The problem of hope

Hanging out the washing is a dangerous thing... werl, that and mowing the lawn. I always find myself mentally idling through the dramas of the past few days searching for solutions. Thus I found myself this morning, waiting for the temperature to clock 40degC and hanging out school uniforms, dancing tights and beach towels.

I was pondering the comments of a secularist when it occurred to me that there were two sizable holes in them. Come to think of it, there are these two holes in most of our thinking. The first of these holes goes a little like this...

"I can be objective"

Really?

"Well sure", comes the answer.

Sure I can be objective. I can block out every other piece of information I've ever received. Every emotion I've ever experience. I can disengage every negative thing I found with people X and every positive thing I found with people Y. I can stop, look at something and see it's true meaning, totally unclouded by the circumstance of my life, family, home, town, culture and... let's not forget... education.

Really? Well ok, but I'd like some of your drugs too please.

The problem for us that we're build NOT to think objectively. We're built to be subjective... that is personal and relational. So to live a life of unending objectiveness is to live a life where people are small annoying things that need not be pandered to in a huge universe that is beyond measure.

But that's not how life works is it.

This leads to our second hole. This is a peculiarly Western hole just as secularism is a parculiarly Western movement. Secularism come out of Christianity. So does the hole into which it falls.

The problem of hope.

At this point I might have lost you, so let me back up a bit. Secularism these days, broadly speaking is built (among others) upon two ideas. One of them is what I'd call the cult of macro-evolution. The other is what was called modernism.

Both evolution and modernism work on the principle of improvement over a long period of time.

Macro-evolution tells us everything started as nothing, became something and then progressively got better and better until we were walking around being awesome. Apparently it will continue that way. Modernism similarly suggests that the world is/will get better and better and we will too.

The question in my mind is, where did this drive for constant improvement come from?

The answer is, certainly not from an objective vacuum. Western culture, specifically post reformation Christian culture. A culture that encouraged and desired education, innovation, improvement and growth. In short, a culture that was "hoping" for better things.

I don't want to be yet another google expert on Charles Darwin so I'm not going to project my own desires and thoughts on his life and work. However, I think it is fair to say, this is the cultural ooze in which he was swimming. However committed some of his contemporary atheist friends were to eradicating the ideas of Christianity, they were still the fruit of it's culture.

The issue for me is this, how can a universe that is without moral value, higher consciousness or creator be built on the "hope" for better things? Why would it work to "improve"? Why would it evolve and increase? What's to say (like many eastern patterns of thought) it isn't "same old same old" or "a great cycle", rather than striving to move "onwards and upwards".

Reason and objectivity would surely poo poo such an explanation of a vast, meaningless universe?