Formations of Belief

Subtitled 'historical approaches to religion and the secular', this volume offers a multifaceted and nuanced approach to the origins of secularist thought, and the recent calling into question of secularism as a historical inevitability, as had been predicted by Max Weber 100 years ago. It also shows how secularism itself is a form of belief and reminds readers that metaphysical naturalism is taken for granted across a large range of scientific and academic disciplines. Specific essays draw on many different cultures – Jewish, Spanish, Mexican, Russian, Iranian and Pakistani. What began as a movement for emancipation has itself become a new orthodoxy, the 'immanent frame' and context of the modern university. The fall of theology from its position as Queen of the Sciences in Medieval universities has been precipitous. Religious truth claims have been moved to the margin, even though they can still be rationally justified. However, as Victoria Smolkin demonstrates in her essay on scientific atheism in relation to the development of socialist rituals in the Soviet Union, culturally embedded forms remain powerful.

For me, the most interesting essay was Brad Gregory on the Reformation era and the secularisation of knowledge. He explains the critical role of doctrinal pluralism brought about in the Reformation, but also the implications of the principle of non-contradiction when theologians so clearly disagree with each other – only one view can be correct. The modern epistemological space within universities inherits the scientific narrative of secular objectivity contrasted with subjective belief, defining itself in the traditional sense as knowledge rather than opinion. The rise of research universities such as Berlin in 1809 refocused their purpose as the accumulation and transmission of knowledge, Wissenschaft in the service of individual Bildung. The social sciences also adopted an empirical and objective methodology and the overall project becomes consilience within a naturalistic framework. This narrative is largely taken for granted, as we highlighted in the Galileo Commission Report. However, I believe that the nature of consciousness (a word not in the index; nor is spirituality or world view) poses a fundamental challenge to this agenda and that we will need to develop a framework that embraces this and that furthermore provides a moral and existential foundation missing from secularism – a significant reason for its recent decline.