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.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”