"'How did they ever come to that place, those desolate multitudes, gathered under Satan's ashen skies?'"

"'what the modern age has taught us is that the kingdom of hell is essentially a respectable place, where the devil is best served by remaining incognito, where sin and remorse and penitence trouble no one with their curbside importunities—'Please, sir, only a sou!'—where no one frets about angels or devils, where all good men apply themselves to becoming machines among machines, without sin because without souls.'"

     Charles Baudelaire, as channeled by David Bentley Hart, in "A phantom's visit (C. B.)," First things, February 2014, 72-71.  Disbelief as "a habitual insensibility to the illuminations and chastisements of beauty".

Ho hum

"The wide demographic spread of unbelief is without question a modern story that belongs especially to social and cultural history, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and accelerating enormously in Western Europe and somewhat in the United States since the 1960s.  But its intellectual bases remain what they were in the seventeenth century, and even more deeply, what they were in the late Middle Ages:  a univocal conception of being and the use of Occam's razor in the relationship between natural causality and alleged divine presence. . . . Nothing conceptually original, including Darwinian evolution, has been added for many centuries."

     Nothing conceptually original, or intellectually compelling (the point being that "what they were in the seventeenth century, and . . . in the late Middle Ages" was extraordinarily thin even back then).
     Brad S. Gregory, The unintended Reformation:  how a religious revolution secularized society (Cambridge and London:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 64.

"A subjective conception of nature as 'objectively' devoid of God's presence would neatly serve a highly interested view of nature as 'disinterested'".

"the conception of nature that from the seventeenth century increasingly sought to replace the traditional conception of nature as created by a transcendent, loving God" was not "in fact objective, detached, or disinterested. . . ."  Traditional theological "claims impinged on any number of potential human plans about the use of natural things, including one's own body as expressed in one's behavior."  But "The intellectual impasse created by theological controversy provided an opening for ideas about nature based on novel beliefs.  A subjective conception of nature as 'objectively' devoid of God's presence would neatly serve a highly interested view of nature as 'disinterested'—even for thinkers who were Christians."

     Brad S. Gregory, The unintended Reformation:  how a religious revolution secularized society (Cambridge and London:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 56-57.  Gregory fleshes this out historically in the pages that follow.

"'If his name's not Wagner, my name's not Farmer.'"

     Enrico Fermi, vouching for Eugene Wigner at a high-security American checkpoint during World War II.

     Fermi and I had been given real American names for the war.  Mine was 'Eugene Wagner' and Enrico's was 'Henry Farmer.'  One day we were driving together along a high-security road.  At the checkpoint, the military guard asked my name.  I said, 'Wigner—oh, excuse me please!—Wagner.'  The guard could not help but notice my Hungarian accent.  He regarded me with suspicion and asked sternly:  'Is your name really Wagner?' 

     What could I say?  I had no idea.  But Enrico saved me.

     The recollections of Eugene P. Wigner as told to Andrew Szanton (New York and London:  Plenum Press, 1992), 237.  The two physicists worked together on the Manhattan Project.

"Few things are as difficult as keeping clear about the distinction between God and creation as understood in traditional Christianity, and hence few things are as intuitive as unself-consciously regarding God as a quasi-spatial part within the whole of reality."

     Brad S. Gregory, The unintended Reformation:  how a religious revolution secularized society (Cambridge and London:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 33.

Principalities and powers

"the past has made the present what it is, but things did not have to turn out this way.  Institutionally and ideologically, materially and morally, we need not have ended up where we are.  Human decisions were made that did not have to be made, some of which turned out to be deeply consequential.  Patterns were established, aspirations justified, expectations naturalized, desires influenced, and new behaviors normalized that need not have taken hold.  Within the constraints imposed and the opportunities afforded by biological realities, the human past is not a product of any autonomous, impersonal social, economic, ideological, or cultural 'forces'—rather, such forces are themselves the cumulative, aggregate product of countless human decisions and actions, sometimes institutionalized, politically protected, and enduring and sometimes not, which in turn affect and constrain other decisions and actions."

     Brad S. Gregory, The unintended Reformation:  how a religious revolution secularized society (Cambridge and London:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 12.

"In the history of human thought, science has often come out of superstition. Astronomy came out of astrology. Chemistry came out of alchemy. What will come out of economics?"

     Bernard Lewis, as quoted by Helen Rittelmeyer in "Bloodless moralism," First things, February 2014, 36.
     But then, according to Brad S. Gregory, it was actually economics that, beginning in the late 13th century, gave rise to the mathematical precision of natural philosophy!

This mathematization of natural phenomena, which began in late thirteenth-century Paris and Oxford and was preoccupied with measurement, gradation, equilibrium, and the attempt to quantify qualities, derived significantly from the influences on natural philosophy of scholastic economic analysis that sought to comprehend an increasingly monetized world of exchange characterized by market practices

(The unintended Reformation:  how a religious revolution secularized society (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 39, citing Joel Kaye, Economy and nature in the fourteenth century:  money, market exchange, and the emergence of scientific thought (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998)).
     In any case, back to Rittelmeyer:  Only very rarely is First things anything even close to this funny:

"During the Cold War, especially its early stages, the books written in defense of the Soviet model fairly bristled with statistics. Wisely, the West's more effective defenders did not attempt to refute tractor-production figures from the Ukraine with tractor-production figures from Moline, Illinois. They made more fundamental points, like the difficulty of collecting accurate statistics in a police state, or the conclusiveness with which even accurate statistics are trumped by the brute fact of mass starvation. 

     "At a more Kirkian level of abstraction, there were such simple observations as: Our people are free, yours are not; we produce poetry, you produce propaganda; our cities are beautiful, yours are hideous. The equivalent arguments in the modern context might be (1) no amount of creative accounting will convince a sane person that you have made a money-saver out of a vast new entitlement like Obamacare; (2) no study could ever refute the fact that character is both a cause and a casualty of government-subsidized poverty; and (3) I will listen to econometricians as soon as you show me one that can write with more fluency than a high school sophomore" (38).