure mathematics is, very clearly, reliant on institutions. The motives in providing pure mathematicians with the considerable leisure from physical labor that their product requires are as sordid as the military and industrial uses that finance most of mathematics and science, today. I don't have figures to back it up this morning but I strongly suspect that the armaments and petroleum and other extraction industries and the governments that serve their purposes finance many dozens of times more pure mathematicians to support their efforts than those engaged in the unprofitable sciences dealing with environmental protection and public health. And what can be said of mathematicians can be said of physics, chemistry, biology and most of the science that applies the work of pure mathematicians.
The superstition that mathematics and science have some existence more pure than the, admittedly, sordid and sorry history of organized religion, is remarkable among those with educations. There is no more obvious fact than that science is up to its hair roots in the industrial destruction of life on Earth. Even the purest and most abstract of pure mathematicians knowingly make a deal with the devil in order to exist in the modern world. They exchange their sustenance to do their work with criminal enterprise that kills people in ever more efficient ways (the motive of weapons science) and to extract oil, gas, coal, gold, diamonds, for the most profit, leaving the highest cost to, most dramatically, the poorest of the human poor and all other life on Earth. The remove of affluence from that destruction used to be almost entirely possible. With the success of science, which is spectacularly efficacious in magnifying human ability to do things, and the limits of the Earth that ability of affluence to cushion the effects of science is ending.
The role that the cult of pure, inculpable, science has had in denying the reality of moral consequences is among the most destructive aspects of this superstition. As I've noted in many other posts, the denial of the reality of moral obligations, due to the complete inability of science to articulate them, is a frequently encountered assertion of the pseudo-left today. That denial is probably the thing that most justifies putting allegedly opposite political identities that reject morality into the same bin. Alleged leftists who deny that moral obligations have a real existence due to the real differences in their consequences in real lives in the real world, generally produce results not much different from right wingers who act as if those moral obligations are options they don't choose to take. The reality coming from the motive of hatred of religion turns out to not really be much different in the real world than the motives of aristocratic greed.
Note: I thought it was necessary to point this out before going on with Marilynne Robinson's essay. This cult of scientism is an essential aspect of the things she discusses. I think it's a typically more American aspect of the same thing, today. It is like a local dialect of the same language. The same spirit of the remove of the intellectual from the consequences in real lives of real people is a common feature of both.
UPDATE: Looking at my old hard drive while researching a related post, I came across the comment thread which had the argument I refer to above. It was not that aspect of the running of the Nazi death machine that I brought up in that argument, it was the mathematics involved in the construction of the death factory. The point about the economics of coal conservation through burning the fat of murder victims was a different blog brawl. I'm sorry for the unintended confusion between the two on my part.
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