We envision a world of digital paradise, a direct consequence of modernity and secularism, which germinated from the Age of Enlightenment that came after the Dark ages in the western European continent. While we actively seek to remove religion’s influence over our lives through secularization, the advancement of the digital age in the dawn of the third millennium has, ironically, created a cult of faith towards modernity. It is ironic in a sense that, while secularism disapproves faith without base, secularism has gradually turned into faith itself.
We may or may not realize that, through thousands of years of perfection of every facet of our civilization, we have deliberately and completely redefined, if not altered, some of human’s natural characteristics and cultural perception. Yet, we are still bound by the genetic sequence that defines both our anatomy and existence. Soon enough, we would revert back to simplicity that is originally part of our characteristics. Thousands of years of civilization would collapse in the face of millions of years of evolution. Thus, such transmogrification into modernity has created an imbalance that will ultimately topple such faith of modernism, eventually resulting in regression. Apropos, this becomes more pertinent in a world where identities are shifting and collapsing, resulting in uncertainties.
Amidst flood of modernization that threatens our values and faith, we have the predisposition to retreat into fundamentalism. Vis-à-vis of the uncertainties and the tendency to revert to simplicity mentioned earlier, men are psychologically pre-wired to fulfill their need for certainties and reassurance. Such uncertainties are characteristics of a pluralistic view of the world brought about by modernity, and faith provides the certainty they need. People are confused and scared of a materialistic world without God, without divinity. Complexity and sophistication of modernism had not dwindled the importance of religions, as most early scholars had suggested, but had taken a toll on secularism itself and thus fueled the expansion of fundamentalist religion, some even the extremities.
Secularism is bolstered by empiricism, which explicates its conspicuously stark dichotomy with religion, which is based solely on faith. Yet, of late, proponents of fundamentalism, in order to gain an upper hand, have resorted to empiricist methods. In the U.S, some of the fundamentalist Christians, which prefer the label ‘Evangelical’ instead, supported Intelligent Design in lieu of Darwinism and Evolution. Intelligent Design, which is creationism in disguise, simply stated that the complexity of all living things could not possibly be the result of seemingly random interaction of amino acids. It based its view on a weak postulate that the probabilities of such interactions leading to conspicuously sophisticated biological anatomies are simply too small, if not zero. Such a trend of using science to corroborate fundamentalism is alarming as it is harming science itself.
As one proponent of secularism aptly puts it, we must not oppose to publicly held view; the more we attack it, the more defensive it becomes. Thus secularists, in facing fundamentalism, should cling onto the Enlightenment values – reason, pluralism, democracy and freedom of thought, yet must comprehend the fundamentalists psyche at the same time. Only then will they reciprocate, and thus co-exist peacefully with secularism.