The Vast Amnesia

During the Great Purification an involuntary veiling of darkness descended on some scientists and they repressed their own knowledge. Scientific materialists dogmatically, often truculently, asserted that God is an effect of the human brain. From this rickety edifice of negative forgetfulness a framework of unknowing, even anti-knowing, was constructed. Scientific materialism held that God was a biologically adaptive brain-based mental construct and there is no such thing as divine grace. Rather, religious experience of every kind from the greatest saint to the prattling child expresses myths and social modes originating in molecular-level brain defluxions. Materialism denied divine inspiration. It taught that the great saints and lovers of God, the great poets and martyrs,philosophers and musicians, all merely expressed brain-based reactions to gratify biologically determined needs. All thought and longing and feeling—in fact, everything in consciousness—is determined by genetics and its sibling epigenetics, and while the former may be more beautiful or linguistically complex, there is no essential difference between the prayers of St. Theresa and the phrase, "What's for dinner?"

Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge was a passionate hope that the reductionistic scientific method could unify all knowledge. Unity of knowledge was a great thirst of the Old Humanity. They sensed the oneness of creation and their forms of natural religious experience expressed that sense. They achieved knowledge of the illusory individual soul and the Oversoul, the basis of natural theism. But an anti-God dogma infected science of the Great Purification with a reckless hypocrisy: claiming to be rational and to demand robust theories based on empirical investigation, these scientists jumped to the unwarranted conclusion that God is a human artifact and creation has no purpose.

Consilience is a most thorough summary of the final form of scientific materialism. It carefully traces the history of scientific materialism and emphasizes the core negation—that evolution is non-purposive—and its other negations about God, religion and love. It's author, Edward Wilson, incarnated among the religiously pugnacious Old American South Baptists. This sect was noted for their insistence on a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, despite the fact it was well-known even then to be a collaborative work that had been perpetually edited over millennia. These Baptists were also noted for hymn singing and for their charming rites of water baptism in rivers. But their favorite pastime, and they were generally poor people who had to make sport where they could find it, was rejecting the obvious facts of the evolution of forms over ages of time. They insisted that God had made the world in six days and then rested. Wilson spent his whole life reacting to that silliness. His principle scientific contribution involved ant pheromones, but his personal religion was faith in non-purposive evolution.

There were examples of political persecution in the Old America, but they did not prosecute scientific thought-crime. For example, during the Silence intellectuals and artists suspected of being Communists were persecuted, but the American government never targeted scientific theory, never held trials or imprisoned scientists for their work. No branch of scientific endeavor was ever outlawed. The cups of poison that were poured for Socrates and Anaxagoras (one was sipped and the other declined) established the archetype that religion persecuted science. And throughout much of the Old Humanity it did. But during the Great Purification, the most prestigious American universities and most productive research centers were secular and independent of religious authority. Scientific knowledge was not submitted to religious review, and no degree of religious impiety would land a Harvard professor in the hemlock. Wilson's casting himself and his colleagues in the victim's role of being persecuted by religion is romantic nonsense. In the end, scientists were more likely to disdain God and reproach religion, than were the prayers and pulpits of America to disparage science. One of Wilson's colleagues, a paleontologist named Stephen Gould, wrote a fine little book about this subject called Rocks of Ages, but Wilson appeared not to have read it.

A veil descended upon humanity, especially on scientists and artists, during the Great Purification to protect them through that travail. The unnaturalness was so great scientists and artists of the Manifestation could carry on with their work only if numbed by forgetfulness. These people knew, everybody knew, that the Old Humanity was destroying itself. Wilson himself wrote a paper entitled "Is Humanity Suicidal?" (No, Dr. Wilson. Humanism was suicidal!) They were witnessing the furious termination of biodiversity and understood its implications. But scientific materialism did not exalt human consciousness. They worriedly counted the explosion of human souls flooding to Earth to experience the Manifestation. They bemoaned the effects of the intensification of human consciousness and grieved the intractable ignorance of war and understood its waste. In order to carry on, not only creatively but with life itself, God granted a mass amnesia to many scientists of that time.