Reviewing a recent biography of John Stuart Mill that focuses on the British philosopher’s attitude toward religion, and a recently published book that looks at the diminishing authority accorded in contemporary culture to the supernatural, John Cottingham examines what these two books have to say about the secularization of the West. Cottingham finds more merit in the latter book, written by Paul Gifford, but nonetheless contends that its core argument is unconvincing:

Gifford is well aware that there is more to being religious than the holding of certain beliefs: religion, he acknowledges, has been a vehicle for “community, tradition, emotion, ritual, color, beauty, value, art, poetry, and much else.” But he nevertheless insists on focusing almost exclusively on the cognitive element within religion because of what he calls the “great ditch”—the decisive shift in outlook in the early modern period leading to the rise of science and its application to technology, which produced “continuous innovation and increase” that “swept all before it.” The rise of a new “form of knowing associated with science,” Gifford argues, has “peripheralized religion in the West.”

If this thesis is hardly new, Gifford deploys it in an informative way, with almost every page enriched with quotations from an array of sociological, historical and other sources. But the thesis is highly problematic, not because there is any doubt about the magnificent achievements of science, but because there seems no good reason to think that these achievements are what have led to the decline in religious belief.

Excluding fundamentalists and fanatics, most religious adherents (certainly all those known to me) have a deep respect for the ways of knowing championed by science. They simply do not believe that these ways of knowing exhaust all reality. To insist that there is no meaning or truth outside the limits of science is not science but metaphysics, and Gifford’s airy dismissal of metaphysics (he cites with approval the discredited positivism of A.J. Ayer) thus verges on the self-refuting. If there is a connection between the rise of science and the decline of Western religion, one would need a philosophically more sophisticated account of such key notions as “natural,” “supernatural,” and “otherworldly” in order to make the case convincing.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.