Stanley Fish’s 2/22/10 Opinionator article, Are There Secular Reasons?, highlights an argument made by Steven Smith in “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse,” that pure analytical reasoning, without reference to religion or philosophical principles, is impossible. Fish writes:

It is not, Smith tells us, that secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.

While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it. No matter how much information you pile up and how sophisticated are the analytical operations you perform, you will never get one millimeter closer to the moment when you can move from the piled-up information to some lesson or imperative it points to; for it doesn’t point anywhere; it just sits there, inert and empty.

Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle) and is instead thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves” there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?”

Instead, Smith argues, those who insist that public discourse must be based entirely on secularism move from A to B by “smuggling” in normative values in the guise of universal truths, like “freedom” and “equality,” which secularism itself should consider empty abstractions. These concepts have no value unless you begin with some form of ideological perspective.

It’s an interesting argument that feels intuitive. I’d love to be able to say I will read Smith’s book, but if you knew how many books I already have on my should-read list that I’ll probably never get to…