When it comes to stirring it, I lift my columnist's ladle in homage to my colleague, Prof William Reville, who provoked nearly a full letters' page of responses on Saturday to a column on some baneful aspects of liberal leftism.
All the letters were in some degree hostile, several trenchantly so. Few, of course, bothered to engage with what the professor had written - a critique of how left-wing fundamentalism intolerantly dismisses anything outside its purview - but instead engaged with arguments he might have made, had previously made, or, in several cases, with what Prof Reville actually is - a scientist who believes in God. All in all, the letter writers made a good fist of illustrating his argument. But the discussion touched on an idea deserving of more controversy: that the repudiation of religious belief, which is all but invariably a dimension of left-wing politics, is based on a scientific worldview. To the extent that Prof Reveille has suggested this, I believe he has extended too much credit to left-wing secularists. It is interesting that respondents to his article seemed to take this "agnosticism = rationality" connection as read.
Let us eschew the cheap shots, such as the observation that, whereas the existence of God has yet to be disproved, Karl Marx is dead and buried, along with fifteen-sixteenths of everything he ever thought. I observe this merely to note that science is liable to obsolescence in a way that "irrational" faith, self-evidently, is not.
In truth, there is no such thing as a completely rational human being, because rationality would seem to demand total knowledge and understanding. Even if we could calculate the totality of human knowledge, it would still amount to but a tiny, notional fraction of what may (or may not!) be knowable.
And each human being, regardless of achievement or brilliance, has access only to an infinitesimal amount of even what is already known. Anyone who lives in an advanced western society is dependent to a high degree on scientific achievements he does not understand, and is therefore a passenger on the knowledge and achievement of others, living and dead. Agnostics who write letters to The Irish Times from what is presented as a scientific-rational perspective usually do so in rooms lit and heated by processes they barely understand, on machines they couldn't fix in the event of a breakdown. What's rational or scientific about that? Western agnosticism is not knowledge-based, but merely clings to the idea of science, taking out a mortgage on the putative future discoveries that agnostics assume, on the basis of a relatively negligible grasp of what is currently known, will vindicate their unbelief.
Modern society simply invites us to replace one form of faith with another, and this, as Prof Reville has suggested, is as prone to fundamentalist expostulation as any form of traditionalism.
And did you hear about the Irish atheist? He was angry with God. Irish secularists are motivated far less by even the idea of a rational-scientific worldview than by a sense of disappointment with a deity whom they have relatively recently given up on. Perhaps because of their treatment at the hands of this deity's earthly representatives, or the perceived failure of their own early-life religious practice, they have developed an outlook towards religious faith that is closer to hatred than unbelief. Their scorn for believers confirms the existence of something less rational than the repudiation of superstition they profess.
Secular fundamentalism may therefore exist disproportionately as a symptom of Irish lapsed-Catholicism. Its primary symptom is a refusal of the authority of God, less because self-styled secularists have discovered God to be implausible than because they resent the idea of divine authority. The issue is not rationalism, but arrogance, or, more specifically, lack of humility. It is not that secularists are convinced that God does not exist, but that they cannot bear to think of being subordinate to a deity Who may have made their lives possible. It is hard to imagine anything less rational.
It is true, of course, as one of Saturday's letter writers argued, that the inability of science to explain everything does not in itself legitimate religion. But it surely cautions modesty on the part of those who propose that science is the best, if not the only way forward.
Faith is eminently rational, not because its tenets are empirically demonstrable, but because it has worked for millennia in providing meaning in a reality that might otherwise have been insufficient to sustain human life.
Atheist states fail because materialism is insufficient sustenance for the human spirit, and usually they fail spectacularly, declining into mass depression and spiritual malaise. In deciding that agnosticism can work for the individual, we may overlook the extent to which that individual is buffered and protected by the level of transcendent beliefs in the surrounding culture. In this sense, the secular-agnostic may, as well as piggy-backing on the scientific achievements of others, be a parasite on the faith of the very believers he derides.