Due May 16, 2023:
So this is a profoundly puzzling book. Spencer knows his history of science. He recounts the set pieces of any such story – the trial of Galileo, Huxley vs Wilberforce, the Scopes monkey trial – with bravura. He has a good grasp of how science has changed over time, and he also understands that the word ‘religion’ meant very different things to Cicero, Augustine and the author of The Golden Bough. But he doesn’t seem to grasp that the pared down, purely ‘spiritual’ religion he defends has virtually nothing in common with that of Augustine, Calvin, Loyola and Newman.
What this book marks, in fact, is the quiet triumph of meta-science over faith, for faith in the Bible as history, in the great eschatological drama of redemption, has been replaced here by faith, not in a creator and redeemer God, but in the peculiar specialness of human beings. Perhaps we are special; but there’s more to religion than an insistence that, because we make our lives meaningful, the universe must have a meaning. Though Spencer finds the idea repugnant, maybe we are just peculiar machines whose functioning depends on producing, in endless succession, deepity after deepity. If there is one thing that is clear about human beings, after all, it is that we have a remark-able talent for self-deception – and what is religion but a trick we play on ourselves? – David Wootton (March 18, 2023)