By any standards, David Hume was one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers. Similarly, you don’t need to bother about what the Enlightenment was actually like. All you need do is consult a dictionary, and you will find that religion is – by definition – irrational. There is no need to trouble yourself with the arguments of historians, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists, who treat religion as a highly complex phenomenon, serving a variety of human needs. Early on in this monumental apologia for a currently fashionable version of Enlightenment thinking, he writes: “To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason.” Well, it’s good to have that settled once and for all. “Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable.” Steven Pinker is fond of definitions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |