Pavlov’s God

But lo, within that ancient place 

Science had reared her iron crown, 

And the great cloud of steam went up 

That telleth where she takes a town.

Modern Elfland, G.K. Chesterton, 1927

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I’m sure we are all familiar with Pavlov’s dog. I’m also sure that we have all missed its meaning. The truth of Pavlov’s dog is the truth of Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The Propagandist knows this one thing, and with it, tries to re-make the world: the conflation of repetition with reality is at the heart of every lie. Do you not know that God’s Word alone creates the world?

Pavlov’s proverbial dog rears his ugly head in every communist regime and in every common advertisement. He did nothing that had not already been done or that is not done or that will not be done.

BUT LO, WITHIN THAT ANCIENT PLACE

Pavlov, in fooling his dog to expect food at the ring of a bell, has only done what has been done since the dawn of man: mastery of the beasts. This is no feat at all. “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, … into your hand are they delivered.” To fear something is to empower it. And to empower something is half-way to believing it. This truth is as old as the animals themselves. What Pavlov really proved, and what no one has realized he proved, is this: anyone will believe anything if it is echoed in the corridors of power.

Truth is the food, science is the bell, and we are all dogs.

SCIENCE HAD REARED HER IRON CROWN

I fear the atheists do not even believe themselves when they proclaim the death of God. What they really mean is that the scientific revolution has overthrown him and usurped his throne. As that first rebellion of Lucifer made of him a devil and of the world death, so too in a devilish coup d’état has Science been made God, and the world died.

Now I do not say that science is evil. That would be absurd. Nor do I say that Lucifer was evil, but that he chose to be. And there is a frightening parallel. Pride fashioned Satan from that Angel of Light and doomed him to darkness. Pride took science, that light of human reason, and made blind the world to the Light of the World.

AND THE GREAT CLOUD OF STEAM WENT UP 

Today, there is no mere science, but Scientism — the absolute authority of science. The great scientists of the past, even in their greatness, humbled themselves with the idea that they were “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” The Scientists of our age think their own thoughts and call them gods. We have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dog to expect from scientists the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We salivate at the very thought. But this nothing other than a lie. This is the case, for example when Sam Harris derives morality from biology in The Moral Landscape. Biology is no mother of morality — they are Cain and Abel, brothers at odds and and only one is immortal. They share one Father who curses the former for sin and preserves the latter through saints. Morality is eternal — God’s faithful servant;  biology is but soil and blood and groans on the earth for want of renewal — the prodigal son.

When science is made the only authority, then Truth is made subservient. If there is no Truth to which science is accountable, when there is no master to watch over it, it moves when no one is looking to the Fruit of the Forbidden Tree — the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. And yet science cannot see its own nakedness. It feels no shame. Modern Scientists have tried to make themselves like God, but have only become devils.

There lies at the heart of Scientism an absurd contradiction: Science cannot live in a vacuum. It cannot justify itself. It relies on assumptions that it cannot prove. For example (per William Lane Craig):

• Logical and mathematical truths

• Metaphysical truths

• Ethical truths

• Aesthetic judgments

• Science itself

As Dr William Lane Craig famously pointed out, to try and prove any of these by science would be to argue in a circle, since science presupposes them all. Science can only be justified in a rationally intelligible world, spoken into existence by a Creator God. It cannot live in a vacuum without suffocating to death. Scientism is but smoke and mirrors — or steam and hot air — obscuring the truth in a thick fog.

THAT TELLETH WHERE SHE TAKES A TOWN

We wonder at the death of truth in our world today. The fog of Scientism has descended upon us and suffocated Truth. And we haven’t noticed because we have been conditioned to expect nothing else. God speaks from the cloud: “Do not give what is holy to dogs.”