Victorian England witnessed a debate, carried on with intellectual force and high elegance. T.H. Huxley emerged as the champion of science, armed with the potent new doctrines of Charles Darwin. The towering figure of John Henry Newman defended the claims of religion in countless essays and in books that have become classics, such as the Apologia, the Grammar of Assent, and The Development of Christian Doctrine. Matthew Arnold spoke for the humanities, the “best that has been thought and said.” This was very much a university fight, indeed a fight over the desirable emphasis in the curriculum, but it was also a fight about the content of high culture itself.
In an odd reprise, and in our own period, C.P. Snow, the scientist and novelist, spoke for science. F.R. Leavis, the stand-in, puritanically, for Newman, blasted Snow unmercifully. Lionel Trilling, not surprisingly took up the role of Arnold and tried to adjudicate the quarrel. Trilling tried to build a bridge which at once recognized the claims of science but also advanced the strong claims of the humanities.
It must be said that in its later version the three-way debate did not come close to the cogency and intellectual reach of its great Victorian predecessor.
Now comes the philosopher Mortimer Adler with an argument that strikes me, at least, as new and cogent. In his book Truth in Religion: The Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truth (Macmillan, 1990), he has many things of great interest to say, but his central argument goes this way: We now understand that the truths of mathematics, science, and logic are transcultural. If the Chinese wish to build a nuclear reactor, there is nothing distinctive in the Chinese tradition that can advance the project. There is no “alternative” Chinese math or physics. They must turn to Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, and the rest. Adler builds upon this observation by arguing—very much against the “multicultural” spirit of the academy today—that if the truths of mathematics, logic, and science know no cultural borders, then neither do the truths of religion.
Whenever twentieth-century technology is employed, the mathematical and scientific truths that underlie it are either explicitly or implicitly affirmed. No matter how they differ in all other cultural respects—in their religions, their philosophies, their interpretation of history, and their mythologies—all cultural communities on this globe that use the technological devices now available affirm, at least implicitly, the mathematics and the natural sciences on which technology is based.
I will cite here another brief passage in which he puts the matter a bit differently, and advances it a bit further:
If the underlying mathematics and natural science are true, then the underlying view of reality as free from inherent contradictions must also be true; for if it were not, the conclusions of the empirical natural sciences could not be true by virtue of their correspondence with reality.
Adler’s phrase about inherent contradictions is important here. He returns to the logic of Aristotle, who held that two contradictory statements cannot both logically be true. (Though, of course, both might be false.) Adler sees the dominant Greek logic as fundamental to Western metaphysics, to the Western worldview, and thence to science, logic, and mathematics. Aristotle’s logic was a statement about the nature of the universe: a statement cannot be both true and untrue. A thing cannot both exist and not exist.
As Adler observes, the Aristotelian metaphysics triumphed in the famous controversy between Aquinas and Averroes, an Arabic philosopher who tried to save the Muslim position as regards religion against the onslaught of Aristotelian thought. He argued that there are separate truths existing in logic-tight compartments: Greek logic and religious truth. For Averroes they are, though often contradictory, nevertheless both true.
Aquinas said no, and argued strenuously for the unity of all truth. A proposition could not be true in science and at the same time false in religion. The sphere of factual and logical truth is all-embracing and unitary. No matter how diverse their assertions, religion and science cannot be incompatible, contradictory. The religious concept of eternity, for example, though it cannot be proved by scientific means, is not contradictory to the assertions of science. There is no conflict possible between philosophy and religion.
Adler follows Aquinas. The assertions of religion, he says, are meant to be assertions of truth. They are not matters of taste, like a preference for Picasso over Miro. Religious assertions may be based upon history, probability, deductive logic, and so forth, but they are part of the unitary Aristotelian universe. And, as noted above, Adler thinks that Western metaphysics, which underlies Western science, goes back to a fundamental axiom of the ancient Greeks.
With regard to the logic of truth, there is another important difference between the three Western religions and the six or seven religions of the Far East. The culture in which the Western religions originated and developed all adopted or accepted the logic that had been formulated by the Greeks in antiquity. This is certainly true of Christianity and Islam; and while it is not true of the Judaism that predated Greek philosophy, it is true of the Jewish philosophers in the Hellenistic period and of Jewish philosophers in the Middle Ages.
The principles of Aristotelian logic do not similarly underlie such major Far Eastern religions and Hinduism or Buddhism in its several forms; much less the assortment of lesser religions—animism and the like—that flourish in the Third World. Thus, all such religions are objectively false at their cores.
The foregoing argument cannot avoid ending with a conclusion that will seem harshly illiberal to those who wish to defend unrestricted cultural pluralism. The conclusion is that the Averroistic duality of truth in the domains of science and religion (where neither domain regards its truth as poetical or fictional rather than factual) is not a healthy state of mind and should not be welcomed and embraced.
A striking example of how such schizophrenia works can be imagined as follows. A Buddhist Zen master who lives in Tokyo wishes to fly to Kyoto in a private plane. When he arrives at the airport, he is offered two planes, one that is faster but aeronautically questionable, and one that is slower but aeronautically sound. He is informed by the airport authorities that the faster plane violates some of the basic principles of aeronautical mechanics, and the slower plane does not.
Adler concludes that in matters of taste, cultural pluralism is highly valuable; but in matters of truth it is not. The underlying Western assumptions about reality are validated by the evident success of Western science—which is transcultural. He speculates that someday religious truth will be transcultural as well, whenever Greek logic makes a bit more headway.
If these arguments be accepted, they lead to questions about how non-Western religions should be studied in the university. The non-Western religions should certainly be studied, but not as possible alternative truth-systems. They may well be studied as objects of fascination, objects of aesthetic pleasure, areas of anthropological interest, and so on. But the kinds of claims they are capable of making are not equivalent to those of Western religions. They tripped up over their own local version of the Averroistic heresy.
Among other things, by the way, Adler’s book strikes me as a fine example of multiculturalism taken seriously, rather than as a sentimental campus plaything: Your rain dance is as good as Aristotle’s logic. Multiculturalism thus seriously pursued would not be a bad thing at all. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen.
Nor by all indications is there going to happen another serious aspect of multiculturalism. Central to Arnold’s critical method and to his concept of culture was the comparative method, reading and comparing literary works in their original languages. He did not think that English literature could be properly understood without a knowledge of French and German literatures, and one has the sense that he regretted that he was not more expert in other modern languages. He certainly knew Greek and Latin. He looked with favor and indeed longing on the serious study of Asian languages and literature. Nothing along these lines is happening in the college curriculum today. Language study is extremely thin. The non-Western books are polemical, complaining, and mostly thin. We are required to admire the Sioux and denounce Columbus—in English. Everything is read in translation.
For decades now, Adler has been fighting these trends. In removing the opposition between science and religion, and in effect making them partners through Greek logic, he has produced a variant on the old argument from design, which has not been much heard from lately. Popular in the eighteenth century, the argument from design tried to move from perceived regularities in nature to religious assertions. In its popular and journalistic form, it appealed to assorted aspects of physical nature—the seasons, animal behavior, the human eye, etc. Hume treated the Argument in its popular form roughly in his Dialogues on Natural Religion. Adler’s argument about Greek logic and the performance of science and technology much more resembles Newton’s use of the equations of physics in his own sense of Design.