I am currently reading How (Not) to be a Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, by James K. A. Smith. It’s a book that explains and summarizes the colossal work A Secular Age, written by Charles Taylor. It is a monumental book that tries to explain how we got where we are.

I will not get into the details (I myself am just understanding it now), but on Chapter 3 Smith point’s something out that I saw happen with me on the past. Since something from a philosophy book actually did take place in my life, I thought I might share it here.

Context

The section in particular is called “Why we don’t believe” and is the last in the chapter. To give a bit more context before diving in, he has been talking about how being secular (most easily understandable being an atheist) became a valid and acceptable option in the society. The analysis on how this happened and the consequences is long and I recommend getting the book if you’re interested, however one key insight he adds is that “art as art” arose as a consequence of this.

Taylor argues that being secular casts the transcendental meaning out of our lives, however we are still haunted by it - either because we are still too close to the time where we believe it or because there really is a Spirit out there (I do believe it’s the later, but Taylor is open to either). Being haunted, we still yearn for some sort of meaning and found through the arts a piece of it. Art was traditionally associated with religion and politics, but as religion was considered unbelievable in the new world, we needed a way to keep art alive to give us that fulfillment. Thus, “art for art’s sake” was born. I found this to be a compelling argument in the whole argument’s context, though I have simplified it here.

Hermeneutic of Disbelief

Taylor calls this analysts the hermeneutic of disbelief, because it is an analysis of how someone “converts” to “disbelief”. He argues that when someone looses faith, they will usually argue that is was because of the facts of science, whereas the truth is that is stems from the form of science. To quote him:

The appeal of the scientific materialism is not such the persuasion power of it’s detailed discoveries as much as that of the subjacent epistemological posture and ethics. It is seems as the position of maturity, courage, virility, in favor of the childish fear and sentimentalism.

So, Taylor argues that the convincing part is more the aestethic of science than actual facts. However, in opposition to this is the fact that someone that went through this process, in retrospect will obviously not admit it, instead opting to focus on the facts.

Taylor, however, does one blow to the fact of these people. He says that the faith they usually abandon is a immature, childish faith that could really be destroyed. Thus, even when these people talk about “maturing”, Taylor argues their faith was never mature in the first place, which just led them to switch their belief in the supernatural for a new belief in science and it’s methods.

He does admit that there is a freeing aspect to this process, because it’s true that this new universe they believe does not give them any sense of purpose, at the same time it does not require anything from them. Each man is free to purse whatever purposes he dims worthy.

Does this really happen?

I cannot talk about everyone and I’ll let you judge, based on your experiences. Taylor admits this hermeneutic is stronger on people that personally lived through it. That is probably the reason I found the argument so compelling. How did I live this?

The year was 2016 and I was in my first year of high school (wow, almost a decade now). It was then that I had my first contact with “higher-level” sciences and, at the same time, facebook bombarded me with Carl Sagan and Christopher Dawnson videos and debates. In these, they threw at me so many facts and narratives about how science explained everything and, through it’s methods, emancipated us out of the darkness of religion to a new world. This became a loop in my life, leading to me ultimately becoming an atheist.

The narrative that we could understand everything out there and that there was no one else out there we needed to invoke to explain things our to bestow us purpose was very compelling to me. If you do not stop to think, you start to believe that, because science teaches biological evolution and the Bible that everything was made in 7 literal days, then it is only reasonable to choose science. And I agree - if that was the Bible’s teaching. However, here we are at Taylor’s point: if your faith is childish, then it is easy dissuaded by other beliefs, like, no shit! Try doing the same to a mature faith.

To be clear: yes, science does explain so many things about the world and it is such a marvelous and incredible process. But, irrespective of what people say, science is not the disbelief, it is the belief in something else. I didn’t realized this at the time, but after you see it you cannot unsee it. Science is the belief that reason alone can find the truth. A scientist must believe that reason and logic are able to find the truth. There is no way to prove this statement, because doing so would envolve reason, making the whole thing circular.

Now, I do think this is a good and fair belief to hold, but it is a belief nonetheless.

When I noticed that (1) science is also a belief system and (2) that my faith was childish, the scientific, materialistic narrative lost it’s grip. I again considered the Christian faith and this time searching for a truly mature faith, I was convinced it was true. This is it’s own story, so i will hold it.

Conclusion

It is not often that an example a philosopher gives maps itself perfectly to something you lived, yet this was the case here. It was so curious that I decided to write about it.