I once met a distinguished, lapsed member of the church. We fell into conversation, and the subject turned to his alma mater, BYU. His tone, though carefully controlled, suggested not a mere gentle disaffiliation, but something sharper. He expressed disapproval, with perhaps a dash of contempt, for the attempt of the leadership of the church to ensure that BYU stayed on mission and to disallow the teaching of ideologies contrary to doctrine. BYU was not a real university, unlike his other alma mater, Harvard, that allowed professors unlimited inquiry and untrammeled teaching. Harvard represented the true model of fearless rationality, while BYU represented religious obscurationism.
Whatever one might feel about his comments about BYU, he has identified a real tension in BYU’s mission at least vis a vis modern secularism. For the modern university claims to depend on what is considered the best template for knowledge acquisition: the open-ended search for truth, using empirical evidence and rational argument. As different arguments are made, the process is presumably designed to converge on truth, and in this way, man progresses upward the ladder of knowledge. If this is the best template, then the BYU model is surely broken. While academia may be besieged in many quarters, and the luminous lamp of science may seem to be dark and tarnished, this template has ensured that academia retains a hallowed place in our society as an arbiter of what is empirically true.
However, it is an imperfect arbiter. Before we throw out the BYU model, we must first assess just how imperfect the ruling template is. That is, the BYU model does not reject the ruling template, but rather highlights its imperfections and provides an alternative arbiter of truth: faith. I argue that the belief in the power of reason, aided by our human sense, to deliver the truth is one of the most seductive and destructive assaults on faith available. However, it need not be so: empirical reasoning and faith are not enemies. To challenge secularism’s demand that we treat faith as an enemy, and to restore faith as a viable option companion of empirical reason, we first must smash the secular world’s idolatry concerning the ruling template.
So, let’s get started. Rather than look at the ruling template of empirical reason in the abstract, let us instead look at it as it is actually practiced in real life at our universities.
Academic Freedom and Other Myths
Is academic freedom what we might assume it to be? That is, is there true freedom in the academy to research anything, and to publish our findings, no matter what those findings might be? The short answer is no.
Academia does not allow unlimited publication of whatever is written, nor does it allow unlimited expression. Academic discourse is controlled through the broader guild, particularly senior members. To get papers published, they must be submitted to journals where they are reviewed by peers and senior members of the field. Ideally, peer review exists to prevent serious scientific errors from being published, though its efficacy has been disputed [1]. While I am not a person that believes any crank should be given a platform, there are reasons, however, to think that peer review often exists to keep unwelcome ideas out. Please do not misunderstand: I don’t believe that peer review was created consciously with this intention in mind. What I do believe is that the peer reviewers are human beings who like their ideas a lot. And that involves smacking down ideas that contradict their own and passing that dismissal off as “reason.”
As Iain McGilchrist discusses, quoting Richard Smith: “According to Smith, peer review is impossible even to define, and is ‘thus like poetry, love, or justice’. For a start, he asks, who is a peer? Somebody doing exactly the same kind of research (in which case he or she is probably a direct competitor)? Somebody in the same discipline? Somebody who is an expert on methodology? And what is review? Somebody saying ‘The paper looks all right to me’, which is sadly what peer review sometimes seems to be. ‘People have a great many fantasies about peer review’, he continues, ‘and one of the most powerful is that it is a highly objective, reliable, and consistent process’. Rather, he suggests, peer review is ‘a subjective and, therefore, inconsistent process … something of a lottery’: You submit a study to a journal. It enters a system that is effectively a black box, and then a more or less sensible answer comes out at the other end. The black box is like the roulette wheel, and the prizes and the losses can be big. For an academic, publication in a major journal like Nature or Cell is to win the jackpot.
It is clear that some assessment of the value of peer review needs to be undertaken: but how to do so? ‘The most important step on the journey was realizing that peer review could be studied just like anything else’, writes Smith. ‘At the time it was a radical idea, and still seems radical to some – rather like conducting experiments with God or love.’ Finally, a systematic review of all the available evidence on peer review was conducted and published. It concluded that ‘the practice of peer review is based on faith in its effects, rather than on facts’. The meta-analysis found that the typical three reviewers of a given piece agree amongst themselves concerning the quality of the paper only slightly more than they would by chance, and that ‘sometimes the inconsistency can be laughable.’ Noting that peer review is ‘slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, prone to bias, and easily abused’, Smith points out that asking authors to pay for peer review, as they increasingly are, is ‘ironic’” [2]
A similar self-defeating dynamic also applies to tenure. Tenure is granted at the discretion of the administration and one’s fellow faculty. It depends, first and foremost on publications, which in turn depends on passing peer review, but also depends on the consensus of one’s peers, who include external faculty tasked to review a tenure applicant’s file, along with the judgment of one’s fellow faculty in the department and college. Let us be honest: the nature of the process ensures that those people whose ideas fall outside the bounds of what is considered acceptable likely won’t get tenure. And this goes a long way to explaining why there are so few conservative faculty members, particularly in the humanities– so few that the percentages cannot be reasonably explained by mere selection of who wants to study what field.
The debate over academic freedom, therefore, is not a debate about freedom at all. They peer review system, set up to provide quality control, also makes true academic freedom impossible. It really is a question over who is going to have power, particularly the power over ideas in our society: the control of the professors or someone else. Thus the only real question is how power will be directed.
But perhaps what happens in the academy is of no real consequence to our society. Is it really the case that academic ideas disseminate into the larger society? It is a cause of perpetual frustration in academia that Americans do not listen to what they have to say. One observation is that the educated tend to listen better to the studies of the academics, and the organs that promote new academic research such as the media (think the New York Times) are consumed by those with college degrees. Colleges select students on the basis of intelligence, with IQ and its proxies such as the SAT and ACT, which also mean there is some selection among college students.
And this is where the problems inherent in academic peer review become everyone’s problem. Young people go to college, mainly, to get access to the middle class. And college is a system of carrots and sticks. If you listen to the teacher, if you do what they tell you to do, if you do your homework, you will likely succeed. If you don’t listen, you will not do well and will not get a very good job. This process involves an internalization of academic authority, because listening to the professors leads to good outcomes in students’ lives, while completely ignoring them leads to bad outcomes. Of course, many students do what it takes to get by, rather than hanging on every word. The bright and ambitious, however, do internalize this authority, and these ambitious students usually end up in professions with authority. Once they have the college degrees, the incentive is to continue to uphold academic authority, as the college degree, particularly if their college is selective, is the reason they should get the job and not someone else.
It’s dubious, however, that those who get college degrees are necessarily more intelligent than the population generally. There is an open question of whether IQ tests and similar measures quantify intelligence, whatever that means. Nassim Nicholas Taleb [3] argues that IQ measures incompetence but has no impact beyond the bottom left tail. As correlation is meant to measure the linear relationship between the variables, and ignores nonlinearities, correlation shows an artificially high relationship between accomplishment and IQ. Additionally, Taleb cites a relatively recent study that shows that IQ explains very little of the variation in variables ranging from personal wealth to educational achievement. These facts suggest that there is more to college than purely being selected for intelligence [4]. Viewpoint alignment is also occurring.
Perhaps you will say that the involvement of messy human beings in any project means less than optimal outcomes. However, that does not mean the project is wrong-headed. More specifically, while peer review and selection of students might be corrupting of the ruling template of knowledge acquisition, knowledge can still be acquired. People can be self-deluding about their motives and yet be correct at the same time. After all, unlike the superstitions of time gone by, academic work is empirical, and it depends on carefully observing the outside world and providing inferences on the basis of pure experience alone.
So let us then turn our minds to the issue of empirical observation.
Empiricism, Empiricism, Wherefore Art Thou Empiricism?
Our ruling template of knowledge acquisition asserts that if someone has empirical evidence-based beliefs, that means that their beliefs are more likely to correspond to reality, while the beliefs of those without such evidence as less likely to do so.
Empiricism rests on the assumption that we can observe the world to ascertain the truth. Tied up with this, comes a belief that there are discrete packets of information (often referred to as facts) that can be ascertained independently. By observing these facts, theories explaining how those facts come to be, can be assembled to explain the world. Truth emerges from careful enough attention to the world. It does sound simple, straightforward and easy, but facts, like wigs for gentlemen, are inventions of the 17th century. [5] Insuperable difficulties remain, however: let us take the field of history as a case in point.
I’ve been reading John Turner’s recent biography of Joseph Smith [6]. Turner is not a member of the church, and unlike Fawn Brodie, never has been. He is, by all accounts, a very nice guy, and he is well liked by his CoJC colleagues and associates. He is a solid historian at George Mason University. Moreover, I think he genuinely believes that in writing his biography of Smith, he has found a middle way between Brodie and Bushman, between scathing skepticism and an austerely intellectual, yet faithful account.
However, that turns out to be an impossibility. Consider his treatment of the Gold Plates. Turner asserts that, in his view, there were no such objects. He thinks the simplest explanation when someone refuses to show the golden plates to anyone, is that they didn’t exist. And he argues that the so-called witnesses were not witnesses in the ordinary sense, as they saw the plates under very specific circumstances. (Or, for the unofficial witnesses, they only saw the plates in flashes.) Joseph Smith, according to Turner, had power to make men see visions, and this explains the experiences.
I find most of these claims extraordinary. I have never met anyone who has the power of making other men see visions. Nor would I characterize the experiences of the eight witnesses as being visionary in any way. The prosaic nature of their experience with the plates contrasts with the visionary experience of the three witnesses and Mary Whitmer. Nor do the random glances of Josiah Stowell, Emma Smith, and others lack merit. They testify to the physicality of the object.
I out forward that Turner’s solution evinces a failure of facts, that is, a failure of the empiricist mindset. It is clear that we don’t just observe the world; we try to make sense of it and our views shape what we see. Turner is a Protestant, and I’m a member of the Restored Church. Facts are not mere facts, but interpreted and understood through a broader context. And it’s not unreasonable for someone out of the church, who believes they have good reason to believe their faith to be true, would try to interpret the founding events of the church in a different light than believers. I see physical reality in the accounts of the plates provided by witnesses; Turner that those same account and infer lack of physical reality from them. And Turner may have a vested interest in his interpretation: if you start out with eliminating the physical reality of the golden plates, there is no way to see Joseph Smith as anything other than at least partially fraudulent. This way of looking at Joseph carries on, so that the “facts” surrounding early plural marriage and the Kirtland Bank Failure and the prophecies of himself as a new Moses all begin to take on the light of duplicity rather than sincerity. There is simply no way to assemble a merely empirical account, then. Facts are fungible, and so are their theories. This point is not that distinct from the one Richard Bushman made in Believing History [7] when he reflects the way in which the same information can be framed in myriad different ways. To expect history to deliver us a single, univocal view based on empirical observation is—unfortunately--deeply deluded.
In considering the limits of empiricism, I also think we underestimate the extent to which our conceptual vocabulary is historically contingent. Consider the way in which history has largely abolished any appeal to the supernatural. Miracles are either not approached, or are ignored, or explained away as being psychological, not real, phenomena. Economic, personal, and social factors are used to explain away what would otherwise escape our empiricism. It would be unacceptable, for example, to claim that demons or vengeful ancestors played a major role in the rise of the Nazis. But is this some scientific finding, as proponents of the Enlightenment like to portray, or maybe a cultural prejudice? This leads us to the question of whether non-Western societies, that have not gone through the same path of secularization and “rationalization”, retain the ability to perceive things that Western societies cannot. I have a sneaking suspicion that this may be true. I also don’t fundamentally believe that Westerners are more intelligent and more perspicacious than non-Westerners. As documented by Marshall Sahlins, in his last book The New Science of an Enchanted Universe [8], the spirits and ghosts and ancestors of tribal societies must be taken seriously on their own terms. The explanations tribal societies give are not crazy, but have their own logic and sense, according to Sahlins. Regardless, the point is not to argue over the reality of miracles, but rather to highlight that non-empirically based categories and concepts cannot simply be discarded because they do not conform to Late Modern Western views.
History, though, is one of the softer fields, and very few if any historians would doubt that history lacks total exactness and that different perspectives are possible. Empiricism is thin there. Let’s move up the ladder of light and consider one of the more fashionable trends: the application of statistics and statistical methods to provide answers to causal questions in the domain of the social sciences. Perhaps the most developed area is economics, where econometricians apply their statistical models to every imaginable problem under the sun. Sociology, political science, psychology, and even medicine use the foundation of statistics to observe the empirical world and make sense of it. However, I argue that this use of statistical models ensures that these fields are not just about observing reality, but involve structuring it according to a particular theoretical framework. To see this, let us turn to an example.
Professor Steven Pinker is one of the most celebrated academics in America. And perhaps his most famous book (or infamous, particularly given the collapse of the Western, liberal order) is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. In it, he suggests, as the title says, that violence has declined since the Enlightenment through a civilizing process, and he suggests there have been further declines in the rate of violence from war since the end of World War II. He provides data to back up his claims, with very nice graphs as well. His prose style is elegant, and his argument seemingly persuasive. [9]
Nassim Nicholas Taleb was having none of it [10]. He challenged the entire basis of Pinker’s statistical claims. War violence follows a power law distribution, made famous by Pareto’s observation of Italian landownership: 80% of the land is owned by 20% of the people. In other words, where the data shows a deep internal difference, the standard normal distribution cannot be used to understand it. In the case of war violence, almost all the war deaths come from a few large wars. And therefore power laws get in the way of making the claims that Pinker is making. On the surface, Pinker makes a claim that violent death is declining, due to the rise of Enlightenment ideals and secularism. However, when modeling social phenomena, we conceive of the world as being generated by probability distributions. We have the observable data that is seen as one instantiation of that process, but we have to be careful, very careful, to make generalizations from that simple observable data. And it is easy to be fooled, as our task appears on the surface to be a simple question of observing the data. If Pinker wished to assert merely that data indicates that rates of violent crime are lower now, than, say, a hundred years ago, this would be a straightforward empirical observation. Yet Pinker ventures into the realm of causality, claiming that there are fundamental historical forces that have changed rates of violence. This is not an empirical claim, at least not a purely empirical claim. He is making a claim about stochastic processes which are not directly observable. To provide the appropriate justifications requires theoretical context, not mere sample averages. For example, to justify this claim, he needs to show there is a statistically significant drop in the rate of violence, rather than just the spasmodic randomness of the distribution. Given the truncated power law distribution from which war violence is drawn, the law of large numbers converges slowly, requiring much more information to suggest a statistically significant result than normally would be expected. [11]
Here’s the broader point: rather than social scientific research being a mere matter of observing the world, such research intrinsically depends on theoretical assumptions in order to observe in the first place. That is, in most cases of social science research, theory must precede observation, and then observation becomes the foundation for more theory. In fact, if we are interested in causality more broadly, all empirical research actually involves not the phenomenal world as it exists, but claims about unobservable entities. No one, for example, has ever seen a causal relationship or a market or parameters indicating the degree of police brutality (a current topic of research of mine). Theory elucidates the entity in question, statistics provides the theoretical basis and assumptions that allow a connection between the observable world to the world of the unseen that the social sciences attempt to elucidate. Allegedly empirical observations at this level of research are no such thing: saying you see the Enlightenment as the cause of a reduction in human violence simply is not like saying, “I see a cat.” Far from giving us unmediated access to the real world, then, academia has its own series of lenses and views that shape the way it looks at the world. Think about that for a moment: is that not the same critique that the ruling template of knowledge acquisition makes about faith? In a sense, then, differences between religion and academic research do not necessarily discredit religion, or show its failure to live up to reality. The “truth” of the matter is that there is no unmediated access to reality. This realization does not discredit academia, but it does relativize its discoveries. Light is always refracted, no matter what.
Teppo Fellin, a business professor at the University of Utah, has explored this topic in more detail. In his article, “The Data-Hypothesis Relationship,” Fellin responds to the claims that theory and hypotheses are irrelevant to the practice of science and that a better scientific approach would be hypothesis-free data exploration. [12] We’ve already seen how empiricism fails in the social sciences, but let’s consider the case in the “hard” sciences. Fellin begins by reminding us about the famous psychological experiment where a man in a gorilla suit dances across the screen as participants are asked to track how many times a basketball changes hands between a group of young people: because of attention to the task, viewers often fail to notice the gorilla:
‘To illustrate the problem with [hypothesis-free data exploration], consider two stimulus or cue characteristics that are important to various versions of the gorilla study—and central to psychophysics and the cognitive sciences more generally—namely “size” and “surprisingness” [6]. The idea in psychophysics is that these characteristics should make cues salient. For example, researchers embedded an image of a gorilla in the CT scan images of patients’ lungs. They then asked expert radiologists to look for nodules as part of lung-cancer screening. Eighty-three percent of the radiologists missed the gorilla embedded in the image, despite the fact that the gorilla was 48 times the size of the nodules they were looking for [7].
“But if radiologists or experimental subjects were asked to, say, “look for something unusual” or to “see if you can find the animal,” they would presumably find the gorilla. Thus, visual awareness or recognition has little to do with size or surprisingness. It has more to do with the question posed by the experimenter or the expectations of experimental subjects. In fact, experimental subjects themselves might suspect that the study actually is not about counting basketball passes or about analyzing health data or finding cancerous nodules in lungs…The key point here is that the “transformation” of raw cues or data to information and evidence is not a straightforward process. It requires some form of hypothesis. Cues and data do not automatically tell us what they mean, whether or why they are relevant, or for which hypothesis they might provide evidence. Size is relevant in some situations, but not in others. Cues and data only become information and evidence in response to the questions and queries that we are asking.”
Once again, the assumptions underlying empiricism can be shown to be problematic. For my part, I believe this helps explain why science and religion present different views of reality: they ask different questions. Reality is inexhaustibly rich, and the types of questions shape the answers. More directly, there is no particular reason to privilege the alleged scientific account of reality as the one, true source of wisdom. It captures one aspect of reality, and those aspects can be amazing (I am particularly taken with its use of mathematical equations to expose the structure of reality). No one should doubt the beauty, predictive power, and insight of modern physics. The question remains whether what physics currently “knows” is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Though the mathematical equations of physics work extremely well, the interpretations and explanations that underlie it are undoubtedly social constructs. That does not mean they are false, but merely that they draw on the background ideas and thoughts of the given society in which they are formulated.
Simply put, empirical research as practiced in the academy does not offer a pure, unmediated access to reality. All of reality is mediated by theories, assumptions, interests, questions, and hypotheses.
Nevertheless, might it converge on the truth, or be the best way of ensuring that convergence? To this topic, we now turn our attention.
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
Even though I was drawn to the ruling template when younger, I was pulled up short when I realized that the steady “progress” of science might be nothing of the sort. It had never occurred to me that science could get more wrong over time; I assume that over time, science could only get more correct, more accurate, more truth-approximating.
I was rudely disabused of my naivete in the 2010s. As I was coming of age, the idea that a man could become a woman and a woman could become a man became not only popular, but began to be endorsed by real scientists and real professional organizations. But the idea that some people are born in the wrong body with the wrong sex is, in hindsight to that historical moment, utterly unscientific. Gender identity was completely unobservable, and yet scientists began treating is as an empirical reality.
Furthermore, all of the other issues of peer review and elite conformity were put on full display in this case. The groups that now control academia would never accept that they don’t believe in truth and only believe in activism. They believe they have found the truth which requires them to deconstruct the oppressive construct of gender and other facets of Western Civilization. On a psychological level, it is not simply a matter of truth and lies, but a contestation over truth and who claims the power to define reality.
Surely it must give us all pause that these ideas were cooked up and created and disseminated among the leading educational institutions on the planet when liberals controlled them. Researchers who wrote these papers are graduates of elite universities and proteges of the professors that populate them. They reflect a hyper-liberal ideology in which all constraints must be abolished to express human dignity as autonomy.
From this scenario, awkward conclusions follow for the proponent of identifying academia with truth. After all, how can a preposterous ideology have been delivered from the most rational, intelligent, educated people in all of society? And if it does follow that such an ideology can gain control of academia, this certainly suggests that academic discourse is not merely the royal road to truth.
There are other examples from the history of science. The founders of the London School of Economics, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, were convinced that the Soviet Union heralded the future of civilization [13]. And as Niall Ferguson has meticulously documented, it was the educated elite, not the common man, that was the most susceptible to Nazism in Weimar Germany [14]. A pattern is starting to emerge, one that should engender humility rather than pride among those who view themselves as upholding standards of empirical rationality as the ultimate arbiter of truth. As one Harvard law professor has observed:
“As we have seen, the marketplace of ideas hovers perpetually and restlessly between a tautology (truth is defined as whatever emerges from the conditions of free and open discussion) and an empirical thesis (conditions of free and open discussion do in fact, on average and in the long run, tend to produce truth). This equivocation papers over the extraordinary weakness of the empirical thesis: the most that can be said is that there is no general mechanism to sustain it and no evidence that it is generally true, even on average and in the long run… research programs in cognitive and social psychology and behavioral economics have radically undermined any remaining, naïve faith that truth will automatically tend to “win out” in free and open discussion. It would take a kind of miracle of providential stature for the large and motley assortment of human heuristics and biases to interact in just the right way so as to make the marketplace of ideas into a reliable truth-generating machine.” [15]
It is unfortunately clear that academics will restrain their ideas to that which is socially acceptable rather than that which is true. Academics are selected from the pool of people who have been processed through the university system and have shown themselves obedient to the dictates of the academics, except a few who escape with their independence intact. They internalize that the broader academic community is right, and unfortunately many show a great unwillingness to think outside the structures set in place. Let us explore the class interests of academics.
The Class Interests of Academics
For yes, academics as a class have interests. For example, social scientists attempt to shape public policy. Individuals who shape public policy enjoy large amounts of prestige and are protective of that prestige. The hunt for that prestige may overwhelm the hunt for truth. This can be seen in the discussion over the lab leak hypothesis for Covid where the question whether the virus was leaked from the Wuhan lab was suppressed to protect the reputation of the American medical establishment. But even for cases in which some of the most powerful people in the country’s reputations aren’t on the line, academics still promote their self-interest, which means promoting their view of the world, even as disconfirming evidence begins to accumulate.
For example, in 1963, Benoit Mandelbrot, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, presented a paper at University of Chicago suggesting that asset prices follow a power law distribution, rather than the usually assumed normal distribution. The reaction from mainstream economists? They ignored it, as it overturned their theories and also lacked an analytically tractable solution that would allow them to continue their research. The existing conversation can’t stop, otherwise academics involved in it would suffer in their careers. Let us fast forward a bit to see what happened with economics and the consequences of ignoring the lessons of Mandelbrot. Several economists won the Nobel Prize in economics for their theories about the movement of asset prices, known as the Black-Scholes equation, all based on assumptions that Mandelbrot had overturned. They founded a hedge fund known as Long Term Capital Management.
It went bankrupt in a few years [16]. Sometimes reality just won’t play along with our pet ideas.
I’ll add another factor. The thinkers admired in academia are those that broke the mold and transformed ideas and society. Fundamentally, to gain prestige, academics need to find new things wrong with society and new ways to break the mold, even when the old system works perfectly fine. Think of the enthusiasm for Marxism among intellectuals in the early 20th century, or transgenderism today. There is a touch of the Hebrew prophets in academics, smiting society and also glorifying in their own superior intelligence. There is a strong bias then to both conform and to develop radical ideas that justify the existence and role of intellectuals, leading to a bizarre “radical conformity.” What it does not lead to is a clear search for truth.
In addition, all academic research must be put within its historic context, something that is often not done. All research draws on the ideas that are prevalent in society. Thus, all academic research, even the best, is subject to the limits of its time and place. No ideas are invented sui generis, even though sometimes advances are made. To illustrate the point, one of the most transformative intellectual achievements of the 20th century was the reformulation of economics on the basis of rigorous, mathematical models by Paul Samuelson. Samuelson was one of the great minds of the 20th century, and he began as a physicist before moving over to economics. In his attempt to create a more exact science of economics, he brought math from physics and consciously modeled his aspirations on the mathematical precision of physics. Economics was transformed, make no doubt. But I think that even the most ardent economist will admit that the success of economics pales in comparison with the success of theoretical physics. These ideas simply don’t translate easily, and the ability to think only within the path science sets limits creativity.
Another example of this involves biology. As Iain McGilchrist has extensively demonstrated in his book The Matter with Things, biology is beholden to the concepts that were developed as part of the mechanistic revolution and Newtonian physics. [17] He documents the way in which the machine metaphor dominates, quoting a philosopher of biologist: “‘There is little doubt about the biologist’s declared obsession with mechanisms of every sort’, writes Stephen Talbott, a philosopher of biology; these include widespread references to ‘genetic mechanisms’, ‘epigenetic mechanisms’, ‘regulatory mechanisms’, ‘signalling mechanisms’, ‘oncogenic mechanisms’, ‘immune mechanisms’, ‘circadian clock mechanisms’, ‘DNA repair mechanisms’, ‘RNA splicing mechanisms’, and even ‘molecular mechanisms of plasticity’ … no cellular entity or process is exempt; everything has been or will be baptised a ‘mechanism’ … The odd thing is that I have yet to find a single technical paper in molecular biology whose author thought it necessary to define mechanism or any of the related terms.”
I cannot summarize the whole of McGilchrist’s here; in fact, the whole book, which in my estimation is the greatest work of philosophy for several hundred years, defies summary. I will merely state that he observes that, in contrast to machines: “The organism as a whole acts in a co-ordinated fashion to create and respond to meaning in the pursuit of value-laden goals, whereby it is fully realised and fulfilled as an organism.” [18] The biologists who made the assumption that living organisms were machines can’t be faulted; they were drawing on the most cutting-edge philosophy of the day. That such intelligent and thoughtful people were severely limited by the conceptual framework of their day suggests a need for humility.
The theory of evolution itself was shaped by and then broadly shaped the culture. As N T Wright observed, evolution emerged out of Epicurean thought in the 19th century which was particularly prominent in the Darwin family [19]. That does not mean that evolution is necessarily false. It does mean that evolution cannot be seen as a timeless view outside of historical processes. That is, evolution must be understood within history. Furthermore, individuals like Herbert Spencer took the notion of evolution to apply it to everything from free market capitalism to the survival of nations. As none of us are Social Darwinists anymore, I think we can concede that something went wrong when the broader ideas of evolution were applied outside its realm. But again, theorists have no option but to borrow ideas from the broader culture. History matters.
And one more criticism; we have a powerful and overwhelming counterexample of success in academic “generation of knowledge” that does not depend on free discourse and the ability of academics to ceaselessly negotiate between each other among an infinite array of options without any government interference. We call it China. A recent report in The Economist observes that China has become a scientific superpower. In fact, in many fields, China exceeds the United States in scientific output [20]. This scientific growth suggests that merely letting universities put out whatever they want is not necessarily the golden route to truth.
And Now, For Some Pop Psychology
In a sense, academics have become the clergy of our post-Christian societies, offering prohets, seers, and revelators to a godless age. Lacking a belief in God and a recognition that God has appointed modern prophets, the secularist turns to academics as the source of revelation. You don’t have to dig that far to find this idea scattered throughout modernity. Auguste de Comte, for example, believed in creating a rational religion of humanity where intellectuals would use cutting edge science to direct humanity. To this day, most applaud the replacement of religious explanations with scientific ones
I do not believe there is any conspiracy on behalf of the academic community to perform this ecclesiastical role. They do not meet in the dead of night in order to plot how they can take over the world. Many academics are aware of the limitations of their field. What I do think is that many are influenced by the broad outlines that the forefathers of modern science and academia created. And there is a strong strand there of the belief that the cleverest should rule. Many academics have been told how clever they are their whole lives, reinforcing a belief that if their ideas would just be implemented, everything would work out for the best. Such a belief can be useful in propping up a theory of meritocratic governance. To criticize the universities would be to admit that the whole raison d’etre for the right to rule of the meritocrats has gone up in smoke. And then the questions would start: why exactly do the people who rule us, rule us? Are they really the best and the brightest? Best not to entertain such thoughts and to keep focused on your investment banking job.
Academia as Temple to Progressive Technocracy
These ideas crystalize in the current interests of the American elite and their temples, the universities. N.S Lyons, perhaps the greatest political commentator of the era, has understood the current dynamics of the culture war in his article “The West’s Anti-Colonial Struggle is Real.” [21] Despite all the rhetoric of decolonization by our current elite, they, the cultural elites that live in Boston, DC, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, are colonizing their own country. He identifies six processes that imperial elites historically use: de-nationalization, division, deculturalization and demoralization, displacement and dispossession, exploitation and enforcement, and systematization. I can’t go through all of these (read the article), but succinctly, the systematic rejection of our cultural heritage and the lunatic ambition of this tiny anti-Western elite to control the whole world through managerial technocracy is helped along by the universities.
Consider what Lyons says about “deculturalization and demoralization”:
“Deculturalization is the process of stripping a people of their traditional culture, customs, beliefs, values, and language, and forcibly replacing these with those of a new dominant group. Unlike acculturation or assimilation, which is an individual’s choice to join an existing dominant culture, deculturalization is a coercive process waged from the top down. It involves the deliberate severing of historical roots and abolition of historical memory, including through censorship, propaganda, indoctrination, and desacralization…deculturalization is accompanied by a concerted campaign of deliberate demoralization, or the attempt to convince a people that everything about their culture, ways of life, or race as a whole is inferior, backwards, and barbaric, and that they would be better off adopting the cultural values and ways of life of their colonial masters, who are obviously their civilized betters.”
Academia functions as the tip of the spear for this effort in America. Beyond the attempt to rewrite American history, academics display a generally hostile attitude towards religion. Movements like neoliberal feminism and LGBT are useful, as they suggest that the Christian order was disgusting and depraved. Universities love promoting this message. Additionally, academia provides other forms of desacralization and deculturalization, particularly in its study of the Bible. Forgive me for going out on a limb here, but I’m deeply suspicious of most of these efforts. For example, there is a broad consensus in the field of archaeology that the Exodus never happened, and there is a broad attempt to discredit the narrative of the New Testament. It is hard not to see this as part of a broader attempt to discredit the previous culture to allow the current elite to replace it with their own.
Lyons suggests that the population is gradually made to feel that “decisions about his nation and even his own future are something simply out of his hands – something to instead rightfully be handed down by his far-away betters like declarations dispatched from the heights of some unseen Mount Olympus.” This process could not proceed without academia, which as mentioned before, provides the credentialization and research to make the population believe that the elite are smarter and better than them, and thus able to rule. Additionally, Lyons notes that members of the population that show talent are generally strip mined from their local population, and taken to urban centers where they are re-educated along the ruling class’ lines, such as in Ivy League schools. Though they mainly exist to train the current imperial elite’s offspring, they also strip mine talent from home and abroad to turn them into drones of the American ruling class. Impressionable 18 year olds quickly transform into secular progressives who believe the expansion of technocratic control over all the world is the necessary prerequisite for progress.
Lastly, Lyons suggests that a central technique of the American ruling class is division. The population is broken up into subgroups, and subgroups are pitted against others in order to prevent collective uprising. I want to turn my attention to the CoJC community specifically, though. This divide and conquer rule has, I think, produced two specific groups: the Sadducees and the mainstream. The Sadducees were elite Jews that had hellenized and given over to Greek influence. Generally, the CoJC Sadducees are, for the most part, highly educated and/or wealthy CoJC people who give over to the current elite obsessions over sexuality, race, gender, and academic authority. In essence, they intend to thoroughly secularize the CoJC church to sing perfectly in harmony with modern American culture and to replace the authority of traditional religion with the authority of academics.
Consider an example: Greg Prince gave a talk about seven years ago at Sunstone. In it, he says:
“Let’s examine the most enduring and influential of the symbols he [Joseph Smith] produced: The Book of Mormon. If you allow data, rather than dogma, to speak, you will find many things that make problematic the traditional story of The Book of Mormon being a literal translation of an ancient history and the most perfect book in the world. Despite the insistence of apologists for well over a century that archaeological ruins throughout Central and South America bear material witness to the book’s historicity, closer examination has shown just the opposite. Michael Coe, a Yale University professor widely considered one of the world’s experts on Mesoamerica, has gone on the record repeatedly to say that not a single archeological find supports the claim that The Book of Mormon is an ancient history.” [22]
Michael Coe, pray for us! The data and dogma comment alone evidences a rather dogmatic commitment to “radical empiricism" and “naive realism.” But see the point: he wants us to defer to academics, who get to dictate the meaning and significance of the religion, rather than to, you know, the prophet. A similar vein of argumentation can be seen in Taylor Petrey’s furious commitment to overturning gender and sexuality in the CoJC context [23]. They both concern different issues, but directionally they move towards progressive technocracy wearing the CoJC religion as a skinsuit and to total deference to the imperial class.
The Challenge Ahead
I have not, in this article, spelled out a clear alternative to the secular mythos of the ruling template of knowledge acquisition that surrounds us. I do not have clear enough ideas to do that. I hope to have exposed, though, the hollowness of the ideology that my secularized interlocutor who critiqued BYU in favor of Harvard has embraced. The ruling template of knowledge acquisition is a building without foundation, the vain and foolish imaginings of the world. Unfortunately, however, the challenge he offered cannot be ignored. In many ways, it is the fundamental challenge the Church faces in the secular world: how to combat a hostile empire of the mind that trumpets its own superiority over all other systems and wields technological sophistication to match.
What we need to counter secular, cynical theories are theories and ideas of our own. Though other religious traditions can help, we cannot entirely rely on them and their conclusions. In defending God, for example, we do not buy the claims of classical theism; rather, we see deity as a gendered and exalted man (or a married couple) as opposed to the ground of all being. The defense we seek will not come external from our religion; it must come within.
What we should not call for is a know-nothing movement. “It is equally excessive to shut reason out and to let nothing else in,” as Pascal was reputed to have said. Anyone, regardless of their intellectual ability, can gain a perfect knowledge through the witness of the Holy Spirit. But importantly, we need people to defend that claim, so that the Spirit is not drowned out in a tidal wave of secularism.
The church and its people have had much success in recent years of fusing the gospel and scholarship. To give a few examples, the broad apologetic work of figures such as Daniel Peterson and others, the historical writings of Richard Bushman, and even Neylan McBaine’s reflections on the role of women in the church and how their role can be magnified (as it has been by recent changes in Church structure, many which were prefigured in her writings). But what we truly need is what Ralph Hancock called for several years ago [24]: a gospel methodology that will bathe our understanding of all subjects in the light of our religion, rather than deconstructing it in the light of “objective” and “neutral” secular standards.
The future of the church and its intellectual tradition is covered in fog but there is also a sense of excitement, adventure, and possibility. To liberate our minds from stultifying secular dogmas is merely the first step in a grand quest to constitute the intellectual and educational part of the city of Zion. To do that, we must go forward with faith, and with the confidence that all truth can be circumscribed in one great whole.
NOTES:
[1] Smith R. Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals. J R Soc Med. 2006 Apr;99(4):178-82. doi: 10.1177/014107680609900414. PMID: 16574968; PMCID: PMC1420798. [Back to manuscript].
[2] Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021). [Back to manuscript].
[3] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, *“IQ Is Largely a Pseudoscientific Swindle (Argument Closed),”* INCERTO (Medium), January 2, 2019, [https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39] [Back to manuscript].
[4] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, *“IQ Is Largely a Pseudoscientific Swindle (Argument Closed),”* INCERTO (Medium), January 2, 2019, [https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39] [Back to manuscript].
[5] Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 357. and Peter Markie and M. Folescu, “Rationalism vs. Empiricism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, first published August 19, 2004; substantive revision September 2, 2021, accessed October 23, 2025, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/ [Back to manuscript].
[6] Turner, John G. Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025. [Back to manuscript].
[7] Richard L. Bushman, Believing History: Latter-day Saint Essays, ed. Reid L. Neilson and Jed Woodworth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
[Back to manuscript].
[8] Marshall Sahlins, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022). [Back to manuscript].
[9] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). [Back to manuscript].
[10] Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “On the Statistical Properties and Tail Risk of Violent Conflicts,” Real World Risk Institute Working Paper Series (2016), https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/longpeace.pdf. [Back to manuscript].
[11] Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “On the Statistical Properties and Tail Risk of Violent Conflicts,” Real World Risk Institute Working Paper Series (2016), https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/longpeace.pdf. [Back to manuscript].
[12] T. Felin, J. Koenderink, J. I. Krueger, N. Noble, and G. F. R. Ellis, “The Data-Hypothesis Relationship,” Genome Biology 22, no. 1 (2021): 57, https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-021-02276-4. [Back to manuscript].
[13] John Gray, “A Point Of View: Why capitalism hasn't triumphed,” BBC News Magazine, November 8, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29951222
[Back to manuscript].
[14] Niall Ferguson, “Niall Ferguson: The Treason of the Intellectuals,” The Free Press, December 11, 2023, https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-treason-intellectuals-third-reich [Back to manuscript].
[15] Vermeule, Adrian. “Liberalism and the Invisible Hand.” American Affairs 3, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 172–97. [Back to manuscript].
[16] Benoit B. Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson, The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence (New York: Basic Books, 2004) [Back to manuscript].
[17] Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021). [Back to manuscript].
[18] Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021). [Back to manuscript].
[19] N. T. Wright, “Loving to Know,” First Things, February 1, 2020 [Back to manuscript].
[20] The Economist, “China has become a scientific superpower,” June 12, 2024
[Back to manuscript].
[21] N. S. Lyons, “The West’s Anti-Colonial Struggle Is Real,” *The Upheaval* (Substack), April 3, 2024, https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-wests-anti-colonial-struggle. [Back to manuscript].
[22] Greg Prince, “Own Your Religion,” *Sunstone*, October 31, 2018, https://sunstone.org/own-your-religion/. [Back to manuscript].
[23] Taylor G. Petrey, *Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism* (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
[Back to manuscript].
[24] Ralph C. Hancock, "BYU and Secular Higher Education: The Challenge of a 'Gospel Methodology'," SquareTwo 15, no. 3 (Fall 2022), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleHancockGospelMethodology.html, accessed March 21, 2026. [Back to manuscript].
Full Citation for this Article: Strong, Ryan (2026) "On the Illusion of Secular Rationality," SquareTwo, Vol. 19 No. 1 (Spring 2026), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleDEFAULT.html, accessed <give access date>.
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