The Scandalous Success of Atheistic Intellectual Projects

Any number of post-enlightenment intellectual projects have started in error and achieved tremendous success: modern biblical studies began as an attack on Scripture and ended by contributing mightily to our understanding of Scripture; the theory of evolution seemed to its original audience to remove God from the equation, and yet has explained all manner of conundrums of zoology; modern science in general began with the rejection of formal and final causality and gained an almost unimaginable power over the material world.

A quick and general account of this phenomenon is that man is an imperfect knower. Sometimes what is in itself an error actually counterbalances one of our flaws and leads to truth, like a man who aims away from the target because his gun doesn't shoot straight.

One example of this has been on my mind lately. Only after philosophers denied the "Cat First" principle did technology achieve its modern miracles. First they said that cats are machines, then they undertook to build machines like the cat, then they thought to build machines better than the cat, and finally they flew to the moon. Why would mechanical mastery depend on philosophical loss?

Basically, it is because all men at all times and in all places are tempted to substitute imagining for reasoning.

When men could not see the tiny, tiny parts that make up the mechanical aspect of a cat, they imagined the tissues of the cat as continuous; when they tried to imagine how the cat's tissues achieved their various functions, the result was rather blurrily attributed to the "powers" due to the "nature" of the cat and its tissues. In other words, imagination favored thinking of cats as one thing.

But once men discovered the tiny parts that make up the mechanical aspect of a cat, they could imagine the mechanical processes leading to the various operations of the cat. More importantly, they inevitably imagined the cat as made up of billions of little wholes, because substantial unity is in fact extrasensory and so unimaginable. So then imagination favored thinking of cats as many things.

In an odd way, then, the belief that a cat is one thing prevented men from achieving a mechanical mastery of the world by encouraging an imaginative error, just as mechanical mastery of the world now prevents men from seeing a cat as one thing by encouraging another imaginative error.

This is the way of the Moose: imagine, don't think. He loves pictures and hates words. But our universal tendency to go with the more sensible and vivid--with the imaginable--makes it difficult indeed to ignore Ray Moose.