by Luke Markham, Conservative Home
Of all the hubristic practices, none is perhaps as amusing as that of the primacy of the present: the conviction that ‘today’ acts as guarantor of the accuracy of the beliefs of now against those of before.
It is rooted in the canonisation of the scientific method, based on the misconception that the rate of technological progress is directly proportional to the approach of the truth. No doubt it was with a volley of celebratory backslapping and hand-shaking that scientists ‘discovered’ last year that there are six types of love; the Greeks had reached this conclusion over 2 millennia ago, but because they didn’t have a 5G connection they hadn’t been considered credible sources.
What escapes the intellectual elite of today is that they are tomorrow’s Greeks, and so ought to compare their own beliefs to those of others with the humility of already being a product of yesterday.
Where this tyranny of science deleteriously applies itself is in the question of the existence of God, which it has reduced to a problem of observable or non-observable epistemology; as a ‘solved’ issue, therefore – God does not visibly exist – it does not demand further investigation.