In this wonderfully diverse Canada that Ms. Payette now represents, was it her intent to ridicule the religious beliefs of so very many faiths?

Delight in one’s own intellectual capacity is a delusion both frequent and foolish, and the desire to have others share in that rapture is almost always a disappointment. That we are all partisans for our own opinions is of course a truism, as is the consideration that opinions, particularly political ones, many times follow just as much from temperament as from reason. There is no Ideal Reasoner, and the truth of some questions is always a quarry and never a capture. That is why our finest sages, present and past, have always counselled against certitude, and cautioned that when we are most certain of something is precisely the time we should go over our sums.

Our recently minted Governor General, in one of her inaugural appearances, has been very quick off the mark to make her declarative presence known. She gave a talk at a science conference this week, a speech notable for its confident strength of assertion and readiness to pronounce determinatively on matters large and trivial, and which was unfortunately inflected with a tone of condescension that will do little to buttress the appeal of the mainly ceremonial office she now inhabits.

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Merely as prelude, we should point out that the difference between elected and selected is more than a matter of the letter “s,” and add that being assigned to a state ceremonial office does not confer oracular status on a person. On the first, it must be clearly acknowledged that it is the elected, not the selected, who argue and debate the issues of the day and determine the worth and truth of the policies that emerge from that process. They write the laws: the GG, as ceremonial totem, the stand-in for an absent Regent of a hollowed-out Monarchy, affixes her signature to them.

Assertions on life and climate are on another plane entirely

Secondly, elevation to the GG office, delight and honour that it undoubtedly is, does not come with a certificate of intellectual authority, or the prerogative to delimit the scope of inquiry and debate on any issue the Commons or the citizenry may wish to engage. It is not at all evident that Ms. Payette is clear on these points.

Her speech had a scattering, pinball machine trajectory. In the space of a few sentences it went from climate change, to the origin of life, to newspaper horoscopes; from dicta on the “denialism” sometimes confronting the first, to the religious understandings of the second, and the vacuous absurdity of the third. The problem with this neat triad is that, while a tirade against horoscopy might be perfectly agreeable to most everyone (being a machine gun attack on a whole field of straw men — who reads horoscopes save for feeble amusement?), assertions on life and climate are on another plane entirely.

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Her quote: “And we are still debating and still questioning whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process let alone, oh my goodness, a random process.”

Religion and science are not necessarily in contest

In this wonderfully diverse Canada that Ms. Payette now represents, was it her intent to ridicule the religious beliefs of so very many faiths whose cosmologies include a divine creation, some as myth, some as a fact of faith — as opposed to a fact of science? It may be easy to flip a rhetorical knuckle at, say, Christian fundamentalists (almost a hobby for present-day secularists), but is the Governor General really comfortable with derogating the mythos of so many of the world’s religions, and implicitly at least, leaving them on a plane with the trivial fortune-cookie elaborations of the daily horoscope? Indeed, what of First Nations’ and other Aboriginals’ cosmologies, their spiritual practices, their belief in the “sacredness” of nature? Are these acceptable truths or facts in a scientific age?

It might be a further question whether the Governor General should seek to place herself as an umpire or judge on questions of faith at all. But more profoundly, the observations on the origins of life and the religious understandings of that most profound of subjects are not in contest,as evidently she thinks they are, with scientific understandings. They can, and in fact often do, co-exist. There is physics, and there is also metaphysics; facts are indeed truth, but truth is very often more than just facts. What we may observe and measure is not all of life, nor will it ever be. A backhand dismissal of the “truths” of religion, and the clear implication that they are the products of credulousness and ignorance (“can you believe…? Are we still debating…?” ) is a sophomoric indulgence.

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A backhand dismissal of religion is a sophomoric indulgence

Faith has its “knowing” and it is not the same as the “knowing” of science, and to make science with a capital “S” the singular aperture by which we may know all of life and the world is itself a secular heresy, which we know as Scientism.

There is more than a taste of Scientism in Ms. Payette’s frequent reference to “learned debate,” an easy phrase but a perplexing concept. How would she characterize debate in the House of Commons, or any of our provincial and municipal assemblies? Probably not up to Royal Society standards, I’d guess. Are we to conflate learned with scientific, for that was plainly her thrust? Should the lesser learned, who somehow get elected, defer to those with B.Sc. degrees? Should we change the franchise? Those with Grade 11 or less, or mere Fine Arts certificates – the “unlearned” or “wrongly learned” – get half a vote?

Naturally, Ms. Payette opined on climate science, and equally naturally placed inquiry and skepticism on what is proclaimed the consensus of that but emergent discipline as denialism – thereby endorsing the ugliest rhetorical term in this entire, explosive issue, which summons the butchery and cruelty of History’s greatest crime as a spurious backdrop to debate on an unresolved public issue. We have a right to expect better from Her Majesty’s representative.

Should the lesser learned defer to those with B.Sc. degrees?

On a lesser point, it truly is unbecoming for the Governor General, appointed by a furiously environmentalist prime minister, who has made “climate change, global warming” the central pillar of his government, to be opining with such certitude and aggressiveness on that precise issue. Policy is for the elected, not the selected. And however much she holds strong opinions on the subject as Julie Payette the individual, it is not in her brief as our Governor General to advocate her personal views under the stamp of Her Majesty’s office.