Venerable vs. terrible

I wonder whether the meaning will remain the same if I put in "the" there:

human well-being entirely depends on the events in the world and on the states of the human brain.

If not, why?

Both sides believe that reason is powerless to answer the most
important questions in human life. And how a person perceives the gulf between facts and values seems to influence his views on almost every issue of social importance! from the fighting of wars to the education of children.

It would be faulty parallelism. The form has to match "the education of children." Of course, the author could have written more concisely and made it "from war to education." The choice is just a stylistic one.

Secular liberals, on the other hand, tend to imagine that no objective answers to moral questions exist. While John Stuart Mill might conform to our cultural ideal of goodness better than Osama bin Laden does, most secularists suspect that Mill's ideas about right and wrong reach no closer to the Truth. Multiculturalism, moral relativism, political correctness, tolerance even of intolerance-these are the familiar consequences of separating facts and values on the left.

The Left is progressive and liberal, the Right is conservative. (The origin of the terms lies in 18th-century France) The Left is identified with secularism, whereas the Right is identified with religious extremism, such as that of Osama bin Laden.

The Right doesn't tend to separate facts from values. Their (usually religious) values/faith/beliefs are their facts. The Left tends to separate them, meaning that they embrace a more objective, scientific worldview that the Right opposes.

It should concern us that these two orientations are not equally empowering. Increasingly, secular democracies are left supine before the unreasoning zeal of old-time religion. The juxtaposition of conservative dogmatism and liberal doubt accounts for the decade that has been lost in the United States to a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research; it explains the years of political distraction we have suffered, and will continue to suffer, over issues like abortion and gay marriage; it lies at the bottom of current efforts to pass antiblasphemy laws at the United Nations (which would make it illegal for the citizens of member states to criticize religion); it has hobbled the West in its generational war against radical Islam; and it may yet refashion the societies of Europe
into a new Caliphate.

Multiculturalism, moral relativism, political correctness, tolerance even of intolerance-these are the familiar consequences of separating facts and values on the left.

Quote:

Multiculturalism, moral relativism, political correctness, tolerance even of intolerance-these are the familiar consequences of separating facts and values on the left.

Yes, when one begins to separate facts from values, such things as multiculturalism, moral relativism, etc, logically appear.

position.

The scientific community is predominantly secular and liberal-and the concessions that scientists have made to religious dogmatism have been breathtaking. As we will see, the problem reaches as high as the National Academies of Science and the National Institutes of Health. Even the journal Nature, the most influential scientific publication on earth, has been unable to reliably police the boundary between reasoned discourse and pious fiction. I recently reviewed every appearance of the term "religion"in the journal going back ten years and found that Nature's editors have generally accepted Stephen J. Gould's doomed notion of "nonoverlapping magisteria"- the idea
that science and religion, properly construed, cannot be in conflict because they constitute different domains of expertise.

The scientific community's reluctance to take a stand on moral issues has come at a price. It has made science appear divorced, in principle, from the most important questions of human life. From the point of view of popular culture, science often seems like little more than a hatchery for technology. While most educated people will concede
that the scientific method has delivered centuries of fresh embarrassment to religion on matters of fact, it is now an article of almost unquestioned certainty, both inside and outside scientific circles, that science has nothing to say about what constitutes a good life. Religious thinkers in all faiths, and on both ends of the political spectrum, are united on precisely this point; the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there
is compelling evidence for His existence, but that faith in Him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance. Mutually incompatible religious traditions now take refuge behind the same non sequitur.