The *myth* of secular rationality and science

It is assumed that it is possible to hold an autonomous, unbiased, neutral, objective point of view which is free from the influence of a particular tradition or particular faith stance. 

In relation to the basic assumption of modernity that it is unbiased, neutral, objective reason which determines rationality and knowledge, postmodern theorists argue that such an assumption is simply not sustainable. The reason is that there is no such a thing as pure reason. As Mark McConnell says,

It is a myth. There is no such thing as an unbiased, neutral, objective standpoint.

But more significantly, for our purposes, there is nothing wrong with this. Postmodern thinkers therefore call into question the ideal of pure reason and rationality and thus call into question the project and doctrine of secularism.

The critique of postmodernism says to the post-Enlightenment modernists, “What you are calling ‘rational’ is not ‘just reason.’ It is based on a set of prior commitments. It is based on a belief system.” 

So, according to thinkers like James KA Smith, the basic critique of postmodernism has the effect of levelling the playing field. This in turn means that religious belief cannot be discounted as irrational, Smith writes :

On this basis it means that Christians (and other people of faith) can say to the fundamentalist secularist, “If you get to bring in your fundamental beliefs and commitments and pretend that they are rational and objective, then why can’t I?”

In fact, Christianity, and Judism, is one of the few world vies that escapes the postmodern suspicion of metanarratives. 

For Lyotard a “metanarrative” has a specific meaning. The key thing about metanarratives is the nature of the claim that they make. They are stories that not only tell a grand story; they also claim to be able to legitimate or prove the story’s claim by an appeal to universal criteria. The key issue is one of legitimation. In relation to modernity and its metanarrative there is, for example, an appeal to science or scientific method for legitimation.

In other words, there is an appeal to the universal criteria of a shared autonomous reason.

But as Smith says, the biblical narrative and the Christian faith claim to be legitimated not by anpeal to a universal, autonomous reason.

 Indeed, David Bentley Hart remarks, 

"Postmodern theory simply confirms theology in its original condition: that of a story, thoroughly dependent upon a sequence of historical events to which the only access is the report and practice of believers, a story whose truthfulness may be urged - even enacted - but never proved simply by the processes of scrupulous dialectic. 

What Christian thought offers the world is not a set of "rational" arguments, it stands before the world principally with the story it tells , Christian thought has no stake in the "pure" rationality to which dialectic seems to appeal - the Christian ratio, its Logos, is a crucified Jew - and cannot choose but be "rhetorical" in form.”

Peter Leithhart, quoting Lyotard HERE says,

“The appeal to reason as the criterion for what constitutes knowledge is but one more language game among many, shaped by founding beliefs or commitments that determine what constitutes knowledge within the game; reason is grounded in myth.

On the one hand, science claims to have expelled fables and stories from the world, and replaced them with reason and scientific method. Yet, in the end, science justifies itself with fables and myths, as Lyotard says, there is an “inevitable” move that amounts to a “return of the narrative in the non-narrative.”

States spend “large amounts of money to enable science to pas itself off as epic.” On the other hand, Lyotard criticizes the modern assumption that an appeal to science or to universal reason is an appeal to a standard of judgment that is beyond all particular language games (hence the meta of metanarrative and meta-discourse). 

The plurality of language games is simply a fact of late modern or postmodern life; science is one language game among others, and reason is always (in MacIntyre’s terminology) tradition-bound.

Putting these two points together, “the language game of science desires its statements to be true but does not have the resources to legitimate their truth on its own.”

As Stanley Fish puts it HERE,

"If there is no thought without constraints (chains) and if the constraints cannot be the object of thought because they mark out the space in which thought will go on, what is noticed and perspicuous will always be a function of what cannot be noticed because it cannot be seen. The theological formulation of this insight is well known: Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11). Once the act of simply reporting or simply observing is exposed as a fiction — as something that just can’t be done — the facile opposition between faith-thinking and thinking grounded in independent evidence cannot be maintained.

Pking gets it right. “To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.)

Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the 
criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith."

Science, of course, is value laden as well, and it relies on an arbitrary marshaling of metaphors to contextualize it's free floating data into a meaningful narrative that makes sense to humans - natural "laws," DNA is *like a blueprint, X is *like a light particle and a wave etc etc

This is known as the difference between the manifest image and the scientific, as Sellers has so richly written about.

And Hart asks,

“Why presume that the scientific image is true while the manifest image is an illusion when, after all, the scientific image is a supposition of reason dependent upon decisions regarding methods of inquiry, whereas the manifest image — the world as it exists in the conscious mind — presents itself directly to us as an indubitable, inescapable, and eminently coherent reality in every single moment of our lives? How could one possibly determine here what should qualify as reality as such?

Perhaps the scientific and manifest images are both accurate. Then again, perhaps only the manifest image is. Perhaps the mind inhabits a real Platonic order of being, where ideal forms express themselves in phenomenal reflections, while the scientific image — a mechanistic regime devoid of purpose and composed of purely particulate causes, stirred only by blind, random impulses — is a fantasy, a pale abstraction decocted from the material residues of an immeasurably richer reality.”

As Orgen said, “Truth never appears to us completely free from figures”

I end with this fine quote by Dom Gregory Dix :

‘It is not myth or allegory which is at the heart of the mystery of the Christian Faith but something rooted in a solid temporal event, wrought out grimly and murderously in one Man’s flesh and blood on a few particular square yards of hillock outside a gate, epi Pontiou Pilatou’