Despite what my "I'm Reading" sidebar says (as of today), I am reading The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand. (Hey Amazon: Update your web services interfaces already!)
Every now and then, my thoughts tend to drift to wondering about what our world would be like if the field of science (or any academic pursuit, really) hadn't been hampered and stifled by religious dogmatism. Think, for one, how long the concept of heliocentrism languished in the prison of ignorance and superstition wrought by the medieval Catholic church. Even now — for example, in stem cell research — dogmatism fueled by ignorance is standing in the way of possible medical progress.
The Metaphysical Club tells a similar story, but in the field of philosophy. I am hardly qualified to comment authoritatively on philosophy or the history of American thought. I took some philosophy in college and graduate school, and I've read a great deal of the works of C. S. Peirce, who figures prominently in the book (though I can say now that I did not fully comprehend him). But, Menard does a really good job of describing the historical tension between philosophy and religion and in placing the work of Kant, Hegel, and others in that context. I can't help but stretch the time line to the present day and think about how that tension is still being played out in the academic and political arenas.
The chapter I just finished this morning covers the early part of the 19th century and follows the career of James Marsh, the founder of the transcendentalist movement and eventual President of the University of Vermont. Marsh was extremely influential to important American thinkers, including John Dewey. He was also a born-again Christian who struggled all his life to reconcile empirical philosophy with religion.
Menard explains:
It was common in the nineteenth century to make modern science and philosophy compatible with Christian belief by pronouncing questions of faith to be, by their nature, unprovable.... Marsh refused to adhere to this decorum, and it became the quest of his short life to find a philosophy on all fours with evangelical Christianity.
Marsh thinks he finds what he's looking for in the work of Kant, but Menard observes that his understanding of Kant was flawed and filtered through some of Kant's later interpreters who were more opposed to empiricism than Kant was. Ultimately, Marsh realizes this, but he is unable to reverse course before he dies in 1842. Later thinkers would take inspiration from Hegel, who posits the necessary existence of an "Absolute Mind," which is remarkably similar to the Christian concept of God.
Marsh's influence was substantial and informs generations of thinkers after him. As with my occassional ruminations on science, I wonder where the field of American philosophy would be now if so much time hadn't been wasted on trying to get religion to play nicely with actual thought and observations.
It's also interesting to note that contemporary Christianity, like Marsh, no longer is satisfied by bracketing off its theology as "unprovable" and separate from engaged thought. The recent push by fundamentalists on the psuedo-science of intelligent design is a sort of end-around approach to the unification Marsh sought. Instead of trying to reconcile science with religion, however, they try to pass religion off as science in the hopes of attaching some credibility to it and of circumventing that troublesome "wall of separation."
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