by Josh » January 3rd, 2007, 1:36 pm
A few years ago Richard Posner wrote a book called The Decline of the Public Intellectual, wherein he meticulously documents through statistical analysis what we otherwise can tell very well anecdotally: the public intellectual died sometime in the early 20th century. A public intellectual is a person whose expertise and influence transcends all (or many) areas of public life: science, philosophy, politics, etc. The modern age of science and mathematics began with such men (e.g., Descartes, Bacon, Pascal, Newton--all Christians by the way). Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were public intellectuals (e.g., Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton etc). Great early examples are Leonardo Da Vinci and Thomas Aquinas. The age of French humanism (as it was defined in the 16th century--referring to an emphasis on the humanities) and the Enlightenment were filled with men who understood their philosophy as well as they understood their calculus and their Shakespeare. That lasted through the nineteenth century, even with the rise of scientific specialization. You still had men like Freud speaking intelligently on non-scientific issues (although Freud was a very bad philosopher), and William James crossing the line between science and philosophy with ease. In the 20th century, Lewis (who didn't know too much science and very little math, but who did comment intelligently on medieval literature, modern religion, philosophy and war-time politics) and perhaps Russell, Sartre, and Wittgenstein fit the mold in the early half and middle of the century, but no one carried the mantle from any of those guys.
Postmodernism is a great breeding ground for scientists, but it's philosophically void (there are no good postmodern philosophers--it's almost a contradiction in terms). The religionists, particularly evangelical Christians, for their part have shown an alarming ignorance of, and an unfortunate (and confounding) hostility toward, modern science. No one cares about math anymore, other than mathematicians, quantum physicists, and economists, and other scientists getting their core coursework out of the way. Latin and philosophy are no longer parts of the basic public school curriculum, which leaves our generation devoid of an understanding of basic language usages, logic and argument forms. Whether it's because of poor public education, scientific specialization, or the atheists' and religionists' shared zeal to compartmentalize faith, the public intellectual is dead. Perhaps it's the case that the war between "evilution" and religion over the last 150 years has claimed not only the decline of religious intellectual life but also that of scientific intellectual life.
Dawkins--who should be the inheritor of the legacy of men like Sartre and Freud--shows us this in his work. The "philosophical" argument he puts forth in that book (if complexity of life proves God, then the necessary higher complexity of God would make God's existence improbable) is basically the same ol' "if God created us, who created God?" line that the materialist philosophers of yesteryear would have been too embarassed even to suggest. It presumes that if God exists, he must be created (which is not correct--contingency of being implies a non-contingency somewhere, not more contingent beings). It's nonsense, like the rest of his book is apparently.
It's refreshing to see a couple good scientific minds on this forum (alecto and Larry Gilman) discuss Christianity intelligently. It's also good to see some (with whom alecto and Larry no doubt disagree, but who I think they both respect), such as the Discovery Institute crowd, discuss both faith and science intelligently from the other side of the aisle. What would be great to see is the return of the "philosopher king" (to use Plato's terminology) to politics, true intellectuals running for public office. We need more Lincolns and Jeffersons, and fewer Kennedy's and Bushes. The last real idealist I think we've had in American political life was Reagan, and before that it was the two Roosevelts.
ecclesia semper reformata, semper reformanda.
--John Calvin
