All you need to know about Roger Scruton

In a article for Axess entitled The Return of Religion, we are privileged to watch Roger Scruton defend a form of religion that nobody in the world actually practices - a common affliction for academic philosophers and theologians. He’s a pacy rider, but the wheels come off the wagon towards the end:

Yet human beings have an innate need to conceptualise their world in terms of the transcendental, and to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane.

I don’t have any such innate need, and consequently his entire argument is falsified.

POSTSCRIPT:

There are questions addressed to reason which are not addressed to science, since they are not asking for a causal explanation. One of these is the question of consciousness. [Insert barely-understood and largely irrelevant reference to quantum physics to distract the punters here.] Look for it wherever you like, you encounter only its objects – a face, a dream, a memory, a colour, a pain, a melody, a problem, but nowhere the consciousness that shines on them.

It may be the case that the reason that we haven’t been able to “see” the consciousness before is that we didn’t have the right tools - in exactly the same way as we weren’t able (and in many cases, remain unable) to see the “great tapestry of waves and particles, of fields and forces, of matter and energy” that so impresses Scruton. It may be the case that we may be in the early stages of exploring consciousness, some years behind our journey of exploring the cosmos. It may be the case that consciousness will soon be laid bare, and that Scruton’s metaphysical discourse turns out to be a dead end.

On the other hand, it may not. One thing is absolutely certain, however - consciousness is very clearly and very obviously a question that is addressed to science. If I were Roger Scruton, I probably wouldn’t try to build my house of worship on this particular sand.