Long-standing cultural habits may thrive at our serious peril, and one of humanity’s most pernicious examples is a reluctance, by many, to fully embrace core implications of science-based inquiry, our era’s comprehensive and strongly affirmed knowledge horizon. Knowledge has grown through centuries of empirically grounded thinking—reasoning in the most general sense. While the benefits of technology are eagerly consumed by most segment of society, many crucial aspects of the knowledge horizon have not taken hold and formed the dominant frame of mind, a deficit most pronounced when confronted by the influence of socially and politically active fundamentalist groups. Their respective creation narratives support the world view of human exceptionalism, erecting intellectual barriers strongly infused with emotion. The essential commonality of all life forms, the relatedness of all organisms from very simple cells to complex systems, including humans, is rejected as an affront to our species’ absolute uniqueness. These tradition-based world views have deeply affected ethics and social norms, and profoundly shape how the nature of our species is conceptualized.

Over the past decades a naturalistic, science-based and philosophically articulated description of the human species has emerged from the consilience of multiple fields of scientific endeavor. Its roots reach back centuries, but recent decades have given this frame of mind a compelling replacement for tradition-bound or faith-based fundamentalist philosophies. Evolutionary biology, cognitive and social psychology, neurobiology, anthropology, and scienced-influenced philosophy, have most clearly grounded this comprehensive naturalism. The term “consilience” was popularized by E.O. Wilson to capture the unity of all science, describing a far-reaching and powerful consistency between the physical and life sciences, as well as the social sciences. But even given this success, a strongly felt epistemological humility is essential for the knowledge horizon to continue its expansion. This sense of humility implies the world—the totality of the cosmos—may be much stranger than our intellect is prepared to imagine, even given highly sophisticated inquiry that may emerge in the future.

The contemporary knowledge horizon is shaped by consilience, but also supported through a commitment to an iterative and dynamic epistemology, skeptical of final or absolute claims to truth, the converse of faith-based and traditionalist mindsets. Knowledge is constantly evolving, although its general character and trend may be anticipated, but only approximately. While the acceptance and commitment to long-held points of view is common in science, reflecting its general conservatism, resistance to change has historically been overcome by superior, more inclusive theories, especially noticeable in cosmology, fundamental physics and the brain sciences. Seemingly comprehensive, and for a time, established theories, are eventually supplanted by concepts better able to explain anomalies in data. More comprehensive theories can synthesize whatever predictive power earlier iterations provided, but, crucially, offer greater explanation and prediction previous systems could not.

The crux of this essay responds to two related questions. Given today’s knowledge horizon, what are its most telling implications when evaluating the faith-based and traditionalist world views? In what sense does the knowledge horizon challenge and seriously question these points of view? Answers cannot reference any sort of logical proof or reference to final truth. These amount to intellectual fantasies. Rather, its impact results from fully absorbing the nature of the world described by the knowledge horizon—our current understanding of the cosmos implies the fundamentalist, faith-based mindset is an extremely unlikely world view.

What makes the fundamentalist world views distinctive, as well as vulnerable, are the literalist interpretations of their creation narratives—the idea of human exceptionalism. This sets them apart from benign forms of religious persuasion, only remotely tied to rigid theology or doctrine. To a significant degree these “liberal” religious groups have evolved into interactive communities of shared ethical beliefs, emphasizing social and emotional support and concern for their fellow human beings. Their core philosophies express tolerance and compassion, acknowledging a very real universalism and inclusion in the human experience. Because the fundamentalist mindset is married to the literal and absolute truth of its narratives and doctrines, a schism grows between true believers and the remainder of humanity. Further, a mindset of certainty implies both avoiding and rejecting the knowledge horizon—turning away from the accumulation of centuries of learning. Commitments to certainty create dead-end epistemologies.

The knowledge horizon’s naturalism precludes viewing the human species as the climax of cosmic teleology, theistic or otherwise, where humans occupy a privileged and wholly unique state of being. Our species emerged by means of well-known inheritance patterns through evolution by natural selection, linking all life on earth. Life in all its variations has emerged from “common clay”. Humans are an evolutionary accident, the contingent result of chance, and consequently, statistically lucky to have reached its point of planetary dominance. On a cosmic scale we are insignificant in the extreme. This naturalistic consensus forms the essential framework of all the life sciences, and is as well established as any empirically and rationally-grounded inquiry can be. And likewise, the physical sciences mirror this outlook—and are integral to it—forming a consistent and consilient whole.

To reject the core of the knowledge horizon’s naturalism means confronting a formidable challenge; doing so requires replacing the current consensus of scientific and philosophical inquiry with something altogether radical, yet it must be strongly supported by empirical evidence and reasoning. This implies overthrowing nearly all our accumulated science-based knowledge. Is this even conceivable? While the history of science, and the growth of knowledge in general, clearly show knowledge being dramatically transformed through multiple conceptual leaps, any radical, alternative conceptual framework--on the scale of eliminating the core structure of the contemporary knowledge horizon—is weaker than simply being unlikely, and its chance of relevance is diminishing every decade. Not impossible, of course, but a fragile basis for determining how we view humanity’s place in the cosmos.

The fundamentalist mindset of certainty, when imbedded within a well-focused and politically forceful subset of society, carries worrisome implications for the larger, pluralistic body, whether nation or community. With its proclivity for creating cultural and ethical divisions between its minions and the remainder of society, and accepting those divisions as reflecting the absolute truth and permanence of its narratives, opportunities for commonality become strained, or worse. We know this scenario all too well. Neutralizing the epistemological blight of certainty is its resolution, but faith-based certainty—so strongly infused emotionally—has seemed intractable.

While a pluralistic society facing this impasse must maintain, at almost any cost, the vital institutions, legal frameworks and constitutional safeguards that have sustained a liberal and open society, any tendency to dismiss traditionalist thinking individuals as foolish, and avoiding social encounters as unworthy of your time, is unwise, unethical and exacerbates the conflict we hope to lessen. And no amount of lecturing about the supremacy of science and empirical reasoning will dissuade anyone from their strongly-held, self-defining world view. What can become socially significant is our nurturing of whatever degree of commonality exists between persons of very dissimilar perspectives, focusing on the non-ideological aspects of daily life, of which there are many. Acknowledging and enlarging our experience of commonality—our shared humanity—will give our civilization a longer period within which conflict can begin to dissipate. While this social strategy may seem pathetically little in terms of the threats from active, fundamentalist thinking, it may be the most meaningful course of action a free and open society can take. And if the knowledge horizon can continue to expand, its naturalistic world view could become the default perspective of humanity.