The Church of Atheism

Last autumn seemed to be the season for anti-religious religious movements. About October or November 2012 the British broadsheet newspaper, the Independent, covered a service held in an atheist ‘church’ in London. It was set up by two comedians, a man who was a former Jew, and a woman, who had been raised as a Roman Catholic. The service’s venue was a decommissioned church, and much of it seemed to involve ridicule and mockery of religion, except for a section where the congregation was told to shut their eyes, breathe deeply, and think of how special they were. The paper described it as an example of ‘New Age’ type thinking and ritual in a milieu that would otherwise have ridiculed and rejected it. The newspaper reported that the service’s congregation numbered 200, a figure that most mainstream churches would have envied. It noted that the two were considering holding further such services.

Now I was bitterly attacked several years ago on this blog for pointing out how many atheist organisations haved adopted the features of organised religion. Classic examples are the Ethical Churches of the 19th century and the Humanist Society today. The atheist church in London is another example. There isn’t anything new or radical in atheists holding such services to denounce and ridicule religion. Under Lenin and Stalin in the former Soviet Union, churches were closed down and turned into museums of atheism. A fictional version of one of these is described in the novel The Keeper of Antiquities. Outside of the USSR the Surrealists under Andre Breton held a similar service attacking Christianity and specifically Roman Catholicism. A French Roman Catholic newspaper in the 1950s had run a feature on them. Breton responded by published a violent denunciation of the Catholic clergy, ‘To Your Kennels, Curs of God’, in the Surrealist newspaper. The Surrealist also marched out to a ruined church on the outskirts of parish to attend a blasphemous service led by a former Roman Catholic priest.

The atheist church was also an example of a growing trend in which the main spokespeople for organised atheism aren’t philosophers or scientists, which the exception of Daniel C. Dennett, Richard Dawkins and a few others, as comedians or comic actors, like Ricky Gervaise or Stephen Fry. Several of the comedy programmes broadcast by the BBC are aggressively atheist, such as QI under Stephen Fry, Stuart Lee’s series last year and the News Quiz on Radio 4, chaired by Sandi Toksvig. Frank Skinner apparently offended many atheists last year or so by remarking at a comedy event that much contemporary comedy was less about humour as about preaching atheism and attacking religion. This event proved that he was right. It also bears out another comment about the New Atheism, that it was celebrity led.

It also points to something peculiar about the psychology of the congregation of such spoof churches themselves – the need for some church-like organisation to belong to, as well as the desire to mock, insult and decry religious observance and belief. This goes far beyond any definition of atheism as ‘a lack of belief in God’. Most people without any kind of religious belief generally stop worrying about it. They simply stop going to churchm or mosque, synagogue, temple or other religious institution. They may become cynical or embittered, or simply adopt an attitude of complete indifference in which religion is alright for some people, but not for them. They simply are no longer interested in it. This is outright anti-theism, characterised by a need to attack, and form organisations that imitate and mock that which they so despise. It shows an increasingly bitter and polemical comedy industry attempting to adopt a position as aggressively antireligious preachers and moral spokespeople, so subordinating humour with vitriol and polemic.

The Bible, Judaism and Christianity and the Origins of Democracy: Part 2

In the first part of this blog post I attempted to describe how, while ancient Israel certainly did not possess the institutions of the modern democratic state, nevertheless the revelation of the Bible established the moral values essential to democracy in the notions of human equality before the Lord, concern for human welfare and opposition to tyranny based on God’s justice. These values were maintained, practised and developed by Talmudic Judaism and Christianity. In this section I’m going to discuss how the early Church further developed these values to form the basis of the modern idea of the democratic state.

Adoption of Roman View of Popular Sovereignty By Early Christianity, but Only Secure Basis for Society God’s Justice and Concern for Humanity

The early Christians also adopted the view of contemporary Roman jurists and political philosophers that laws derived their authority through popular sovereignty. This view was developed particularly by Cicero, Seneca, the Cynics and the Stoics. This viewed the state, and the ability of each individual to participate in politics, as based on the common rationality in humanity and the universe. For the Roman lawyers, society was based on private, autonomous individuals, whose rights had to be respected and to whom justice was due because of their common humanity and rationality, regardless of how they were regarded or held by their fellow citizens, or their own ability to use force to enforce their will on others. 45 The early Church adopted the idea of human society as composed of rational creatures, and that the people were the true source of law. St. Augustine thus wrote in the City of God that ‘a populus is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love; in order to discover the character of any society, we have only to observe what they love.’ 46 For Augustine, however, the most secure basis for society and law was the love of God and the divine command to love one’s neighbour amongst the people, rather than just human rationality itself. Thus St. Augustine declared in the Epistle to Volusianus

‘Here (in Jesus Christ’s summary of the Law and the prophets in the double command to love God and one’s neighbour) is the basis for an admirable commonwealth; for a society can neither be ideally founded nor maintained unless upon the basis and by the bond of faith and strong concord, when the object of love is the universal good which in its highest and truest character is God Himself, and when men love one another with complete sincerity in Him, and the ground of their love for one another is the love of Him from whose eyes they cannot conceal the spirit of their love.’ 47

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Roman Law and its precepts were replaced by customary law, until it was rediscovered by the Church’s canon lawyers in the 12^th century. Nevertheless, the Church insisted that kings and princes had a duty to society as a whole through the maintenance of peace and justice, protecting the weak and encouraging and securing love and charity between people. This prepared European society for the revival of the doctrine of popular sovereignty when western European scholars returned to studying Roman Law. 48 The beginning of all Roman legal doctrine from the 12^th century onwards was the statement by the Roman lawyer Ulpian, which reached western Europe through Justinian’s Digest, that ‘The prince’s decision has the force of law; inasmuch as by the royal law passed concerning his authority the people has invested him with the whole of its own authority and power.’ 49 Thus the Roman doctrine of popular sovereignty, which became the basis of modern western democracy through the political philosophy of John Locke, was adopted, preserved, and made the basis of western political theory again by Christianity.

Sole Purpose of Authority to Promote Peace and Harmony

Although the early Church recognised that human society required authority, philosophers and theologians such as St. Augustine and Theodoret believed that the sole rightful purpose for such authority was to maintain order and promote harmony and tranquillity. As rulers derived their authority ultimately from God, individuals motivated solely by a desire to rule, rather than promote justice, had no rightful authority. 50 similarly, while the Church itself was hierarchical and stressed obedience to authority, nevertheless it considered that its clergy should rule from a sense of service to the community, rather than a desire for personal power. St. Augustine stated that

‘Those who rule serve those whom they seem to command; for they rule not from a love of power but from a sense of duty – not because they love authority, but because they love mercy.’ 61

Indeed, St. Augustine considered that any member of the clergy who ruled purely from a desire a power had automatically disqualified himself from holding office, as ‘he who loves to govern rather than to do good is no bishop!’ 62

Origin of Separation of Church and State in St. Augustine

St. Augustine further prepared Western society for the separation of church and state that is a part of modern, secular democratic politics. Although the late Roman Empire saw itself very much as a Christian state, in which the church and religious belief and worship were essential institutions and included amongst the secular governmental institutions as a vital aspect of the state, a situation that continued in the new states of the Middle Ages that succeeded the Roman Empire, the early Church distinguished between itself and secular authority. St. Ambrose of Milan in the 4^th century in his letters to the emperor Theodosius denied that secular officials had any authority over the Church, whose clergy and property were outside imperial authority.

St. Augustine developed this idea still further in the City of God. While he accepted that society and sovereignty derived from the people, he denied that justice was the ratio, the basis, of the state. 53 As justice derived from God and so lay beyond the state, so humanity’s duty to God superseded their duty to the state. The state may indeed possess and promote justice abundantly, but this was not the essential basis of the state. 54 Indeed, St. Augustine himself had a very negative view of the state. It was only justice that distinguished kingdoms from robbery on a massive scale, and asked ‘for what are robberies but little kingdoms?’ Humans, because of their sinful nature, hated the idea of their equality before God, and so tried to usurp God’s authority by imposing their will on their fellow humans. ‘Sinful man hates the equality of all men under God.’ It was because of his sinful nature that man, ‘as though he were God, loves to impose his own sovereignty upon his fellow men.’ The state existed to protect human society from such tyrants, but was not in itself fundamentally and absolutely just. 55 Furthermore, as states themselves were transient, rising and falling naturally during the course of history, they therefore required the instruction and education of the Church, which was separate from the state and eternal. Thus in the view of the historian Richard Fletcher, by drawing this distinction between church and state, and secular and religious authority St. Augustine ‘detached the state – any state, but in particular, of course, the Roman State – from the Christian community. Under his hands the Roman Empire became theological neutral.’ 56

Church’s Duty to Condemn Oppression, including that of Roman Emperors

Even before St. Augustine, the Church had considered its duty to criticise and punish tyranny and the abuse of power, even when such acts were ordered by the very highest authority, such as the emperor himself. In 390 the emperor Theodosius ordered a massacre of 7,000 citizens assembled at a circus in Thessalonica in reprisal for the murder of a member of the military garrison there. St. Ambrose of Milan strongly condemned the massacre, and in a letter to Theodosius warned him to repent or he would withhold Holy Communion from him. He stated ‘I dare not offer the sacrifice if you intend to be present. Is that which is not allowed after shedding the blood of one innocent person, allowed after shedding the blood of many? I do not think so.’ 57 Theodosius gave in to St. Ambrose’s moral authority, and duly did public penance for the atrocity in Milan cathedral, thus conceding the moral superiority of the Church over the state.

Early Church Doctrine therefore Opposed to Modern Ideas of Totalitarian State

While this prefigured the struggles between Church and state, and popes and emperors to assert their authority and superiority over the other during the Middle Ages, it also directly undermines the concept of the totalitarian state that was fundamental to the Fascist and Communist regimes of the 20^th century. These were based on the Hegelian idea that the state represented the highest expression of the forces of history and the divine mind, and so the citizen owed the state his absolute allegiance. The early Church, by making a distinction between Church and state, and declaring that the state was not fundamentally just and that it was subordinate to God and the Church, directly contradicted and attacked the idea of such absolute states.

Membership of Early Church Open to Everyone, Regardless of Gender, Wealth or Nationality

The early Church also differed from contemporary Roman society in that it was open to all members of society, regardless of social rank and gender. In secular Roman society, philosophy and the Gnostic religions, including Gnostic Christianity, were largely confined to leisured aristocrats, while the Mystery religions similarly confined their membership to the initiated. Catholic Christianity, however, was open to anyone who wished to join it and share in the knowledge and worship of Christ. Arnobius Afer stated Christianity’s universal mission to all humanity in the words:

‘Does not He (Jesus Christ) free all alike who invites all alike: or does He thrust back or repel any one from the kindness of the Supreme who gives to all alike the power of coming to Him-to men of high rank, to the meanest slaves, to women, to boys? To all, he says, the fountain of life is open, and no one is hindered or kept back from drinking.’ 58 While pagan opponents of Christianity such as Celsus viewed it with contempt because the Church’s members came from the lower sections of Roman society without a formal education, Christian apologists such as Athenagoras considered it to be a positive aspect of Christianity, that it included people from such sections of society, who lived exemplary lives despite their lack of a formal education. Athenagoras stated

‘Among us (the Christians) you will find uneducated persons, and artisans, and old women, who, if they are unable in words to prove the benefit of our doctrine, yet by their deeds exhibit the benefit arising from the persuasion of its truth: they do not rehearse speeches, but exhibit good works; when struck, they do not strike again; when robbed they do not go to the law; they give to those that ask of them, and love their neighbours as themselves.’ 59

The early Church’s concern and mission to all sections of Roman society also led it to criticise the restriction of philosophy and intellectual activity to the aristocratic elites. For theologians and apologists such as Clement of Alexandria, everyone had the right to study the Gospel and philosophy, regardless of their social rank, gender or race:

‘Both slave and free must equally philosophise, whether male or female in sex … whether barbarian, Greek, slave, whether an old man, or a boy, or a woman … And we must admit that the same nature exists in every race, and the same virtue.’60

Advocacy of Freedom of Conscience in Early Church

As well as declaring that every person was capable of receiving the Gospel and so should have the freedom to join the Church, early Christian apologists, such as Tertullian, Lactantius and Hilary of Poitiers also argued for freedom of conscience in their criticisms of their persecution by the Roman state. The Church itself became increasingly repressive of rival faiths and controlled intellectual activity after its establishment as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, these arguments were revived during the Reformation by religious writers, theologians and politicians such as William Penn to create the religious tolerance that eventually resulted in the freedom of conscience that is a fundamental part of modern democratic liberty. 61

Furthermore, although the Church later did much to suppress individual freedom, it also did much to introduce the individual, subject view of the individual into political debate and discussion. In the ancient world, the wellbeing of the individual was frequently identified with that of society as a whole, with the effect that there was little discussion of the freedom of the individual as an ideal, rather than a political reality. However, Christianity introduced the idea of the importance of the individual through the doctrine of the fundamental sanctity of every human life. This was further developed in Western philosophy by the introduction by St. Augustine of the ‘first-person standpoint’ as a fundamental feature of the search for truth according to the historian Charles Taylor. 62 This concern for the subjective, first-person view is demonstrated most clearly by Augustine in his autobiography, The Confessions.

Election of Bishops in Early Christianity

The early Church was also democratic in that originally the bishops were elected by the whole of the Christian community of each diocese, both clergy and laypeople. 63 Cyprian states that this was the practice in almost all the provinces of the Roman Empire in the second century AD. 64 The idea and practice of popular suffrage, through which the people of a diocese could directly choose their bishop, was taken from general Roman electoral practice, such as in the election of secular magistrates. Jews similarly had adopted such electoral practices in the election of synagogue officials. Nevertheless, the Church differed from pagan society in that women and slaves also had a right to vote. 65 Eventually, however, the direct election of bishops declined along with secular democracy. There was opposition to it within the Church by leading members of the clergy, such as Origen. Origen criticised it for the bribery, corruption and factionalism in contemporary popular Episcopal elections that resulted in the appointment of unsuitable candidates who were more interested in power and the financial advantages rather than scholarship and truly ministering to the spiritual needs of their congregation. As a result of such electoral corruption, bishops were succeeded by their brothers or sons. 66 The gradual abolition of the direct election of bishops by the people helped to prevent the post becoming hereditary, and so allowed individuals from other sections of society, such as peasants, to be appointed to the post. 67

The election of the clergy by the congregation returned in Western Christianity with the establishment of the orders of pastors, doctors, elders and deacons by Jean Calvin in the Reformed Church, modelled on what he considered to be the governmental structure of the early Church as found in Scripture. This was remarkably democratic in that these clergy were elected, rather than appointed to office. 68 Although the practise of electing officials was confined to the Church, rather than recommended for society as a whole, nevertheless it was a major contribution to the emergence of democracy in Europe through the notion that ordinary Christians could elect their clergy, who then had the power to criticise the moral failings of their social superiors.

Early Church not Democratic, also Responsible for Intolerance and Oppression, but also Shares Common Democratic Values

The early Church’s conception of society as a family meant that it did not develop an idea of the complete freedom of the individual similar to that in modern political theory. Instead, the early Church viewed individual freedom as limited by the demands and requirements of the wider society of the Church, and the claims of others upon the individual’s love and service. As human liberty was also limited by the divine origin of authority, the Church and European society generally could become extremely repressive with the individual possessing very little freedom. 69 Indeed, the early Church was certainly not a democracy. It accepted the inequalities in wider Roman society, even slavery. 70 Historians have particularly criticised the early Church for its intolerance, and suppression and persecution of different faiths and minorities, such as heretics and Jews. 71 Nevertheless, despite the fact that the early Church was not democratic, historians have argued that it was concerned with all the same fundamental values of democracy, and creating a vital, existential frame of reference within which it was possible to achieve human happiness. 72

Christianity and democracy, it has been argued, are both based on the idea of objectively true, moral values. They both demand that freedom should be limited in the interests of equality and the general welfare of the community, and that equality should similarly be limited in the interests of social harmony and efficiency. They are also opposed to the fragmentation of human society produced by, for example, imperialism, racism, statism, provincialism and class warfare. Both Christianity and democracy also demand that humans be treated as ends in themselves, and not simply as means. In their view that the proper end of human conduct and effort should be the welfare of humanity, both Christianity and democracy are concerned with ordinary people and ‘the disinherited, and submerged groups in every society’. 73

Christianity and Democracy Both Opposed to Totalitarianism and Oppression

The early Church scholar, Albert C. Outler of Duke University, speaking at a conference of American academics, scholars and politicians from science, philosophy, the humanities, arts and Jewish and Christian religions in 1940 concerned with defending democracy from attack from Nazism, Fascism and Communism, declared that Christianity and democracy would remain separate. However, both Christianity and democracy had a strong interest in the international situation, and so in his view had much to offer each other. Indeed he concluded that democracy needed the support of religion, just as religion needed the support of democracy.

‘I do not see how a democratic order can be achieved or remain uncorrupted without a religious undergirding; I do not doubt that democratic order is the best political means to the end of a religious community. The cross-fertilization which a vital Christianity and a genuine democracy could achieve would greatly aid the cause of humanity and serve the Kingdom of God in this generation.’ 74

Fundamental Democratic Values derived from Bible and Hebrew-Christian Tradition, which Opposes Oppression and Tyranny

This concern with the fundamental values that are the basis of democracy is also shared with Judaism. It is derived from the witness of the Bible to God’s love and concern for humanity and the equal value of everyone, regardless of their race, sex or economic status, before the Lord. The Biblical scholar Millar Burrows, speaking at the 1940 conference attempting to combat the totalitarian attack on democracy, stated that the Bible’s respect for people’s rights and personalities, their common, human nature regardless of differences in gender, race and social rank, and the social responsibilities people have towards their fellows and to society as a whole, rather than in the development of specific societal, industrial or political institutions, were ‘the indispensable basis spiritual basis for a true and enduring democracy.’ 75 For Millar the Hebrew-Christian tradition’s great contribution to democracy lay in ‘its fundamental conception of the nature of man and of his relation to his Maker and to his fellow-man.’ 76 This concern is encapsulated in the Lord’s summary of the Mosaic Law linking one’s duty to love the Lord with one’s whole person and one’s neighbour as oneself. For Millar, the Hebrew-Christian conception of humanity and its relationship to God and its fellow people had made it the absolute opponent of tyrants throughout history, and made its continued presence in human history and society a threat to tyrannical regimes that they sought to eradicate.

‘It is this that has made the Old and New Testaments the deathless foes of all dictators in all subsequent ages. The righteous God of the Bible towers so far above all earthly powers that none of them counts for anything in His presence. The humblest man is equal to the mightiest prince before God. Moses can defy Pharaoh, Nathan can rebuke David, Elijah can challenge Ahab, Jeremiah can oppose Jehoiakim, the humble Maccabees can brave the terrible anger of the Macedonian despot. In the presence of the living God of Israel right always outweighs might. Tyranny can never tolerate the cultivation of the Hebrew-Christian tradition.’ 77

Conclusion: Democracy Recent, Created Partly through Biblical and Christian View of Society Based on God’s Justice and Concern for Humanity, which Still Provides Powerful Support for Democratic Politics

While democratic political and social institutions have taken millennia to emerge, they were created in part through the attempts of philosophers, theologians and ordinary men and women to establish a society based on the Biblical concern for a truly just society, based on God’s concern for humanity, their value as individuals, and their responsibilities to each other. This conception of a society based on God’s justice and humans’ responsibilities to the Lord and each other inspired prophets and saints to criticise, condemn and oppose tyrants, and from the Middle Ages onwards led people to attempt to create political institutions to restrain tyranny and promote freedom, a goal that eventually resulted in the emergence of political democracy in the West. Democracy is separate from Christianity, but linked to it through the fundamental concern of justice and humanity that are common to both, so that Christianity, although it has also supported tyrants, is also, and continues to be a vital source of support for democracy itself.

Notes

1. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 453.
2. St. Augustine, City of God, XIX:24, cited in Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 454.
3. St. Augustine, Epistle to Volusianus 137:17, cited in Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 454.
4. Edouard Meynial, ‘Roman Law’, in C.G. Crump and E.F. Jacob, The Legacy of the Middle Ages (Oxford, Clarendon 1926), p. 384.
5. Edouard Meynial, ‘Roman Law’, in C.G. Crump and E.F. Jacob, The Legacy of the Middle Ages (Oxford, Clarendon 1926), p. 385.
6. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 460.
7. St. Augustine, City of God, XIX, xiv, cited in Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 467.
8. St. Augustine, City of God, XIX, xiv, cited in Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 467.
9. E.F. Jacob, ‘Political Thought’, in Crump and Jacob, Legacy of the Middle Ages, p. 512.
10. E.F. Jacob, ‘Political Thought’, in Crump and Jacob, Legacy of the Middle Ages, p. 512.
11. St. Augustine, cited in Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial: Arguments against Anti-Religious Bigotry (San Francisco, Encounter Books 2002), p. 13.
12. Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (New York, H. Holt & Co, 1998), p. 29, cited in Carroll and Shiflett, Christianity on Trial, p. 13.
13. St. Ambrose of Milan, cited in Carroll and Shiflett, Christianity on Trial, p. 10.
14. Arnobius Afer, Against the Heathen, in Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 462.
15. Athenagoras, ‘A Plea for the Christians’ xi, in Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 461.
16. Clement of Alexandria in Carroll and Shiflett, Christianity on Trial, p.2.
17. Tertullian, cited in William Penn, Liberty of Conscience, in William Penn: The Peace of Europe, the Fruits of Solitude and other Writings, ed. Edwin B. Bronner (London, J.M Dent 1993), p. 179; Lactantius and Hilary, against Auxentius, cited in Penn, Liberty of Conscience, in Penn, Peace of Europe, ed. Bronner, p. 182.
18. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Makings of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press 1989), pp. 131-33, cited in Carroll and Shiflett, Christianity on Trial, p. 14.
19. Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (London, Penguin 1964), p. 299.
20. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second Century Ad to the Conversion of Constantine (London, Penguin 506).
21. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 508.
22. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 511.
23. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 467.
24. G.R. Elton, Reformation Europe 1517-1559 (London, Fontana 1963), pp. 226, 227.
25. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 459.
26. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 458.
27. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 465-7.
28. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 469-70.
29. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 470.
30. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 470.
31. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition, Old and New Testaments’, in in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 412.
32. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition, Old and New Testaments’, in in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 412.
33. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition, Old and New Testaments’, in in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 412.

Judaism, Christianity and the Origins of Democracy: Part 1

Undoubtedly the greatest achievement of modern western political theory was the emergence of democracy in late 18^th and 19^th century America and Europe. In many respects the idea is certainly not new. States governed by a council of elders, rather than a single individual invested with absolute monarchical authority had existed as far back as prehistoric Mesopotamia. 1 Constitutional and political historians have traditionally regarded ancient Greece and Rome as the foundations of democracy through the development of the idea of the social contract by the Greek Sophist philosopher Lycophron in the 5^th century BC, and in particularly the establishment of democracy in Athens through the constitutional reforms of Solon, Cleisthenes, Pericles and Ephialtes from the early sixth to mid-fifth centuries BC. 2 Ancient Rome had begun its career as an independent, expansionist state after the expulsion of the Etruscan dynasty of the Tarquins and the foundation of the Roman Republic in 510 BC. A series of political and military conflicts between the Roman aristocracy, the patricians, and the non-noble plebeians from the first decade of the fifth century to 300 BC created the classic Roman republican constitution that granted political power to Rome’s non-aristocratic population. 3 Even after the fall of the Republic and the establishment of the Empire, some Roman officials continued to be elected. Outside Rome, other nations also had a republican government. The Saxons in Germany in the 8^th century AD were governed not by a king, but through a popular assembly that met annually, composed of an equal number of nobles, freemen and bondsmen. 4

Modern Democracy Different from Historic Conception of the State

These states were not, however, democracies in the modern sense. In all of them political power was confined only to men who possessed a sufficient amount of property. Women and slaves were excluded from voting in the popular assemblies. In ancient Athens, only those whose parents were both Athenians were considered full citizens and so eligible to vote and hold public office. Even in revolutionary France, which established democracy in Europe as a radical, revolutionary force, there was a distinction between active and passive citizens. Only men who possessed a certain amount of wealth were considered to be capable of political responsibility. They were viewed as active citizens, who could vote and be a candidate in the elections. The rest of the population, women, and men, who did not possess sufficient property to qualify for active political involvement, were viewed as passive citizens who, while possessing certain rights could not participate directly in politics. Democracy in the modern, contemporary sense of every adult man and woman having the vote and being able to elect their governmental representatives and stand for public office is very, very recent indeed. British women, for example, were only finally able to vote in elections in the 1920s. Nevertheless, it is democracy in this sense that has become the definitive view of political freedom in Europe, compared to that of earlier centuries that considered freedom to be the amount of personal freedom individuals and groups had to manage their affairs within the limits of a strongly hierarchical society under the authority of a strong, but wise monarch.

Modern Democracy Founded on Ancient Constitutional Theory Adopted by Christian Scholars

Contemporary democratic political theory has been strongly influenced and moulded by Jean-Jacques Rouseau, whose theories of the Social Contract informed the French Revolutionaries, J.S. Mill and Alexis de Toqueville and his observations on democracy in America. Despite this, the foundations of modern democracy and notions of popular sovereignty were established by Christian and Jewish scholars in ancient Rome and medieval and 16^th and 17^th century Europe. Christian philosophers and theologians like St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke and countless others adopted ancient Roman constitutional theory to produce ideas of popular sovereignty and the rights of the individual within a constitutional state. John Locke in particular created modern, liberal political theory, which established the right of the individual to participate in politics and choose his representatives in an elected assembly.

Ancient Israel Theocracy with Concern to Limit Power of Monarch and Preserve God’s Justice and Human Freedom

Religious scholars have noted that democracy in the modern sense is certainly not found in the Bible. As Yale University professor Millar Burrows noted, ‘if by democracy we mean “government of the people by the people and for the people,” in the form of majority rule by the ballot, then the Bible knows nothing of it.’ 5 The ancient Hebrew ideal government was theocracy, not democracy. 6 The Mosaic Law was promulgated by the Lord Himself, and was not the product of human deliberation, so that the great assemblies of the nation of Israel that were called at various points in Israel’s history to ratify the Covenant were there to indicate that Israel had accepted it through acclamation, not to produce it directly themselves. 7 However, the monarchy was never completely accepted as the natural and inevitable form of God’s government of Israel. 8 Before the establishment of the monarchy, such as during the period of the Judges, Israelite society was based on the tribes and clans. When the Israelites needed a leader to protect and organise them an external enemy or settle disputes between tribes, they frequently chose humble individuals like Ehud, Barak, or Gideon, or an outsider, such as Jephthah. Their first king, Saul, was a member of one of the smallest clans of Benjamin, the smallest tribe. 9 The Judges ruled only for as long as the crisis that caused their election lasted and they were able to retain their followers.

10 Indeed, there was considerable opposition to the establishment of a monarchy. In Judges 8:23 Gideon refused to be elected a king in place of the direct rule of Israel by the Lord. 11 Deuteronomy 17:15 –20 contains a series of provisions limiting the power of future Israelite monarchs and providing for their observance of the Law. Only an Israelite could be king. He could not breed horses, nor acquire them from Egypt. He was not to have a number of wives, nor amass too much wealth. He was also required to write out for himself a copy of the Law so that he would be guided by it. When the Israelites appealed to the prophet Samuel to appoint a king for them, he initially refused, describing the oppression they would suffer under such a monarchy in 1 Samuel 8: 11-18. 12 Similarly, prophets such as Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah denounced injustices committed by kings and princes, as well as the rest of Israelite society. 1 Kings 25 records how Elijah vehemently denounced king Ahab for his unjust acquisition of Naboth’s vineyard after Naboth’s death, another incident which showed how ordinary people were protected by the prophets against an unjust and oppressive king. 13 The establishment of the priestly state under the Persian Empire has been viewed as a far more democratic form of government than the Israelite monarchy, as the lack of any army and reliance on public taxation required that the authorities co-operate with the people, with the ‘Great Synagogue’ playing an important role in this process of government, rather than enforce their power militarily. When the independent Maccabean state was established, secular rulers were also included in the governing councils of the priests under the authority of the hereditary Maccabean prince, who possessed the title ‘high priest and head of the commonwealth of the Jews’. 14

Ancient Israel Not Democracy, but Recognised Value of the Individual, including Ordinary People and those from the Lower Sections of Society

However, political decline and conflict during the last period of the Hasmonean kingdom, and Israel’s conquest and annexation by Rome prevented the emergence or development of any kind of democratic institutions. Thus, while ancient Israelite society was far more democratic than the other contemporary nations of Egypt, Assyria, and even the Greeks with the exception of the Athenian republic, political democracy as a particular form of government or collection of institutions does not occur in the Bible. 15 The Bible does, however, possess a strong conviction of the value and rights of all individuals, from the king to the poorest peasant, which forms the basis for the idea of each individual possessing equal rights and opportunities that is one of the major foundations of the democratic ideal in society that supports political democracy. 16 Ancient Israelite society certainly was not democratic. The Mosaic Law permitted slavery and provided for the different treatment of slaves according to whether they were Hebrew or foreign. Nevertheless, the period of servitude for Hebrew slaves was limited to six years, after which they were to be freed. The Law stipulated that slaves had to be treated kindly and strictly limited their punishment. 17

Despite these inequalities in wealth and status, the ancient Biblical ideal was for everyone to live secure and free from oppression enjoying their own property. Micah 4:4 predicts that, during the reign of peace and justice established throughout the world by the Lord, every man will sit under his vine fig tree and no-one will make them afraid. 18 Ordinary people, artisans and labourers, enjoyed a respect in ancient Israel that did not occur elsewhere in the ancient world. In the Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus 38:24-34 describes the work of ploughmen, carpenters, seal-engravers, smiths, and potters, noting that although they don’t have the leisure to acquire the necessary learning in the Law to act as judges and official councillors, nevertheless they were skilled and intelligent in their work. It is through the labour and handiwork of such workers and artisans that cities were made habitable and the whole world supported and maintained. Thus ancient Israel recognised the dignity of manual work, as well as the proper respect due to those who properly studied and applied the Law, and the necessity of such workers to the prosperity, and indeed very existence, of civilised society.

Condemnation of Economic Exploitation as well as Political Oppression in the Bible

The prophets were therefore concerned to preserve justice not just by denouncing political corruption and oppression, but also the exploitation and oppression of the poor by the wealthy. The prophet Amos in the 8^th century BC is particularly important for his denunciation of the injustice and exploitation of contemporary Israelite society. He stated very clearly that the worship of God was completely opposed to the exploitation of other people. 19 Amos 2:6 records God’s statement that He will not turn aside from punishing Israel for selling the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes. 20 Isaiah pronounced woe upon those who joined house to house and laid field to field, so that they were alone in the middle of the Earth, thus depriving the poor of their ancestral lands in order to build up vast estates. 21 Nehemiah 5 records how the population of Israel after the Persian invasion had been forced by previous corrupt and oppressive governors to sell their lands, vineyards and house, and their own children into slavery, to buy food during a famine pay their tribute. Nehemiah was so furious that he summoned his nobles and rulers to a public assembly and forced them to restore the property they had unjustly acquired to its proper owners. 22

The Bible also strongly condemns the exploitation of wage labourers. Leviticus 19:13 states that a hired labourer should have his wages paid promptly and not to be delayed overnight. Job 31: 13-15 records Job’s protest that he did not treat his servants and their concerns with contempt, and his recognition that the same God who formed him also created them. Similarly, in Malachi 3:5 God promises to punish those that deprived hired workers of their due wages, and oppressed widow, orphans and sojourners, as well as adulterers, sorcerers and perjurers. 23 The Bible also insists on just treatment and care for resident foreigners, for example as in Deuteronomy 10:19. This provision in the Law commanded the Jews to love the foreigner, because they were foreigners in Egypt. God declares in Isaiah 56:6-7 that the sons of foreigner who have joined Israel and keep the Lord’s Sabbath and Covenant will be considered true servants of the Lord. God will give them joy when they worship in the Temple, which will be a house of prayer for all people. God send Jonah to urge the people of Nineveh to repent and so avoid destruction, despite the fact that they weren’t Jews, while Ruth, one of the ancestors of King David, came from Moab to join Israel. Biblical scholars have thus considered ancient Israel to be remarkable not for the feeling of national superiority and separation from other nations, but for its view of the unity of humanity and concern for the other nations of the world. 24

Recognition of the Role of Women and their Rights in Ancient Israel

Women in ancient Israel were also recognised as possessing rights and a role in society, even though their social position was subordinate to men. Genesis 1: 27 declares that God created humanity, both male and female, in His own image, thus providing a spiritual basis for equality between men and women. 25 Despite their inferior position, women nevertheless were recognised as playing an important economic and charitable role. Proverbs 31:10-31, which, with the rest of the chapter, was a prophecy given to King Lemuel by his mother, praises the model, virtuous woman who buys and plants vineyards, manufactures clothes, provides food for her household and dispense charity to the poor and needy. Women also played a part in religious worship. Exodus 38:8 describes them as assembling outside the Tabernacle, and 1 Samuel 2:22 similarly mentions them assembling outside the shrine at Shechem. Ezra 2:65 notes the presence of 200 male and singers amongst the staff of the priests. Women could also, at times, hold religious and political power. Moses’ elder sister, Miriam, was a prophetess who led the Israelite women in celebratory music and dancing after their successful crossing of the Red Sea and escape from Pharoah in Exodus 15:20-1. Judges 4-5 describes how the prophetess Deborah, the wife of Lapidoth, with Barak as her lieutenant, dispensed justice in Israel and saved them from Sisera, the captain of Jabin, one of the Canaanite kings.

Ancient Israel Not Democracy, but with Strong Sense of Human Value and Equality, and Concern for Democratic Electoral Processes in the Talmud

Thus, although the Old Testament does not command or describe democracy in the modern sense, it does, through its concern for the whole of humanity, such as the poor, women and resident aliens, as well as the rich and powerful, provide a powerful basis for democracy. The Old Testament’s support for democracy is particularly demonstrated in the constitutional limits placed on the power of the monarchy in the Mosaic Law and its denunciation of exploitation, oppression and injustice. This concern for justice and the equality of all humans before the Lord continued into Christianity, while Talmudic Judaism also further commented on and developed these aspects of the Law to provide Judaism with a popular, democratic character as well as an origin in divine revelation.

This concern for justice and equality extended into all areas of Jewish life so that rich and poor alike were to receive equal treatment before the law, and humane legislation and institutions established to protect the welfare of women and slaves, and maintain justice in the conduct of court cases. Tosefta Sanhedrin 8:4 in the Talmud declared that God created all life from a single ancestor to prevent the various families of humanity claiming superiority over each other through descent from a superior ancestor. Everyone, including saints and sinners, were equal members of the human family through their descent from Adam. 26 Berakot 17a states powerfully that everyone is equally a creature of God, regardless of whether they work in the city or the field. Both types of people rise early to do their work, and no-one can excel in somebody’s else’s job. It did not matter how much or how little a person did, as long as they were fulfilling God’s purpose. 27 The Jewish people during the period of the compilation of the Talmud were governed by a system of town councils. Each town council comprised seven members, who were elected into their office by their community. Everyone, who had been resident in the town for a year or more, had the right to vote in these elections. In the case of particularly important issues, a meeting of the whole town would be called so that the issue would be solved by popular decision rather than be decided solely by the councillors. Some important officials, however, were directly appointed by the head of the Jewish people, such as the Patriarch in Palestine or the Exilarch in Babylon. 28 Nevertheless, the Talmud considered that legislation could only be valid if it was accepted by the majority of the community. 29

Concern for Human Equality in Christ, the Poor and those outside Respectable Society in Christianity

This democratic concern for all members of society, regardless of their social status, continued into Christianity. Christ Himself famously condemned the wealthy and powerful for not paying attention to the suffering of the poor, and directed his missions towards those who were outside the boundaries of respectable Jewish society, such as publicans and tax collectors. The universalist aspect of Judaism, in which other nations would join the Jews in worshipping God, was extended so that national distinctions between the Jews and other peoples were abolished. Similarly men and women were both considered equal before God. St. Paul declared in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ there was neither Jew nor Greek, nor male or female, as everyone was one in Christ. Thus Biblical scholars have stated that ‘Nowhere in the Bible is there any basis for social or political discrimination between men on the basis of colour or land of origin.’ 30 St. Paul’s statement that both men and women were equal in Christ is strongly similar to the statement in Genesis that men and women were both made in God’s image. St. Paul also noted and was very appreciative of the women, as well as men, working in the early Christian community, and their considerable efforts to support the community and the message of the Gospel. In Romans 16:1-4 St. Paul specifically recommends Phebe, Priscilla and Aquila to the church in Rome because of the great support Phebe had given him and other early Christians, while Priscilla and Aquila had risked their necks for him. Although slavery was retained, and slaves urged to work hard and honour their masters, their masters were also required to treat their slaves with justice and equality, as they also had a master in heaven, as St. Paul commanded in Colossians 3:22 and Colossians 4:1.

Early Christianity’s View of Itself as International Community

The Early Christian Church also developed a number of constitutional theories analysing and explaining the nature of the state based on the Bible’s view of the nature and proper attitude Christians should have towards both secular and religious authority, Graeco-Roman political philosophy and the Church’s awareness of itself as an international community, which took its morals from the Lord rather than human philosophical speculation and whose ultimate loyalty was not to any earthly kingdom, but to God. The early Christian apologetic work, the Epistle to Diognetus, dated to c. 120-200 AD, states that Christians are an international community who follow the different manners and customs of the various nations whose citizens they are, and whose members have accepted Christianity, while also considering themselves foreigners and outside of such earthly kingdoms in the passage:

‘The difference between Christians and the rest of mankind is not a matter of nationality, or language, or customs. Christians do not live apart in separate cities of their own, speak any special dialect, nor practise any eccentric way of life. The doctrine they profess is not the invention of busy human minds and brains, nor are they, like some adherents of this or that school of human thought. They pass their lives in whatever township – Greek or foreign – each man’s life has determined; and conform to ordinary local usage in their clothing, diet, and other habits. Nevertheless, the organisation of their community does exhibit some features that are remarkable, and even surprising. For instance, though they are residents at home in their own countries, their behaviour is more like transients; they take their full part as citizens, but they also submit to anything an everything as if they were aliens. For them, any foreign country is a motherland, and any motherland is a foreign country.’ 31

View of Early Christian Church that It Was Separate from State, but Accepted Secular Authority

Other early Christian writers and apologists, such as Minucius Felix, Origen and St. Augustine, also shared this view that Christianity formed a separate community, independent of transitory secular states such as the Roman Empire. Minucius Felix in his Octavius of c. 200 AD stressed that Christians were indifferent to the history and state of the Roman Empire as they were the true leaven of human society. 32 Origen himself described Christianity as a type of fatherland independent of the Roman state. 33 They also considered, however, that the secular authorities were also divinely appointed and were loyal citizens of the Roman Empire. 34 St. Paul in Romans 13:1 expressly stated that Christians should obey the secular authorities, as they received their power from the Almighty in the words ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.’ Justin Martyr, following Christ’s command to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, stated that Christians were loyal to the Roman emperors in his apologetic work, The Defence and Explanation of Christian Faith and Practice in the words ‘The Lord said, ‘Pay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, to God what belongs to God.’ Therefore we render worship to God alone, but in all other things we gladly obey you, acknowledging you as kings and rulers of earth, and praying that in you the royal power may be found combined with wisdom and prudence.’ 35

View of Early Church that Christian Morality Based on God and so Better and More Complete than Secular Roman Morality

The early Christian Church therefore considered that its morals and rules came directly from God’s will and His rule in the world. 36 Early Christian writers and theologians, such as Tertullian, considered secular Roman ideas of morality to be incomplete through its source in human speculation and unable to inspire the necessary respect that produces real morality. Tertullian in his Apology therefore criticised Roman secular philosophical morality with the statement that

‘Uprightness (innocentiam) we have been taught; we know it perfectly because it has been revealed by a perfect teacher (magistro); faithfully we do the will (mandata) of one who reads the heart and cannot be despised. It was but man’s opinion (aestimatio) that gave you your idea of uprightness and human authority which backs it up. Hence your rule of life is neither complete nor does it inspire the reverence which leads o a life of real virtue.’ 37

Christianity Separate from State, but Christians Serve All Humanity through Church

Pagan opponents of Christianity, such as Celsus, accused Christians of not having any sense of social responsibility, and that they were therefore anarchists. Origen countered this accusation with the statement that Christians are primarily loyal and responsible to another society beyond the Roman Empire, and that it was through the church that they channelled their unreserved and unceasing service to the whole of humanity. 38

Christian Conception of Society Based on the Model of the Family

Thus the early Church viewed itself as based on the transcendental morality revealed by the Lord and so required to implement these values in practice, rather than produce a philosophical experiment in the ‘abundant life’. The early church developed a view of itself as a community based very much on the family. The Lord was humanity’s father, and its members were brothers and sisters. Thus, the church was truly God’s family, composed of people from different nations, but together forming a new people, the true Israel. For Christian philosophers and theologians such as St. Augustine, the good family was the pattern for the construction of a stable society. 39 Indeed, the whole human race was a family due to its descent from Adam and Eve, and the whole of humanity was considered equal in nature. No part of the human race was considered super- or subhuman. 40 Moreover, although humans were God’s creation, they were also intended by the Almighty for communion with Him in His image. 41 Thus, all humans possessed dignity and value as members of the single human race, made in the image of God.

All Humans Equal in Church Despite Differences in Economic Status and Social Rank

The early Church also possessed a notion of human equality based on the corruption of humanity as a whole by sin. St. Paul had stated that ‘all men have sinned, and all have fallen short of God’s glory’. As every member of the human race was sinner, no-one therefore was sufficiently morally good to rule others simply by virtue of their moral character. There were indeed differences between people, with some individuals possessing superior status, spiritual gifts or wealth within the church. Like St. Paul, Clement of Rome similarly likened the body of the church to an army and the human body. Nevertheless the presence of each individual, whatever their position, was equally important to the continued functioning of the Church and its performance of the will of God, and every individual thus deserved to have their welfare and interests protected and supported by the others because of interdependence of all the individual members of the Church as part of it as a whole. Clement of Rome, considering the example of the ranks of the Roman army, declared that ‘Not all of them are marshals, generals, colonels, captains, or the like; nevertheless, each at his own level executes the orders of the emperor and the military chiefs. For the great cannot exist without the small, nor the small without the great.’ 42 In the Church, each member was expected to respect the greater spiritual gifts of others, while supporting the poorer members of the Church. In turn the poorer members of the Church were expected to respect the wealthy people who supported them. Clement stated this moral interdependence of rich and poor with the worlds

‘In Christ Jesus, then, let this corporate body of ours be likewise maintained intact, with each of us giving way to his neighbour in proportion to our spiritual gifts. The strong are not to ignore the weak, and the weak are to respect the strong. Rich men should provide for the poor and the poor should thank God for giving them somebody to supply their wants.’ 43 Irenaeus similarly argued that human equality did not mean that humans were did not differ from each other at all, but that the differences between them were only relative, and so were no basis for tyranny by the few over the many. 44

Thus, although Ancient Israel was not a democratic society, the Bible demands the moral values – rejection of tyranny, and concern for the whole of humanity, who are all regarded as equal before the Lord – that are fundamental to democracy. These democratic values were practised and developed by Talmudic Judaism and Christianity, which created the basis of the modern conception of the democratic state. In the second part of this post, I’ll describe how early Christianity adopted and modified Roman ideas of popular sovereignty, condemned oppression and the abuse of power, and advocated freedom of conscience, and how these ideas, based in Christianity, Judaism and the Bible, continue to support democracy against totalitarianism and oppression.

Notes

1. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1961), p. 29.
2. Hermann Kinder and Werner Hilgemann, trans. Ernest A. Menze, The Penguin Atlas of World History: Vol 1: From the Beginning to the French Revolution (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1978), pp. 55-9.
3. Kinder and Hilgemann, trans. Menze, Atlas of World History, pp. 73-77.
4. Orrin W. Robinson, Old English and its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages (London, Routledge 1992), p. 105.
5. Millar Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition; Old and New Testaments in Lyman Bryson and Louis Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion: Second Symposium (New York, Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, 1942), p. 399.
6. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 400.
7. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 399.
8. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 401.
9. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 402.
10. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 402.
11. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 402.
12. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 403.
13. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 404.
14. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 404.
15. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Chrisian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, pp. 402, 406.
16. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein’, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 406.
17. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein’, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, pp. 409-10.
18. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein’, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 409.
19. ‘Amos’ in ‘Biblical Glossary’, Christopher Cook, ed., Pears Cyclopedia 1986-7: 95^th Edition (London, Pelham Books 1986), p. S5.
20. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein’, eds, Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 408.
21. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein’, eds, Science, Philosophy and Religion, pp. 408-9.
22. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein’, eds, Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 409.
23. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein’, eds, Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 410.
24. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein’; eds, Science, Philosophy and Religion, pp. 410-1.
25. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein’, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, pp. 411-2.
26. Ben Zion Bokser, ‘Democratic Aspirations in Talmudic Judaism’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 382.
27. Ben Zion Bokser, ‘Democratic Aspirations in Talmudic Judaism’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 382.
28. Ben Zion Bokser, ‘Democratic Aspirations in Talmudic Judaism’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 388.
29. 29. Ben Zion Bokser, ‘Democratic Aspirations in Talmudic Judaism’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 387.
30. Burrows, ‘Democracy in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 409.
31. ‘The Epistle to Diognetus’ in Maxwell Staniforth, ed. Andrew Louth, Early Christian Writings (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1987), pp. 144-5.
32. Albert C. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’ in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 449.
33. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’ in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 450.
34. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’ in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 450.
35. Justinus (Justin Martyr), Apologia I, xvii, in Henry Bettenson, ed. and trans., The Early Christian Fathers: A Selection from the Writings of the Fathers rom St. Clement of Rome to St. Athanasius (Oxford, OUP 1956), pp. 59-60.
36. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’ in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 450.
37. Tertullian, Apology, chapter xlv, in Outler, ‘The Patristic Chistian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 451.
38. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 451.
39. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 452.
40. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 456.
41. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 456.
42. Clement of Rome, ‘The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians’, verse 37, in Staniforth and Louth, Early Christian Writings, p. 38.
43. Clement of Rome, ‘The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians’, verse 38, in Staniforth and Louth, Early Christian Writings, p. 38.
44. Outler, ‘The Patristic Christian Ethos and Democracy’, in Bryson and Finkelstein, eds., Science, Philosophy and Religion, p. 457.

Christianity, Secularism and European Peace

In one of his comments to my original blog post on the Soviet Persecution of the churches, Robert claimed that European peace was strongly linked to the growth of secularism and the decline of Christianity, stating ‘European peace is positively correlated with the spread of secularism and the decline of Christianity.’ This is an extremely debatable claim, as it seems to assume that the peace Western Europe, at least, has enjoyed since the end of the Second World War is the product of the growth of secularism, if not atheism, and that religion, and particularly Christianity, is somehow responsible for war and violence. This claim can be criticised on a number of points.

Firstly, it’s an important philosophical point that correlation is not causation. One can suggest a number of factors that may have created greater social and political stability in Europe that could lead to a decline in religious belief and international peace in Europe as a whole, without atheism or secularism being the direct cause of either of peace or the political and social stability both nationally and internationally that created it.

Economic Deprivation and Underdevelopment as the Cause of Military Aggression and War

Western Europe, along with North America and Japan, is economically the most prosperous part of the world, despite economic stagnation and challenges from the rapidly expanding and developing economies of India and China. One of the classic causes of social and political instability is economic decline and hardship. A lack of jobs, and thus the means for people to support themselves and stave off starvation, can lead to political instability and violence as nations turn to radical ideologies to provide solutions to their economic and social problems. The Nazi party in Germany appealed to the electorate by promising work and bread on their election posters, and achieved their greatest successes at the ballot box after the catastrophic Wall Street Crash threw the global economy into chaos and millions throughout the world out of work. In such a political climate of economic deprivation and threat, radical parties like the National Socialists were able to make great electoral gains by promising radical solutions to the country’s economic and political problems, including the use of force, violence and brutality against those they claimed, both within Germany and internationally, were responsible for her problems. The result was the emergence of the Third Reich in 1932/3 , characterised by the imprisonment and murder of the regime’s political and religious opponents, as well as those who were considered a danger to it or its racist objectives because of their religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or physical or mental disability. The Nazis attempted to create a new, stronger, more powerful Germany through the conquest of central and eastern Europe and the exploitation of its resources, which were considered to form the key to global power generally, while those nations and states at the periphery of this area, such as Britain, were considered to be in a process of eventual decline through lack of access to this area and its natural resources.

The Russian Revolution and Italian Fascist imperialism were similarly strongly influenced by the lack of economic development and progress in these nations compared to the more economically developed and prosperous nations elsewhere in Europe. Lenin, for example, believed that Russia had been deliberately held back and exploited by the capitalists of the more developed nations. He therefore appealed to the Russian working class to support Communism and the Bolsheviks’ programme of economic and social development by destroying international capitalism’s hold over the nation with the slogan ‘Smash capitalism at the weakest link’.

Although usually considered to be at the opposite end of the political spectrum to Communism, Italian Fascism also had its basis in revolutionary Socialism, though this was anarcho-syndicalism, rather than Marxism, and Mussolini’s regime similarly used arguments based in the ideology of the radical left to support its campaign of military expansion and annexation. The Fascists declared that Italy was a ‘proletarian nation’ lacking the economic development and prosperity of other countries like Britain and France, and so deserved the resources of an empire, such as both of those powers possessed, in order to take its place as leading modern nation. Thus the Fascist regime justified its invasion of North Africa, Abyssinia and Eritrea, as well as its annexation of Albania and parts of Greece in Europe as part of Mussolini’s campaign to create a new, Roman empire.

Economic Success and Improving Conditions Supporting Democratic Peace in Italy and Greater Openness towards West in Russia

The collapse of the former Soviet Union created massive economic and political dislocation in the former Soviet bloc, including widespread poverty in the former Soviet Union itself as the change to capitalism saw inefficient factories and concerns closed, throwing millions out of work, and pensions destroyed over night as the rouble became valueless. Observers of the contemporary Russian political scene, such as the British journalist Jonathan Dimbleby in the recent BBC TV series, Russia, have expressed grave concern about the increasingly authoritarian, anti-democratic nature of the regime and general political climate. Nevertheless, Russia remains a capitalist state open to outside investment, and a far more peaceful attitude to Western Europe at least than under the former Soviet Regime.

Italian politics has been notoriously unstable, which has resulted in a process of political fragmentation in which a large number of small parties have emerged to compete for power, compared with the two and three party systems of North America and Western Europe. Governments have frequently fallen due to corruption, while the country has also been subject to terrorist atrocities by both the extreme Left and Right. Despite this, the Italian economy has developed considerably, so that while explicitly nationalist parties have emerged to play a major role in Italian politics, such as the Allianza Nazionale, which became a partner in Enrico Berlusconi’s coalition regime, Italian politics is still democratic and there is little popular demand for the rejection of democracy and the use of military force to increase Italy’s stature in the international community or develop her economy and society.

Nationalism as Cause of War and Stable Borders as Strong Factor for Peace

Of course, nationalism has also always been one of the major causes of violence and war. Many of the wars in the 19th century were nationalist conflicts, such as the campaigns of Greece and the other Balkan nations to gain their freedom from the Ottoman Empire, and Poland and the other nations in central Europe to gain their independence from Germany, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The independence of many of these central European nations, like Poland and the former Czechoslovakia, was finally achieved after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the redrawing of European national boundaries after the First World War. The borders of many of the central and eastern European nations were similarly revised at the end of the Second World War, as Germany ceded large parts of its territory, such as Pomerania and Silesia, to Poland. Despite this, the national boundaries have, with the serious exception of the former Yugoslavia, been stable, though there are still continuing national tensions in the Balkans and the possibility of further warfare there. Nevertheless, in western Europe at least the question of national territories appears to have been settled. Where there is an increasing demand for independence amongst some nations, such as Scotland and Wales in the United Kingdom, there’s the expectation that this can be gained through the democratic process at the ballot box, rather than through armed insurrection and conflict.

European Peace Produced through Economic Prosperity, Lack of Nationalist Tensions and Desire to Avoid Another War after World War II

Thus part of the reason for the fifty years of peace experienced by Europe after World War II is the lack of economic and nationalist motives for war amongst the various European nations. Indeed, the horrors of the War itself and the devastation it caused economically, socially and politically left Europe exhausted and acted to turn public opinion against war and the use of military force. Of course this does not mean that these nations became pacifists, or that they ceased to wage wars against their enemies. The British fought a series of wars against nationalist rebels, such as the Mau Mau in Kenya, and the French in their turn fought militant indepence movements such as those in Algeria. Nevertheless, after the carnage of two World Wars, the military did not have the same glamour it possessed during the heyday of High Victorian imperialism. Within Europe there was a strong emphasis on international co-operation and rapprochement as a deliberate attempt to prevent the horrors of the Second World War occurring over again.

Post-War Peace in the West Product of Necessity of Creating Alliances against Threat of Soviet Expansionism

The division of Europe between the western and Soviet blocs also helped create peace in Europe. In the West, Britain and other European nations, with the exception of France, banded together with America and Canada to form NATO in order to protect themselves against the threat of invasion from the Soviet Bloc. In eastern Europe, the Communist nations formed a similar military alliance, the Warsaw pact, while the massive political control of these nations and their subordination to the Soviet Union effectively presented an economically and politically united bloc confronting the liberal, capitalist societies of the West, rather than each other. If there is an explicitly atheist cause for peace in this situation, it’s probably through the atheist nature of Communism and the Communist bloc’s suppression of freedom and independence in the member states, rather than through atheism necessarily making western Europeans less militaristic.

European Secularism Produced by Greater Prosperity and Social Stability Creating an Emphasis on This-Worldly Concerns in European Attitudes

There are numerous sociological and ideological reasons for the secularisation of Europe over the past century, many of which are outside the scope of this article. However, it’s possible that the increased prosperity and social stability in post-war Europe was partly responsible for the decline of organised religion in the continent. Material prosperity and social stablility undoubtedly helped to create an emphasis in European culture on the concerns of this world, rather than the other worldly focus of traditional religion. For many Europeans it could appear that it would be possible to find satisfaction and fulfillment on Earth through human rational social and technological developments and planning, without the assistance of the Almighty. Religion could be seen as irrelevant to more pressing earthly concerns, such as the pursuit of one’s own pleasure and interests.

Secularism Produced through European Spiritual Crisis, Prosperity and Loss of Confidence in Traditional Western Culture after World War II

Furthermore, the carnage of the two World Wars also created a spiritual crisis in many Europeans. The fact that European civilisation had created the mechanised slaughter of millions, including the planned, industrial-scale genocide of the Holocaust and similar campaigns to eradicate other peoples and minority groups, such as Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and the disabled, during the Third Reich discredited traditional European culture in the eyes of many European intellectuals. The appearance of the Affluent Society in the 1960s produced a feeling of dissatisfaction with traditional European politics and society amongst young people, and particularly with the traditional ruling classes who were viewed as out of touch and obsolete. For many Europeans this rejection of traditional authority necessarily included the church, which was criticised because of the support parts of it had given Fascist regimes and because of its central place within traditional European culture and as the guardian and promoter of traditional European morality. This morality had been severely compromised and discredited by the horrors committed by Europeans in the Fascist regimes, and the moral authority of the European powers to govern their colonies in Africa and Asia was successfully challenged as these nations gained their independence. Away from the political sphere, the Churches’ traditional moral stance, particularly on sexuality, was criticised as repressive, if not actually oppressive. Prosperity and security helped encourage Europeans to seek to gratify their desires immediately on Earth, rather than adopt the moral restraint advocated by the Church, which was attacked as oppressive and hypocritical.

European Peace and Secularism both Products of European Prosperity and Stability

Thus the material prosperity and social stability Europe achieved after the War helped to produce both the long period of peace and the increased secularisation experienced by its nations. While undoubtedly some of those who became atheists after the War did become active in various peace movements and initiatives, the main causes of European peace lay in these social and economic developments, rather than being directly produced by the growth of either atheism or secularism in Europe.

Religion as Cause of War

Robert’s implied claim that European peace was produced by the growth of secularism further suffers from its assumption that religion, and specifically Christianity, is a major cause of war. Now clearly religious differences have resulted in tension between different faiths, tensions that have resulted in violence and armed conflict. In British politics the most obvious example of this was the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, though this could also be viewed as the result of centuries of conflict over Irish independence and its government by Britain, in which religion is one aspect of a larger question of national identity and political allegiance. Similarly, some religions do have an extremely martial character that has promoted warfare and armed conflict. In the ancient Norse religion, for example, men could only get into Valhalla, to feast and fight with the gods in preparation for the final combat with the forces of evil at the day of Ragnarok if they died in battle. Those who had the misfortune to die of natural causes instead went to the far less pleasant realm of Helheim, a cold and miserable place, though not a place of punishment and torment like the Christian Hell. One ancient Viking king was, however, so terrified of the prospect of going to Helheim through dying in bed that, as an old man, he and his elderly retainers deliberately fought a battle with the specific intention of being killed so that they could enter Valhalla. Thus ancient Norse paganism reflected and promoted the martial, warrior ethos of Viking society and its consequent positive promotion of violence and warfare.

Promotion of Peace and Attempts to Limit Warfare in Christianity

However, attitudes to violence and the morality and conduct of warfare may differ strongly between religions and different sects and denominations of the same faith. While Christianity as a whole did not reject warfare, and at times could have an extremely militaristic character, such as during the Crusades in the Middle Ages, nevertheless it also sought to promote peace and restrain violence. In this Christians have been guided and sought to put into practice Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount that ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’. Although Christians and the Church have engaged in warfare, this was subject to moral and legal constraints. Theologians and philosophers such as St. Ambrose, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas formulated theories of the Just War, based partly on existing Roman law and the moral demands of Scripture, with the intention of limiting its violence and brutality. Warfare was adopted and promoted by Christianity purely as a means for combating evil, and violence for its own sake was explicitly condemned by the Church. St. Augustine himself condemned ‘the passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust of power’ and other moral failings in warfare. 1 Canon law during much of the Middle Ages required that soldiers do penance after battles because of the danger that they had fought from these immoral motives, rather than the higher morality demanded by the Church. Even those soldiers who were unsure whether or not they had actually killed anyone were thus required to do penance for 40 days after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. 2 Furthermore the chaos and bloodshed of the 16th and 17th century Wars of Religion resulted in Christians rejecting holy war because of the way Christians had attacked and persecuted fellow Christians during them. The result was that although religious freedom was very restricted in many Christian states, internationally nations rejected religious warfare. Indeed, the 16th and 17th century Wars of Religion, which included the French Wars of Religion, the revolt of the Netherlands, the Thirty Years War in Germany and central Europe, and the War of the Three Kingdoms/ British Civil War were the last time western European nations fought purely religious wars. Indeed, the British sociologist David Martin, in his book, Does Christianity Cause War?, noted that after these wars religion became merely an aspect of national identity, an aspect whose importance depended on the enemy being fought, but that wars were not fought in the name of Christianity itself or for the purposes of imposing a particular religious doctrine on the opposing side. 3

Proposal for International European Parliament by William Penn to Prevent War

Indeed, some Christian denominations, such as the Amish and the Quakers actively reject violence. William Penn, the great Quaker writer and founder of Pennsylvania, in his pamphlet arguing for religious toleration, A Perswasive to Moderation to Church Dissenters, in Prudence and Conscience, noted the constitutional arrangements granting freedom of conscience and worship in various European states to demand that Nonconformists receive similar toleration in England. 4 Rather than use warfare to settle their disputes, Penn instead urged that European states should instead solely use diplomacy. He thus proposed a plan for establishing European peace through the creation of an international parliament of European states that would meet annually to discuss and resolve disputes between the member states without resorting to military force. 5 In many ways Penn’s idea is a remarkable precursor of the contemporary European Union, and similar international bodies such as the United Nations.

Despite their aims of promoting peace and international harmony, the EU and UN have been the subjects of suspicion and criticism because of the threat they represent to national sovereignty and the national traditions of civil liberty in various member states. Critics of the EU, for example, have attacked its lack of democratic accountability and the financial corruption in some of its institutions, as well as its bureaucracy, inefficiency and bizarre official policies that can place some states at a disadvantage and leave them resentful of the benefits granted other, sometimes more powerful states.

19th Century Largely Peaceful Period in European History

Even if a single, international organisation governing the affairs of its member states is not as popular or as powerful a guarantee of freedom and prosperity as early advocates of the idea like William Penn may have hoped, nevertheless European international politics during the 19th century, when religious faith was far stronger than today, was remarkably peaceful. It has been stated that

‘Perhaps no century since the fall of the Roman Empire has been so peaceful as that between 1815 and 1914. The widespread wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had culminated in the massive campaigns of Napoleon and his enemies. Nothing like this took place in nineteenth-century Europe.’ 6 Despite brief military expeditions by various European powers into Italy Spain and Greece, and a short war between Russia and Turkey in 1828, there were no major wars in Europe between Napoleon’s defeat and 1830. The period from 1830 to 1854 was similarly peaceful, until it was broken by the outbreak of the Crimean War. This was, however, confined to the Crimean peninsula and the nations involved maintained contact with each other through neutral Austria until peace was achieved in 1856. The wars of 1859 consisted of two months of fighting in northern Italy. Bismarck’s campaigns of 1864, 1866 and 1870 were very localised and only ever involved two great powers. The 1866 war was only seven weeks long, and the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 did not last for a year. 7

Peace in 19th Century Europe Produced by Deliberate Policy of Diplomacy in preference to War by European Statesmen

This long period of European peace was the product of the ‘Concert of Europe’, the system of diplomacy and alliances that had been created to oppose Napoleon, and its successors. It consisted of regular meetings of the great powers of Britain, Prussia, Austria, Russia and, after 1815, France, with the intention of preserving European peace. The 1815 peace treaties that formed the basis of the Congress system, as it came to be known, had been designed not only to reorganise and make secure the boundaries of the various European states, punish France and reward the victorious allies, but also to preserve from revolution Europe’s traditional, established order and religion. 8 The main concern of many of the statesmen involved in the Congress system was to promote their countries’ concrete political interests. Louix XVIII’s minister Talleyrand wished to return the various European states to their original borders before 1815 and advance France’s particular national interests in Europe. Metternich of Austria and Hardenburg of Prussia were both concerned to preserve their countries from revolution, while Britain’s Castlereagh hoped to create a balance of power in Europe so that Britain could consolidate her considerable imperial gains overseas. Despite the focus of the European powers on promoting their own national concerns, Alexander I of Russia sincerely hoped to create a lasting European peace, through creating a union with his fellow European rulers ‘as members of a single Christian nation.’ 9 This ideal of a union of Christian European powers did not survive Alexander’s death. 10

Attempts to Abolish War by British Liberal Politicians

Nevertheless the European powers, and particularly the British, hoped that diplomacy could preserve peace in Europe. The Liberals in Britain in particular were deeply concerned to avoid the suffering and economic damage caused by war. In 1856 at the Congress of Paris Lord Clarendon, the chief British plenipotentiary, presented a proposal for the complete abolition of war. Declaring that ‘the calamities of war are still too present to every mind not to make it desirable to seek out every expedient calculated to prevent their return’, he recommended that Article VIII of the peace treaty between Russia and Turkey, should be generally applied to settle all international disputes. 11 This clause stipulated that any country in dispute with Turkey should first attempt mediation through a friendly state before resorting to arms, and Clarendon hoped that the adoption of this as a general principle of international diplomacy would lead to European states settling their disputes through mediation rather than armed conflict. Clarendon’s proposal was made too late to become a formal part of the 1856 peace treaty, but it did become part of the treaty’s protocol and was signed by all the plenipotentiaries of the great powers present at the Congress. Despite continued British requests to the other European powers in the years immediately following the signing of the treaty that they should respect it and attempt a mediated settlement for their conflicts, it was never used to solve any of the major international crises of the time. The attempt to create a complete diplomatic solution to international disputes and abolish war was a complete failure. 12 Nevertheless the fact that it was attempted shows the genuine commitment to peace of the European powers involved, as well as their confidence in the ability of the diplomatic machinery established by the 1815 peace treaty to solve international disputes. 13

19th Century European Peace Maintained when Europe Far More Religious than Today

The 19th century system of international diplomacy catastrophically failed to preserve European peace in 1914, and the following decades saw the rise of aggressively militaristic, Fascist regimes that utterly rejected the 19th century goal of preserving and promoting peace. Nevertheless, despite its failure the attempts of contemporary European nations to maintain peace through diplomatic negotiation and alliances is clearly partly derived and developed from these 19th century attempts to provide a diplomatic solution for international disputes, rather than the use of military force. These attempts to create the diplomatic methods to prevent international conflict were made when Europe was far more religious than it is at present and by politicians who mostly, though not exclusively, shared the concerns of general European society to preserve and maintain religion. It could therefore be considered that the peace currently enjoyed by contemporary, secular European society was founded by 19th century people of faith.

Attempts to Create Peace often Led by People of Faith Inspired by Religious Convictions

It was not just in the 19th century that people of faith attempted to achieve internationl peace. In contemporary Europe as well many of the individuals who actively worked to promote peace were people of faith who were directly inspired by their strong religious principles. The 19th century Liberal Party in Britain was strongly informed by the Protestant, Nonconformist conscience with its concern for moral and social improvement, and in the 20th century Christian clergy and lay people were also involved in various peace movements. The chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain from 1958 to 1964 was the controversial clergyman Lewis John Collins. 14 The scientist and Anglican priest, Charles Raven, was an ardent pacifist and one of the sponsors of the Peace Pledge Union. He based his arguments for pacifism very much on his Christian beliefs and theological views, presenting them in hsi work, The Religious Basis of Pacifism. 15

Peaceful Personal Conduct Commanded by the Bible, and World Peace Traditional Subject of Christian Prayers

Pacifism remains the frequently controversial view of a minority of Christians, as most Christians would probably argue that in all too many cases evil can only be combatted through warfare and deserves the use of military force against it. Nevertheless Christians, regardless of their particular views on war, have prayed for peace in the world since the period of the Early Church. The Apostolic Constitutions, for example, amongst the prayers for the Church and its people also requests Christians to pray for world peace with the words

‘Let us pray for the peace and happy settlement of the world, and of the holy churches; that the God of the whole world may afford us his everlasting peace, and such as may not be taken away from us’. 16

This concern for peace is based firmly in the Bible. St. Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews 13:20 describes the Lord as the God of peace, for example. 1 Peter 3:11 advises the Christian – ‘he that will love life’ – as they are described in verse 10 – to renounce evil and turn to peace with the words

‘let him eschew evil, and do good

let him seek peace and ensue it’ 17.

St. Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews 12:14 also urges Christians to live in peace with everyone with the command

‘Follow peace with all men, and

holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.’ 18

Thus while the Bible does not necessarily reject warfare, it does command that Christians attempt to live in peace with their fellows and condemns violent behaviour. The Bible’s concern and encouragement of peace as a part of Christian morality directly contradicts Robert’s assumption that Christianity must somehow, by its very nature, promote violence and warfare, and that European society has therefore become more peaceful through its decline.

Conclusion: European Peace Product of Post-War Prosperity, Stable Borders, and Preference for Diplomatic Solutions by European Politicians rather than Secularism

Thus while the long period of European peace in the 20th century has also been a period of decline in the Christian faith, or its observance, neither secularism or atheism is the cause of this peace, as Robert’s comment implies. Rather the immediate causes of European peace have been stable borders, produced by the emergence of the nation-state in the 19th century, and the deliberate policy of European governments to settle international disputes by diplomacy rather than military force.

This policy became a necessity after the carnage and devastation of the Second World War, and the threat of war with the Soviet bloc after the establishment of the Iron Curtain. However, European governments and statesmen had preferred to solve their disputes through negotiation rather than force, though certainly not to exclude warfare, since the middle of the second decade of the 19th century. The system of international alliances and organisations that emerged after World War II with the deliberate intention of promoting international peace and curbing the military aggression or the territorial ambitions of the individual member states can be viewed as a development of 19th century great power diplomacy with its preference for negotiation. There is a major difference between the two diplomatic systems, however in that the architects of the ‘Concert of Europe’ believed strongly in national sovereignty and would have rejected the threat posed to it by supranational organisations like the EU. Nevertheless, even the EU has its predecessors in the proposal of Christian statesmen and theologians, such as William Penn, for a common European parliament of member states to maintain European peace and harmony. Europeans had ceased to wage war purely for religious reasons after the 17^th century. The main cause of European warfare in the succeeding centuries was nationalism, of which religion was largely just one aspect. The system of great power diplomacy and alliances that constituted the Concert System, although far less radical than Penn’s plan for a common European parliament, was nevertheless established by statesmen and diplomats who generally viewed religion as essential to their nations’ wellbeing, and wished to preserve it as a vital part of their nations’ security. The preservation and maintenance of established religion from attack from political radicalism was therefore one of the major purposes in the attempts to establish and preserve European peace after the defeat of Napoleon.

European Peace Partly Caused by Christian Moral Doctrine

Furthermore, while Christians have committed horrific atrocities in terrible religious wars, such as during the Crusades and the Wars of Religion, Christianity has also viewed the Almighty as a God of peace. Christian morality required peaceful, non-violent personal conduct, particularly as stated by St. Paul and St. Peter. A number of Christian sects, denominations and individuals have been determined pacifists. While these have only been a minority, Christianity as a whole has attempted to place moral limits on warfare and its conduct through the development of theories of the Just War, and Christians have continued to pray for peace in the world since the Early Church. While undoubtedly the various peace movements and initiatives that appeared in the 20^th century were by no means confined to people of faith, nevertheless they have also included Christian clergy and laypeople. The peace Europe has enjoyed for the last half-century is thus partly the product of the attempts of Christians over the centuries to limit war and promote peace.

Secularism Product of European Peace, Stable Borders and Economic Development

It may be considered that the success of European governments and diplomats in establishing a largely peaceful, stable Europe may be one of the causes of European secularisation. International stability within Europe, as well as increased material prosperity and rising standards of living have led Europeans to adopt a far more this-worldly attitude to life, often to the exclusion of traditional other worldly religion. Thus national prosperity and international peace, as well as ideological challenges from secular philosophies, may have contributed to secularisation and the attitude amongst some Europeans that religion, or religious observance, is unnecessary.

20th Century Totalitarianisms Example of Possible Dangers to Peace from Rejection of Christianity and Christian Moral Support for Peace

It’s a very flawed attitude. The great totalitarianisms of the Left and Right that emerged in the 20^th century did so partly as a rejection of Christianity, and traditional Christian morality. Fascism in particular celebrated warfare for its own sake, in direct contradiction to Christian theology and morality. In their attempts to impose their own ideas of the perfect society on their subject peoples, these regimes murdered millions. Terrible atrocities have been committed by Christians in the name of their religion, yet European attempts to create a genuine, just peace owe much to Christianity. The horrors committed by the extreme Left and Right during the 20^th century show how peace too can suffer once the traditional moral views supporting it, based on Christianity, have been rejected.

Notes

1. St. Augustine, cited in Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial: Arguments against Anti-Religious Bigotry (Encounter Books, New York 2002), p. 90.

2. Carroll and Shiflett, Christianity on Trial, pp. 90-1.

3. David Martin, Does Christianity Cause War? (Oxford, Clarendon Press 1997), cited in Carroll and Shiflett, Christianity on Trial, p. 95.

4. ‘A Perswasive to Moderation to Church-Dissenters, in Prudence and Conscience: Humbly Submitted to the KING and His Great Council’ in William Penn, ed. Edwin B. Bonner, The Peace of Europe, the Fruits of Solitude and Other Writings (London, J.M. Dent 1993), pp. 187-223.

5. ‘An Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe, by the Establishment of an European DYET, PARLIAMENT, or Estates’, in Penn, ed. Bonner, The Peace of Europe, pp. 5-22.

6. Harry Hearder, Europe in the Nineteenth Century 1830-1880, Second Edition (London, Longman 1988), p. 154.

7. Hearder, Europe in the Nineteenth Century, p. 153.

8. Esmond Wright, ed., History of the World: The Last Five Hundred Years (Middlesex, Hamlyn 1984), p. 406.

9. Wright, ed., History of the World, p. 386.

10. Hearder, Europe in the Nineteenth Century, p. 155.

11. Hearder, Europe in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 155-6.

12. Hearder, Europe in the Nineteenth Century, p. 156.

13. Hearder, Europe in the Nineteenth Century, p. 156.

14. ‘Collins, Lewis John’, in The New Illustrated Everyman’s Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (London, J.M. Dent and Sons 1985), p. 370.

15. ‘Charles Raven’ in Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson and Rowan Williams, eds., Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (Oxford, Oxford University Press 2001), p. 612; Charles Raven, ‘The Religious Basis of Pacifism’, in Rowell, Stevenson and Williams, eds., Love’s Redeeming Work, p. 613.

16. F. Forrester Church and Terrence J. Mulry, The MacMillan Book of Earliest Christian Prayers (New York, Collier Books 1988), p. 61.

17. 1 Peter 3:11 and 1 Peter 3:10 in the Holy Bible, King James Version (London, Collins), p. 242.

18. Hebrews 12: 14, in the Holy Bible, King James Version, p. 235.

Atheism as Religion 3

As the first two pieces I’ve written on religion have caused such wide controversy and intense debate, I thought I’d better write a third piece to explain and clarify some of the issues. It’s fair to say a lot of people have questioned and intensely resented the suggestion that certain forms of atheism will fulfil the same sociological and ideological functions as religion. The two are supposed to be antithetical, and for those who look to secular philosophies and ideologies for meaning and value, against what they perceive as the evils and irrationality of religion, clearly the statement that atheism can act as a kind of religion itself is intensely repugnant. However, the difficulty of defining ‘religion’, and the varied sociological and ideological roles it can fulfil, as a well as the intensely varied forms it may take, means that the category of ‘religion’ itself may be so nebulous and difficult to define that many definitions of religion will fit certain forms of organised atheism.

Definition of Secular Alternatives to Religion

Scholars of religion consider that

‘Secular alternatives are not themselves religions but must share enough in common with religions to present themselves as options that exclude religious adherence. Someone who adopted a theoretical standpoint which, for him, excluded religious belief need not accept any alternative to religion. There need not be anything which plays an analogous role in his life to that of religion in the life of a believer. But there are those whose theoretical standpoint is secular but for whom certain commitments perform the same function as does adherence to a religion.’ 1

Thus, for secular, atheist ideologies to compete with religion, they must share certain features with religion, which can make the distinction between an atheist ideology and a religion difficult. Karl Marx and the American sociologist, Peter Berger, consider religion to be ideology. 2 Processual archaeologists like Lewis Binford have similarly regarded religion as a form of ideology, referring to ‘ideological sub-systems’ and ‘ideotechnic artefacts’. 3 Some atheists may regard other atheistic systems of belief as religions. Bertrand Russell, for example, argued that Marxism was a religion through the parallels he perceived with Christianity. God in Marxism, according to Russell, corresponded to Dialectical Materialism, Marx was the Messiah, the proletariat were the elect, the church was the Communist Party, the Second Coming was the Revolution, Hell the punishment of the capitalists and the Millenium the Communist Commonwealth. 4 Russell undoubtedly meant this as an unflattering criticism of Communism. Nevertheless, there was an element of truth in that Communism did indeed possess a strongly religious aspect that saw Stalin structure his funeral oration for Lenin on the Orthodox liturgy, complete with a response ‘We shall be faithful to thy precepts, O Lenin’ and the establishment of Lenin’s mausoleum as a Marxist shrine.

Furthermore, certain atheist ideologies themselves have styled themselves as religions. Auguste Comte declared the gaol of his ‘Positive Philosophy’ to be the worship of humanity, rather than a supernatural personal deity. 5 The founder of the theory that God was merely an alienated projection of humanity’s own nature, Ludwig Feuerbach, demanded a new ‘religion of humanity’. Moreover, certain forms of atheist Humanism describe themselves as religious. For example, Herbert W. Schneider, one of the contributors to Paul Kurtz’s The Humanist Alternative: Some Definitions of Humanism recognised that there were religious forms of Humanism which were ‘an effort to free religious faith and devotion from the dogmas of theistic theologies and supernaturalist psychologies.’ 6 Dewey, one of the founders of modern rationalism, defined and defended what he saw as ‘the religious in experience which stands over and against both ‘religion’ and the religions’. 7 However counterintuitive it appears, it is not hypocritical to state that there are forms of organised atheism that have seen themselves either as a religion, or the due successor to religion. And if all talk about God is considered to be about humanity’s own alienated nature, then those forms of Humanism that assert and affirm human dignity and values may be rightly considered religious.

Problems of Defining Religion

Furthermore, philosophers and scholars of religion have recognised the difficulty in forming an adequate definition of what indeed constitutes religion. Philosophers of religion have attempted

‘to bring out just what it is that distinguishes religion properly so called from other beliefs and activities- from moral codes, for example, or customs, attempts at magic, and the beginnings of science or philosophy. Such analyses have yielded some brave attempts at a comprehensive definition, usually in terms of belief in, together with the worship and service of, some supreme or absolute Being. They have also yielded some valuable, even if partial, insights, like those expressed in Schleiermacher’s dictum, “The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence”, or Whitehead’s “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.” It seems likely, however, that there is in fact no single feature or set of features belonging to all those, and only those, things which we should ordinarily call religions, but rather that they form what Wittgenstein called a “family”, with a complex network of resemblances and interrelations – so that a satisfactory answer to the question “What is religion?” would be more like an encyclopedia than a one-sentence definition.’ 8

Commonsense definitions of what constitutes religion, such as a belief in gods and the supernatural, are also problematic. ‘Dictionary definitions [of religion] (e.g. ‘human recognition of superhuman power’, ‘belief in God’, ‘any system of faith and worship’) are often circular, prejudiced, or so general as to be useless.’ 9 As a result, some scholars attempting to define religion have suggested that religion in general may be defined as

‘(a) the class of all religions; (b) the supposed common essence of all genuinely religious phenomena; (c) that ideal of which all actual religions are taken to be imperfect manifestations; (d) human religiousness, expressed not only in systems and traditions (explicit religion) but also in ways of life where it is hidden (implicit)…The sciences of religion often employ a functional definition. For example, J.M. Yinger defined religion as ‘a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggles with the ultimate problems of human life.’ 10

Scholars of religion further observe that ‘definers of religion are prone to the error of reification (misplaced concreteness). It is well to remember that to be religious pertains to persons, but not necessarily only those who profess religious beliefs or engage in religious practices.’ 11

Mary Midgeley, in her exploration of the religious nature of some of the metaphysical claims made about evolution, Evolution as a Religion, has stated that the presence of gods within a system of belief is not necessarily a defining feature of religion.

‘It is certainly not enough to say that they do not involve belief in God. Taoism does not do this either, nor does Buddhism in its original form. And the question whether the Buddha is now ‘a god’ is not a simple one at all. He is, after all, to be sought and found within us. Moreover, where there are ‘gods’, their nature varies enormously. They certainly need not be creators. The world is often held to be timeless, or to have some other origin.’ 12

Other scholars have also noted the difficulty in effectively defining religion. One archaeology textbook, for example, recommends the definition of religion provided by the sociologist Anthony Giddens: ‘a set of symbols, invoking feelings of reverence or awe … linked to rituals or ceremonials practised by a community of believers.’ 13 It further considers that ‘these symbols may be of gods and goddesses, ancestral or nature spirits, or impersonal powers… People often use them [rituals] to try to influence supernatural powers and beings to their advantage and to deal with problems that cannot be solved through the application of technology. However, there are some religions without objects of worship. In Confucianism and Taoism, for example, the individual attempts to attain a higher level through correctly following specified principles.’ 14 As a result of this, archaeologists, for example, try to avoid using the term religion except when referring to a particular known religion. ‘Outside of these contexts archaeologists have tended to use the term ‘ritual’ to describe material that might often be better described as religious. ‘Ritual’ is again a problematical term and one also subject to debate as to its definition. Ritual can be both sacred and secular in intent, but this distinction is often blurred and the term is used to describe anything which is not fully understood.’ 15 Thus there is the problem that in archaeology the problem of defining religion have resulted in merely one aspect of religion being used as a descriptor for the whole of it. 16

Additionally, it has to be admitted that Buddhism and Taoism both have a number of gods, spirits and other supernatural entities, whose existence may come as a shock to westerners who know of Taoism only from a reading of the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu. There is a tendency amongst westerners attracted to Buddhism to see it very much in terms of an atheist faith. Indeed, during the controversy over the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in the 1980s and 1990s in Britain, the Western Buddhist Order in the city of Bristol responded to calls for the extension of the blasphemy laws to cover Islam by the Muslim community by declaring that, as an atheist faith, Buddhists wished to see the blasphemy laws scrapped altogether. Yet the Dalai Lama recently admonished Western Buddhists not to see Buddhism as simply another form of atheism.

Problems of Defining ‘God’

There is, however, a real problem regarding the definition of a ‘god’. Elsewhere in her book Midgeley notes that Chinese has no word for ‘god’, despite the existence of an elaborate pantheon of deities. Many African languages don’t have a special term for ‘god’ either, referring to such supernatural entities as ‘spirits’. A similar problem occurs in Shintoism. The kami, the deities worshipped in Shintoism, are immensely varied in their character and may include ‘sacred objects, divine beings, natural phenomena or venerated images.’ 17 Indeed, the kami are so varied, that some western scholars prefer to describe them as a soul, rather than a god, to express their essentially animistic nature. ‘The idea that everything, animate or inanimate, has a kami or soul is of Shinto origin’. 18 Their nature is indeed so diverse that one of the earliest definitions of them, that of Motoori Norinaga in the 18^th century, was that they were extraordinary, endowed with high virtuousity and inspired awe. 19 The Quechua word huaca similarly has a plurality of meanings. It means simply ‘holy place or thing’, and the huacas so venerated may include anything out of the ordinary. 20 ‘The Incas regarded with awe, and even worshiped, everything out of the ordinary – a hunchback, twinned ears of corn, a curiously shaped rock, the brilliant planet Venus.’ 21 The ambiguity regarding the definitive traits of divinity also affects the great figures of Celtic legend and mythology. It has been stated that ‘there is no pantheon in Celtic mythology. The very use of the English words ‘god’ or ‘goddess’, denoting a superhuman, immortal entity who is venerated and propitiated and who has power over human affairs, misrepresents surviving records. … Escaping death is not sufficient to be considered divine; the Tuatha De Danann of the pseudo-history Lebor Gabal [Book of Invasions] are usually seen as immortals but not as gods.’ 22

Problems of ‘Supernatural’ as Conceptual Category

Even the nature of the supernatural as a category is questionable. It has been observed that tribal religions regard themselves and their gods as part of nature, not above or outside it. 23 Similarly the gods of ancient Greece, although worshipped as superior beings endowed with power over the elements and humanity, were not necessarily supernatural. They were considered to be like humans, except that they were more rarified and celestial in nature than mortals. Instead of blood, for example, they had ichor. A similar, materialistic conception of God informed Stoic pantheism. ‘The Stoics were materialists, denying fully existence to anything without a body. They believed that the world is a living intelligent Being.’ 24 God, the rational, active cause in the universe, acted on matter through ‘artistic fire’ or intelligent pneuma, a mixture of air and fire. The presence of this fire in certain ratios caused the presence of growth in plants, and soul in humans. The term used for this ratio, phusis, means ‘growth’ and is the root of the English word ‘physics’. The Romans translated the term ‘natura’, hence the English word ‘nature’. 25 Thus Stoic pantheism conceived God as quintessential natural. In the 9^th century, the Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena similarly defined God as ‘nature uncreated and creating’. 26 Thus God was considered to be natural, even perhaps superlatively natural, as the author of the rest of nature, rather than supernatural.

Problem of ‘Magic’ as Concept

On the other side of the supposed dichotomy between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, even magic – often cited as an obvious paradigm of the supernatural – is ambiguous as a category. Although it is now used almost synonymously with the supernatural, it has historically included a variety of concepts and definitions that don’t fit that definition, and paradoxically align it with science. Medieval philosophers and theologians distinguished two types of magic – demonic and natural. Demonic magic clearly worked through the agency of demons. Natural magic, however, referred to occult powers in nature that operated independently of demons. Natural magic referred to powers or properties of objects or herbs that derived not from their own structure, but from emanations from the stars or planets.

‘These latter powers were technically known as occult, and natural magic was the science of such powers. The properties in question were strictly within the realm of nature, but the natural world that could account for them was a broad one: instead of examining the inner structure of a plant to determine its effects, one had to posit influences that flowed from the distant reaches of the cosmos.’ 27

My point here is not that magic itself is scientific, though clearly the technical sense in which ‘natural magic’ was used made it part of the nascent medieval scientific enterprise, even if by today’s level of scientific knowledge it is utterly wrong. It is merely that the modern conception of a radical dichotomy between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ is the product of post-Enlightenment, Western culture and does not conform to the models of the cosmos in pre-Enlightenment Europe nor in other, non-Western cultures today.

‘Scientific’ Mysticism: The Surrealists

The collapse of a distinction between ‘scientific’ and ‘mystical’ can be seen in contemporary cultural movements. In art, the Surrealists strongly viewed themselves as scientific atheists. They were ardent Marxists, who based their views of art on Freud’s theory of the unconscious. They referred to the somnambulistic séances during which they composed their literary works through automatic writing ‘experiments’. And they were vehemently anti-religious and anti-Christian. In 1949, for example, a group of young Parisians caused a scandal by storming Notre Dame Cathedral, proclaiming that the church was ‘diverting man’s vital energy to the service of a corpse’. Their leader, Michel Mourre, wearing a Dominican cassock, began reading ‘God is dead’. In the ensuing storm of controversy, the leader of the Surrealists, Andre Breton, declared in a letter to the newspaper Combat that ‘a thoroughly wholesome act has been accomplished at Notre Dame’, and the movement as a whole considered it particularly apt ‘that the blow should have been struck there, at the very heart of the octopus that is still strangling the universe’. 28 Indeed, the Surrealists saw themselves as firmly and defiantly acting against religion through their espousal of the irrational:

‘In its running confrontation with religion, for example, surrealism refuses to confine itself to the arena of rational criticism; it adopts the more vigorous methods of humour and eroticism, unleashing defiant and irresistible mages of concrete irrationality which penetrate the surface of false consciousness, so that the dehumanising notions of God, prayer, afterlife, etc., are replaced by liberating images of desire. Such an effort does not contradict but rather complements other revolutionary antireligious efforts.’ 29

Yet Surrealism clearly owed much to the supernatural. The sessions of automatic writing were modelled on Spiritualist séances, and leading surrealists like Breton, Mary Ann Atwood and Ethan Allen Hitchcock were fascinated by Hermeticism and alchemy. 30 In their attempts to penetrate to the core of irrational states, and use this to create a new, and in their eyes more moral, order, it is difficult not to agree with Surrealism’s Stalinist critics who denounced it as a form of mysticism. 31 If religion is defined as about ‘ultimate concerns’, a totalising worldview into which other, subordinate beliefs are fitted, and in which sacrifices are considered entirely appropriate, then despite their loud protestations on this matter, Surrealism by its own definition is strongly religious:

‘It cannot be emphasised too strongly: Surrealism, a unitary project of total revolution, is above all a method of knowledge and a way of life; it is lived far more than it is written, or written about, or drawn. Surrealism is the most exhilarating adventure of the mind, an unparalleled means of pursuing the fervent quest for freedom and true life beyond the veil of ideological appearances.’32

Thus Surrealism is both a way of life, a method of knowledge, and a path to truth and value beyond the rational. Clearly this is religious, even if, as an atheist ideology, it is quite distinct from supernatural religion. Thus it is fair to say that Surrealism was a form of occultism, because ‘the very name of the movement – surrealism – shows that the artists involved were seeking a ‘super-reality, a ‘different’ reality, an invisible reality. They wanted to explore this reality, and to succeed where their predecessors had failed; they wanted to ‘change life’ by writing it into their revolutionary agenda.’ 33 Surrealism thus also includes social reform as well as personal conversion. This religious theme within Surrealism expressed itself in the creation of personal mythologies, such as that of Victor Brauner, or the strange ‘epiphanies’ painted by Leonora Carrington.

Adoption of Religious Functions by Secular Activities

This points to another problem in defining ‘religion’ apart from ‘secular’ or ‘atheist’. In traditional societies, religion may inform and provide social cohesion and a sense of moral community through every activity, from art to sport. As traditional religious faith in the West has declined, these functions have been dispersed from religion elsewhere in society, so that those scholars who adopt a functionalist definition of religion ‘have then argued that whatever supplied these functions was, by virtue of that fact, religion. Hence the idea is aired that religion is the celebration of the civic society, or even of the state.’ 34

J.M. Yinger, the great scholar of secular alternatives to religion, considered that the deep human needs that religion sought to answer still existed, and as religion declined, so the secular alternatives to religion became invested with religious meaning for those who pursued them.

‘Almost every need that we have mentioned in connection with religion finds expression in a wide variety of secular movements. This is particularly true in modern society, in which traditional religious symbols and forms have lost force and appeal. The needs with which religion is connected are still with us. If we are not trained to look to a religious system in our attempts to satisfy them, we will tend to infuse secular patterns with a religious quality. We may seek to overcome a sense of aloneness by joining a lodge, rather than (or in addition to) joining a church congregation. We may struggle with a feeling of powerlessness by imbuing our nation with an absolute quality, rather than identifying with an all-powerful God. We may attempt to rid ourselves of guilt by projecting our weakness onto a minority group, instead of going to confession. We may try to reduce a sense of confusion and doubt by adopting rigid ‘all-knowing’ secular formulas to explain the world’s ills, holding to them with a desperation born more of uncertainty than of conviction. We may attempt to reduce our sense of meaninglessness in life, of boredom in our job, by avid pursuit of entertainment or by alcohol, trying to capture on a weekend what is denied us in the course of our work.’ 35

Gods as UFOs and in SETI

In this sense, there may be considerable overlap between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’, and the distinction become extremely nebulous. If gods or spirits are defined as ‘celestial non-human intelligences’, then the aliens reported by those who have experienced UFO encounters are effectively gods or spirits. This is relatively uncontroversial, as there are UFO religions, like the UNARIUS religion of Ruth ‘Spaceship Ruthie’ Norman, the Aetherius Society, and the Raelians. It may also, more controversially, include SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Now fans of Carl Sagan, a firm believer in the existence of extraterrestrial civilisations and an ardent and articulate advocate of the scientific search for them, may be shocked by this, as well as the other scientists and laymen interested in their discovery. Yet the benefits expected from such contact by the scientists involved in the search closely conform to traditional concepts of revelation. Carl Sagan considered that it ‘illuminates the approach to central questions of our being: the search for who we are. Are we the most intelligent beings in the universe or are we just a cosmic commonplace?’ 36 These benefits will include information ‘on curing diseases in carbon-based lifeforms, new sources of energy, how to transmute waste products into any desired element, popular spaceship designs.’ 37 This is remarkably like the theme in various mythologies around the world of humanity being taught scientific, medical and social discoveries by gods, spirits or angels. Sagan himself stated that alien contact would make humans ‘more religious, as well as more scientific’, noting that ‘the word ‘religion means ‘to relate yourself to something,’ that’s all the word means. It’s based on the old Latin term religio, to bind together, the binding of sticks, of taking separate facts and binding them together with a theory or a law, and the bundle of sticks that represented ancient Rome was exactly that.’ 38 Thus, in the view of one of the great leaders of SETI, the search for alien life is itself a kind of religious quest. It is therefore probably not an accident that the aliens in Sagan’s book, Contact, give the heroine information that suggests that the universe itself is designed from a message contained in pi. Within the context of the narrative, one can see the aliens here performing the function as science fictional angels pointing the way to a transcendent God.

Sport and Music as Religion Secular and Theistic

One can also note the way other, secular pursuits are informed by religious terminology and discourse, from music to sport. Great popular musicians are called ‘Rock gods’, and while I disagree with Rich’s suggestion that football can be considered a religion in the same way as certain forms of organised atheism may be so considered, it is true that sport can take on an intensely religious mood amongst some of its supporters. A few years ago in Britain the posters for either the soccer or rugby championship matches carried the slogan ‘Many are called, but few are chosen’, taken from the Gospels. Now it might suggest the elite nature of the sportsmen involved, but it also points to the projection onto them of superhuman, even divine qualities as extraordinary athletes conveying transcendental values.

This quasi-deification of musicians, sportsmen and other celebrities is part of a general pattern in which societies have invested music and sport with religious and mythopoeic qualities. Orpheus was the great musician hero in Greek mythology, and the object of a mystery cult. In German and Scandinavian folklore, the music of the trolls had the power to cause even objects to dance. Elvis for many in the West has become the epitome of rock stardom, and the intense devotion to him, manifesting in post-mortem sightings, shrines set up by his fans and pilgrimages made to his home, all partake of religious sensibility, even if the Church of Elvis itself is a self-conscious parody of religion along the lines of the Church of the Subgenius. Elvis, as one of the greatest exponents of popular music, becomes a personification of the transcendental power of music itself and partakes of something of the character of Orpheus and the other musician gods of ancient mythology.

One can see the same mythopoeic projection in sport. Many societies included sport as a part of their religion. The Meso-American Indian societies of the Aztecs, Maya and other peoples played ball games as a formal part of the worship of their gods, which culminated in the sacrifice of the winner. The Olympic Games in ancient Greece were held in honour of the gods, and similar games were held at the funerals of the Roman emperors. The gladiatorial contests of the Roman arena had their origin in Etruscan funeral rituals, before they were secularised as a mass human blood sport. Now clearly there are very few, if any people, in the West who regard their sportsmen as being in anyway literally divine, and a very much doubt that the next Superbowl, baseball world series or soccer world cup will end in the ritual sacrifice of the winners. Yet there is an element of truth in the statement that some sportsmen and women are literally idolised by their fans because of the intense devotion they give to these athletes as superhuman individuals possessed of personal awe and charisma.

Religious Character in Popular Science

The adoption of religious terminology and metaphysical concerns have even affected and informed contemporary science publishing. The atheist journalist Andrew Brown has remarked that

‘the extraordinary thing about the pop-science-book market is that it is not driven by scientific curiosity at all. What people want is science which appears to answer religious questions. This means physics, cosmology and biology. There are no works of popular chemistry. Successful science publishers know this perfectly well: a noticeable theme in science books is that they should take religious titles, though these had better not be too explicit. The God Particle bombed. Does God Play Dice and God and the New Physics did better; Dawkins is unable to resist titles that give a religious reverberation to his pronouncements: River out of Eden, Immortal Coils’. 39

This statement isn’t quite as true as it was nine years ago. There have been popular science books published on chemistry. There is one currently on the shelf of the local bookshop here in my hometown on the science of strong materials. Nevertheless, there is a crisis in chemistry in Britain with falling numbers of students enrolling for degrees, threatening the closure of chemistry departments at university. There are probably a number of reasons for this, including general changes in the attractiveness of certain professions and the perceived difficulty of the hard sciences. However, chemistry does suffer in that it doesn’t have the cachet of offering cosmic insight that physics, cosmology or biology offer.

Now part of the function of religion is to provide an account of humanity’s place in the universe and an ethical system in which to guide their actions and ground their society. While academic scientific textbooks may talk disinterestedly about scientific fact without discussing the wider, metaphysical dimensions, it is the metaphysical dimensions that occupy popular science, shaping the way science itself has become almost a religious faith. ‘For science to spread as an explanation through society, it must become tanged with, perhaps animated by an ethical theory and an account of our place in the universe. Pure science may know about facts quite free of values, but pop science is a matter of facts and values all tangled together until the make some kind of common sense.’ 40

Atheism, Religion and Atheist Religiosity

So, what is the difference between atheism and religion, and is it possible for atheism to be considered a religion? The distinction between religion and ideology is therefore by no means simple, and the subject of much debate. Commonsense states that it should involve the worship of gods or other supernatural entities, and although this clearly fits much that may be considered religious, scholars have also find it inadequate because of the extremely diverse nature of the gods conceived and worshipped across time in human cultures. Indeed, the concept of the supernatural itself is problematic, and is the product of medieval Western culture and may not adequately describe the worldviews of ancient Western culture and contemporary non-Western religions. The best approach is indeed to see it as a system of symbols approached with reverence or awe and linked to rituals by a community of believers. These symbols provide the function of answering deep, metaphysical questions of the nature of existence and its meaning. They are ‘ultimate concerns’ in the phrase of Paul Tillich, which marshal and organise subordinate beliefs.

Now it has to be admitted that while atheism per se may not do this, and there are atheists who clearly are not religious, there are forms of organised atheist ideology that do act in a manner analogous to conventional religion. The person who regularly attends meetings of their Ethical Church, or Humanist or Brights group, in order to hear more about the scientific explanation for their place in nature, and affirm the existence of value and morality through inspirational readings and song, is doing something deeply religious, even if, as Dewey observed, this stands apart from religion and religions. The same is also true of the Surrealists, whose exploration of irrational states of consciousness, occultism and creation of fictional mythologies links them powerfully with mysticism, even if this is a mysticism of the human subconscious rather than a separate, transcendent Otherworld. The members of these secular groups may vehemently deny that they are religious, like the Surrealists and certain Humanists, but this does not mean that they are not acting in a religious manner. Some atheists groups, such as the religious Humanists, members of the Ethical Church and the Positivists, may indeed consider their ideologies to be religious in a broad, non-theistic sense.

This situation may be complicated further by the adoption of quasi-religious attitudes and terminology by secular activities that confer a numinous awe and superhuman status on their practitioners, such as popular music and sport. Yet however much of a personal cult particular pop stars or sportsmen and women may acquire, this remains mostly on the level of metaphor. The British TV chef, Nigella Lawson, may be described as a ‘domestic goddess’, but this is clearly a metaphor to describe her status as a celebrity exponent of feminine domestic skills, rather than a literal deity of hearth and home like Hera or the Norse goddess Sif.

Sport, and the cult of celebrities may provide an alternative to religion, but the closest secular parallels are those ideologies of ‘ultimate concern’ such as Humanism, Positivism, Surrealism and the Brights movement that see themselves as competing with religion and share certain metaphysical concerns and organisational and ritual features with it. These secular ideologies may develop other, quasi-religious features as part of their campaign against religion, such as rituals modelled on religion, as in the Positivists, or the composition of ideological material after religious models, like the catechisms written by the Baron de Grimm in the 18^th century.

Conclusion: Atheism as a Religion

As a result, while atheism is not a religion, some ideologies can be described as atheism as religion, because certain forms of organised atheism do indeed partake of a strongly religiously character. This is a cause of concern to some atheists. Sam Harris caused a furore earlier this year when he stated during the atheist conference in Washington, D.C., that atheists should not be a self-identified group with a distinct corporate identity, preferring instead that atheism should be seen as a sub-group of rationalism or science. The Canadian SF author, Robert J. Sawyer, also made a similar point in the pages of a Canadian Humanist magazine, criticising contemporary atheism for adopting many of the features of a religion – such as a distinct symbol for their beliefs in the shape of the scarlet letter – and so conforming, despite their denials, to the image of atheism as a religion by people of faith.

Thus, while atheism, as a complete absence of transcendental belief and practice, clearly does not equal religion, there are ideological forms of self-confessed atheism that share certain features of religion, may consider themselves to be religions and may thus rightly be described, albeit paradoxically, as atheist religions. Hence my original point that the nursery school opened by a group of American Humanists, rather than being a remarkable indication of the innately religious nature of atheism, really was part of a long tradition of religious-like organised atheism.

Notes

1. ‘Secular Alternatives to Religion’ in John R. Hinnells, ed., The Penguin Dictionary of Religions (London, Penguin Books 1984), p.290.
2. ‘Secular Alternatives to Religion in Hinnells, Dictionary of Religions, p. 290.
3. Timothy Insoll, ‘Archaeology of Cult and Religion’ in Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, eds., Archaeology: The Key Concepts (London, Routledge 2005), p. 47.
4. John E. Smith, Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Basingstoke, MacMillan 1994), p. 12.
5. ‘Positivism’ in Christopher Cook, ed., Pears Cyclopedia 95^th Edition (London, Pelham Books 1986), p. J40-41.
6. Herbert W. Schneider, ‘Religious Humanism’, in Paul Kurtz, The Humanist Alternative: Some Definitions of Humanism, p. 65, cited in Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 33.
7. James E. Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 24.
8. ‘Religion, philosophy of’, in Jennifer Speake, ed., A Dictionary of Philosophy (London, Pan Books 1979), p. 304.
9. ‘Religion’ in Hinnells, ed., Dictionary of Religions, p. 270.
10. ‘Religion’ in Hinnells, Dictionary of Religions, p. 270.
11. ‘Religion’ in Hinnells, Dictionary of Religions, p. 270.
12. Mary Midgeley, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears (London, Methuen 1985), p. 16.
13. Jim Grant, Sam Gorin and Neil Fleming, The Archaeology Coursebook – Second Edition: An Introduction to Study Skills, Topics and Methods (Abingdon, Routledge 2005), p. 155.
14. Grant, Gorin and Fleming, Archaeology Coursebook, p. 155.
15. Insoll, ‘Archaeology of Cult and Religion’ in Renfrew and Bahn, Archaeology Key Concepts, p. 46.
16. Insoll, ‘Archaeology of Cult and Religion’ in Renfrew and Bahn, Archaeology Key concepts, p. 46.
17. ‘Kami’, in Hinnells, Dictionary of Religions, p. 179.
18. Juliet Piggott, Japanese Mythology (London, Hamlyn 1982), p. 115.
19. ‘Kami’, in Hinnells, Dictionary of Religions, p. 179.
20. Loren McIntyre, illustrated by Louis S. Glanzman, The Incredible Incas and Their Timeless Land (Washington, D.C., National Geographic Society 1984), p. 16.
21. McIntyre and Glanzman, Incredible Incas, p. 43.
22. ‘God, goddess’ in James Mackillop, Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (Oxford, OUP 2000), p. 256.
23. Grant, Gorin and Fleming, Archaeology Coursebook, p. 154..
24. ‘Stoicism’, in Speake, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy, p. 339.
25. Alister E. McGrath, The Science of God, (London, T&T Clark 2004), p. 37; Jonathan Barnes, ‘Introduction, in Jonathan Barnes, ed., Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1987), p. 19.
26. Anthony Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, Clarendon 2005), p. 32.
27. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1990), p. 13.
28. Franklin Rosemont, Andre Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism (London, Pluto Press 1978), pp. 102-3.
29. Rosemont, Andre Breton, p. 75.
30. Rosemont, Andre Breton, p. 45; ‘The Surrealists’ in Andre Nataf, The Occult (Edinburgh, W&R Chambers 1991, p. 222.
31. Rosemont, Andre Breton, p. 6.
32. Rosemont, Andre Breton, p. 5.
33. ‘The Surrealists’ in Nataf, The Occult, p. 222.
34. Bryan Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford, OUP 1982), pp. 41-2.
35. J.M. Yinger, ‘Alternatives to Religion’ in Whitfield Foy, ed., The Religious Quest (London, The Open University 1978), p. 540.
36. Thomas R. McDonough, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Listening for Life in the Cosmos (New York, John Wiley and Sons 1987), pp. 221-2.
37. McDonough, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, p. 228.
38. McDonough, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, p. 223.
39. Andrew Brown, The Darwin Wars: how Stupid Genes Became Selfish Gods (London, Simon & Schuster 1999), p. 196.
40. Brown, Darwin Wars, p. 196.

Atheism as Religion: Part 2

Rich, commenting on my original blogpost discussing the similarities between organised atheism and religion, poses the question

Don’t religions have
Origins stories
Places of Worship
Morality Codes
Afterlife Stories?

Now those are clearly features of religion as it is conventionally understood, and if atheism is considered to be merely the denial of the supernatural, without any attempt to produce supporting arguments and conceptions of the world and morality in opposition to theistic views, atheism clearly is very different from religion. In practice the situation is rather different. Atheism is not simply a mere fideistic denial, but is based on certain arguments and a distinct worldview. In that sense, atheism can be seen as a system of cultural symbols, as in Geertz’s definition of religion, and as a quasi-religion after John E. Smith, as organised atheism attempts to fulfill many of the same ideological and societal functions of religion. Incidentally, when Smith coined the term ‘quasi-religion’ he did not mean it any kind of disparaging sense. He was attempting to steer a middle course between those religious scholars who saw these secular ideologies as religions, and the proponents of these secular ideologies who strongly objected to such an idea. They were quasi-religions because they fulfilled some of the functions of religion, while departing from it in their this-worldly, anti-transcendentalist nature.

My own feeling is that there is no clear distinction between what a religion and a secular ideology, and that avowedly secular philosophies can take on forms or functions profoundly similar to those of theistic religions. The ancient Greek philosophies can be seen as a case in point. Platonism was explicitly theistic, and late Roman Neoplatonism has been described as ‘the mind’s road to God’. Similarly, Aristotelianism was also theistic, and while denying individual life after death, except in the sense of the active intellect which was general to all humans, and did not die with the body, it was concerned with establishing proper ethical conduct, like Platonism. The Stoics too were pantheist materialists. God existed, there was a little sense of a personal deity. Humans were material entities, and there was no life after death except in the sense of the ‘eternal return’ in which matter, after endless ages, would return to it and repeat its original patterns, so that people would be reconstituted and live out their lives, exactly as they had done billions of ages before. And this would be repeated throughout eternity. They also developed a consistent theory of ethics in which the goal was to limit one’s desires to what was achievable and accept pain and distress in order to minimise suffering. Going further, the Epicureans denied the omniscience and creative activity of the Olympian gods in the universe. They had a profoundly Naturalistic view of the creation and functioning of the universe. They also denied the existence of life after death. Nevertheless, they did not deny that the gods existed, had particular conceptions of the goal of life and ethics, and established a series of centres for pastoral care and the development and promotion of their views that has been compared with that of the later Christian church.

Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Epicureanism were all secular philosophies, yet they also showed some connections to theism, such as a belief in a deity, even if these deities were rendered ineffective. They also possessed distinct moral views, established institutions for the moral care of their adherents’ psyches, like religious institutions, and had a distinct view of the origins and fate of the cosmos, although these differed profoundly from that of traditional Graeco-Roman religion. Plato in the Timaeus suggested that the world was created from pre-existing matter by a Demiurge, a deity, observing the pre-existent, eternal Ideas and fashioning copies of them from matter. Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism both considered that the world was eternal, though for Neoplatonism it still had a origin in divine creation through emanation from the One. The Stoics believed that the universe had originally been a single mass, and then had separated out into the distinct objects of the contemporary cosmos. The Epicureans also had a distinct theory of the origins of the cosmos in that they saw it as originating in the chance patterns created through the fall of eternal atoms in the cosmic void. In this sense, the ancient philosophies have a profoundly religious, or quasi-religious character, and can be considered as philosophical religions, rather than what we would consider as pure philosophies.

However, they also point out the way in which some secular, atheistic philosophies can also take on some of the characteristics of religion, including those outlined above as supposedly indicative of religion. Let’s go through them.

Origin Stories

Now most religions do indeed have origin stories. And contemporary atheism also has its secular origins narrative. For the contemporary West, this is a rigidly atheist Neo-Darwinism, strictly understood as removing God from any kind of creative activity. While evolution itself may not be atheistic, evolutionary has formed the basis for much atheistic polemic. A particularly strong example of this is the atheist views propounded by Richard Dawkins and Daniel C. Dennett. Dawkins has always been very clear about the atheistic implications of evolution, telling Peter Medawar that ‘Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’. Daniel C. Dennett in his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea described Neo-Darwinism as a ‘universal acid’ which would corrode religion. Despite the conception of evolution as a secular, non-religious theory, so much metaphysical ideas have been invested in it that the British philosopher, Mary Midgeley, considered it to have become something of a religion itself for some, and so wrote an entire book, Evolution as a Religion, examining atheist evolutionism as a form of religion.

Midgeley, who is herself an opponent of Creationism and Intelligent Design, considered the essential nature of religion to be

‘the sense of having one’s place within a whole greater than oneself, one whose larger aims so enclose one’s own and give them point that sacrifice for it may be entirely proper. This sense need not involve any extra factual beliefs at all. Marxism does not, nor does Taoism. Both call centrally for changes in attitude to the facts one already accepts – changes in connection, in emphasis, in attention, in selection, in the meaning and importance atacched to particulars -in short, a changed world-picture’. 1

Midgeley explicitly considered Marxism and evolutionism to be ‘the two great secular faiths of our day’, and noted that within there were ‘many elements which we think of as characteristically religious. We begin, for instance, to find priesthoods, prophecies, devotion, bigotry, exaltation, heresy-hunting and sectarianism, ritual, sacrifice, fanaticism, notions of sin, absolution and salvation, and the confident promise of a heaven in the future.’ 2

For Midgeley, Marxism and evolutionism, the two classic secular religions, have ‘like the great religions and unlike more casual local faiths, large-scale, ambitious systems of thought, designed to articulate, defend and justify their ideas – in short, ideologies’. 3 As such, it was extremely difficult to establish a simple way of establishing their non-religious character. Their lack of belief in God was no answer.

‘It is certainly not enough to say that they do not involve belief in God. Taoism does not do this either, nor does Buddhism in its original form. And the question whether the Buddha is now ‘a god’ is not a simple one at all. He is, after all, to be sought and found within us. Moreover, where there are ‘gods’ their nature varies enormously. They certainly need not be creators. The world is often held to be timeless, or to have some other origin. Neither, on the other hand, does religion necessarily involve the immortality of the soul. Judaism in its early form does not seem to have involved human survival after death. Even for Buddhism, the soul will eventually be dispersed into its elements. And so on.’ 4

Thus Midgeley considers that there is no dividing line between a secular ideology and a religion, and Marxism and evolutionism deserve to be considered as religions because ‘they are, not accidentally but by their very nature, dominant creeds, explicit faiths by which they live and to which they try to convert others. They tend to alter the world.’ 5 Her book, Evolution as a Religion, is an attempt to demonstrate how a scientific theory whose factuality she accepts – evolution – has become in effect a religion. Thus it is entirely justifiable to view evolution as in some forms both a secular religion in itself, and the origins narrative of contemporary atheism. This perception is strengthened by the location of the headquarters of the National Centre for Science Education, the leading campaign group against Creationism and Intelligent Design, in the same building, and sharing much the same membership, as the Committee for Secular Humanism. At a personal level you can see it also in the reaction of leading atheist evolutionists like Richard Dawkins to the challenge of Intelligent Design. Unlike the reviews of many other atheist evolutionists, Dawkins’ review of Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution was personally vitriolic, perhaps because it represented a challenge to his own, deeply held personal beliefs.

Morality Codes

As atheists themselves have repeatedly pointed out, atheism does not mean a lack or rejection of morality, and atheists have been actively trying to produce rational, secular justifications for morality and moral codes. Nietzsche in the 19th century explored the implications of atheism for morality and human behaviour, and come up with his own, idiosyncratic moral conceptions. Instead of Christian slave morality, he posited egoism. In contrast to Judaeo-Christianity’s complete rejection of the negative parts of the human character, he recommended instead that they should be carefully cultivated, as if in a garden, as a way of promoting self-improvement. For example, an actor’s envy of another actor could, if properly cultivated by the aspiring superman, lead to the envious actor becoming a better actor. This radical negation of traditional Judaeo-Christian views of morality has failed to be accepted. Nevertheless, other atheists have continued the project of creating a godless morality.

Sartrean Existentialism, for example, which Sartre saw as a kind of Humanism, sees the goal of life as living authentically, rejecting the bad faith of living in false beliefs and ideologies, and failing to live up to the curse of radical freedom given to humans in the world. Corliss Lamont, in his Humanism as Philosophy, attempted to promote a Humanist morality based on ‘ethical self-restraint’. He viewed actions as neither good nor bad in themselves, but only through their effects, though he did not reject the importance of motives either as he wished to preserve the distinction between murder and manslaughter. 6 Similarly, contemporary Humanists have a set of values to which they believe humans owe unconditional allegiance, such as freedom, autonomy, creativity, reason and science, aesthetic appreciation and democracy. 7 None of these are unique to Humanism, or even to atheism, but they receive particular emphasis in Secular Humanism, and are contrasted with the ignorance, tyranny and superstition that supernatural religion is supposed to bring. Thus organised atheism has its particular conceptions of morality and moral codes.

Places of Worship

This would seem to be the greatest difference between atheism and religions. Religions do indeed commonly have places of worship – temples, synagogues, mosques and churches. Atheism considers that there is nothing to be worshipped, and so has none. Nevertheless, there are certain similarities even here.

Firstly, atheism does fulfill some of the functions of religious worship in that it has meeting halls and buildings in which events are held intended to connect the adherents of that particular brand of atheism with a deeper reality. The adherents of the Ethical Church, for example, had their meetings in Conway Hall in Red Lion Square in London, in which they sang inspiring songs, heard inspiring prose and listened to what was effectively a sermon on an ethical or scientific issues. 8 Auguste Comte’s Postive Church was founded very much as a church, with rituals and a kind of liturgy, and Corliss Lamont wrote Humanist services. 9 In the early 20th century, Marxist intellectuals such as Maksim Gorky and Anatoly Lunacharsky founded ‘god-building’ or bogostroitel’stvo, whose doctrines were expounded between 1908 and 1911 in Lunacharsky’s two-volume work Religiia i Sotzialism (Religion and Socialism). Marxism was conceived as worship of a god who was human. Therefore, in order for civilisation to be spiritually renewed, cult sites were to be established dedicated to an atheistic genius of socialism to which people would make pilgrimages. These sites would reinforce people’s faiths in the promise of a better future through socialism through reminding them of the immortal achievements of atheist, socialist intellectuals. 10 Although Lenin was sharply opposed to the movement, this did not prevent Stalin from establishing Lenin as a kind of founding Communist prophet, complete with a mausoleum that acted as a shrine, a pattern that was followed in China with the establishment of a dedicated tomb to their great revolutionary, Chairman Mao.

Away from such official Marxist cults, ordinary people can experience in purely secular contexts the overpowering feelings religious people may experience during pilgrimages when they journey to a place associated with a secular intellectual. A few years ago a friend of mine with very strong Secularist beliefs told me of the overpowering emotion he felt visiting Darwin’s house, which had been converted into a museum. Finding himself in Darwin’s house, amongst his personal possessions and writings, the man had been overcome with emotion to the point where he found himself crying. Now it seems to me – and I don’t mean this as any kind of disparagement to either the man or his beliefs – he had experienced something akin to feeling of mysterium tremendum fascinans et augustem – the feeling of ‘awefulness’ Rudolf Otto put at the heart of religious experience. He felt personally connected to a higher realm through an experience of the personal possession – and it would be entirely justifiable here to refer to them as relics in the religious sense – of Darwin, whose idea of Natural Selection was personally important, perhaps particularly so to this man due to his own deeply felt atheism.

Thus atheism shares with religions sites which may have particular importance as places where individuals assemble to reinforce the moral teachings of their ideology, and experience a higher reality, which may be revealed by the discovery of a particularly respected scientist or intellectual.

Incidentally, not all religions have dedicated places of worship. In Genesis, for example, Abraham and the other patriarchs don’t have dedicated shrines, but build cairns upon which they make appropriate sacrifices when they feel the presence of God in a particular location. Archaeologist studying pre-Roman Britain have noted the lack of dedicated religious sites, and consider this to be due to a prevailing religious ideology at the time which did not separate off religion from other cultural activities. There were no special religious sites, as all of life was imbued with religious significance and ritual. In Christianity, certain Christian denominations may radically reject ritual and ceremony as pagan, and while having dedicated buildings to their religious use are very careful to avoid any term for them which denotes pagan religion. The Quakers, for example, rejected ceremonies as pagan corruptions of the original Christianity, preferring the direct experience of the ‘inner light’ of the Holy Spirit. Rather than being called churches, their places of assembly are called simply ‘meeting houses’. Thus their Christian experience of God is, in some respects, less like that of the ritualistic forms of assembly devised by certain forms of organised atheism, like the Ethical Churches and Positivists.

Afterlife Stories

This is another subject that at first sight does indeed distinguish atheism from theism. Atheism, with its basis in materialism and Naturalism, denies a belief in life after death, while religion commonly supports the continuation of the personality in some form. However, even here the difference between atheism and religion may be far less, or even entirely absent, than is apparent. The philosopher J.D. McTaggart indeed considered that reality consisted of a community of independent spirits, and was eager to establish a metaphysics that would justify a ‘religious attitude’, defined as ‘a conviction of harmony between ourselves and the universe at large’. He was, however, an atheist who did not believe in God and was critical of Christianity as a theology and an ethical system in his Some Dogmas of Religion. 11 In the 1930s the Cambridge philosopher C.D. Broad was also an atheist who advocated a kind of ‘emergent materialism’, yet believed very much in the survival of the personality after death and took seriously psychical research in his book Mind and its Place in Nature. 12

There are also atheist ideologies which look forward to the technological achievement of human survival after death, their resurrection and immortality. These take the form of Western Transhumanism, and Russian Cosmism. Cosmism is an intellectual movement that ‘is based on a holistic and anthropocentric view of the universe which presupposed a teleologically determined – and thus meaningful – evolution; its adherents strive to redefine the role of humankind in a universe that lacks a divine plan for salvation, thus acknowledging the threat of self-destruction. As rational beings who are evolving out of the living matter (zhivoe veshcestvo) of the earth, human beings appear destined to become a decisive factor in cosmic evolution – a collective self-consciousness, active agent, and potential benefactor.’ 13 This evolution is considered to have as its gaol the reorganisation of humanity into a single organism with a ‘higher planetarian consciousness’, which will change and perfect the universe, overcome disease and death and eventually create an immortal humanity. 14 This belief was particularly strong in the 1920s, when scientists and intellectuals like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Andrei Platonov and the historian Nikolai Rozhkov. Platonov stated that ‘thought’ would ‘easily and quickly destroy death by its systematic work, science’, while Rozhkov also preached the resurrection of the dead using science and technology. 15

In the contemporary West, Transhumanists such as Hans Moravec have looked forward to a post-human future in which humans download their personalities into immortal machines since the publication of Moravec’s book, Mind Children. Some Transhumanists do indeed recognise the similarity between their project and traditional theism. One of the leaders of the movement is married to a Methodist minister, and has stated that he and his religious wife have the same gaols, only they’re going about it in different ways. Other Transhumanists are vehemently anti-religious, such as Marshall Brain.

Thus, atheists may also have a belief in the afterlife, or look forward to the accomplishment of traditionally religious goals such as the resurrection of the dead or preservation of the human personality after death through high technology. Indeed, the philosopher John Searle described the Functionalist view of mind espoused by Daniel C. Dennett, in which minds could in theory be replicated in computers, as the last gasp of Cartesian dualism.

Just as atheism may include a belief in life after death, it is also true that some religions don’t have any conception of such a post-mortem existence, or give it little emphasis. In ancient Mesopotamia, for example, while there was indeed a life after death, this was a shadowy existence, like the shades in Sheol in the Old Testament. Indeed, ancient Israel looked for fulfilment in this life, rather than a reward in the hereafter. Corliss Lamont himself recognises this aspect of ancient Jewish religion in his approval of the supposedly this-worldly advocacy of worldly enjoyment in The Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes in the Bible. 16 In some tribal religions, while there may be a belief that the world is profuse with spirits in every object and organism, there may be no concept of an afterlife at all. Some pagan Finno-Ugrian peoples indeed believe that the soul was indissoluble linked with the body to the point where it also decayed after death.

‘The soul is, however, indissolubly linked to the body with which it forms an indivisible whole. Having no independent existence it dies with the body. That is why the Ingrians went to weep over the grave of the deceased and placed offerings there during a period roughly equivalent to the time of the body’s decomposition. Afterwards the grave was no longer visited for, they said, ‘there is no longer anything left of the soul’.’ 17 Thus even here there is no sharp distinction between religion and atheism. Certain atheist ideologies and philosophies looking forward to human survival after death and humans’ eventual resurrection, either in a psychic, disembodied state or through high technology and computer science. Some religions, on the other hand, may consider the afterlife to be merely a shadowy existence, while others have no conception of an afterlife.

No Clear Distinction between Atheism and Religion

Thus, regarding the list of features considered definitive of religion suggested by Rich

Origins Stories

Places of worship

Moral Codes

After-life stories

two, origins stories and moral codes, are shared by atheism in atheistic views of Neo-Darwinian evolution and the moral codes of personal autonomy, democracy, dignity and reason adopted by Humanism. Attitudes to the afterlife in religion and some forms of atheism may overlap, with some religions denying personal continuity after death, while some atheist ideologies look forward to post mortem human survival, either as a traditionally conceived spirit, or preserved as a computer programme. There is indeed a difference between organised atheism and traditional religion regarding places of worship. Atheism does not worship anything, unlike religion. However, it does share with people of faith buildings dedicated to the assembly of its adherents for ritual or ceremonial purposes, in which the worldview is expounded and a morality consistent with that worldview preached, and individuals encounter a deeper reality and its true nature. In the case of atheism, this may consistent of an awe felt at scientific discovery and the cosmos itself. Carl Sagan had a series of lectures published in which he expounded his anti-religious and scientific beliefs entitled, The Varieties of Scientific Experience. He deliberately chose the title to contrast with William James’ exploring of religious experience, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Nevertheless, both Sagan and Richard Dawkins strongly espouse a sense of cosmic wonder, which Dawkins has described in The God Delusion as mystical, even if he strongly rejects any similarity between this and religion.

Thus neither of those features in the list serves to distinguish atheism from religion. Rather than atheism and religion being completely separate, they may form part of a continuum of belief and even overlap in particular spheres of concern. Thus organised atheism does indeed participate in many of the activities and concerns of conventional religion, even if it strongly attacks it.

 

1. Mary Midgeley, Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears (London, Methuen 1985), p. 14.

2. Midgeley, Evolution as Religion, p. 15.

3. Midgeley, Evolution as Religion, p. 15.

4. Midgeley, Evolution as Religion, p. 15-16.

5. Midgeley, Evolution as Religion, p. 16.

6. John E. Smith, Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Basingstoke, MacMillan 1994), p. 25.

7. Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 42.

8. ‘Ethical Church’ in Christopher Cook, ed., Pears Cyclopedia 95th Edition (London, Pelham Books 1986), p. J18.

9. ‘Positivism’ in Cook, ed., Pears Cyclopedia 95th Edition (London, Pelham Books 1986), p. J40-1; Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 26.

10. Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (London, FontanaPress 1996), pp. 54-5.

11. John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books 1957), pp. 75-6.

12. Passmore, Hundred Years of Philosophy, p. 349.

13. Michael Hagemeister, ‘Russian Cosmism in the 1920s and Today’ in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, Cornell University Press 1997), pp. 185-6.

14. Hagemeister, ‘Russian Cosmism’ in Rosenthal, ed., The Occult, p. 186.

15. Hagemeister, ‘Russian Cosmism’ in Rosenthal, ed., The Occult, p. 188.

16. Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 39.

17. F. Guirand, ‘Finno-Ugric Mythology’ in F. Guirand, ed., Richard Aldington and Delano Ames, trans., New LaRousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (London, Hamlyn 1959), p. 307.

Atheism as Religion

There was considerable comment on the Christian blogs last week about the opening of a Humanist pre-school in America. Contrary to the vehement denials that atheism is a religion, this appeared to demonstrate the very opposite: that atheism is a religion, or at the very least it tries to do some of the things conventional religion does.

This should actually come as no surprise. For centuries those hostile to religion, and particularly Christianity, have founded organisations and published materials strongly following religious models. In the 18th century the vehemently antichristian Baron de Grimm and J.F. de Saint-Lambert both published secularist catechism. Like Dawkins today, Grimm considered it an outrage against commonsense to teach small children the elements of Christianity. It was because of this that dangerous and absurd ideas had such a powerful influence on people’s minds and characters, and whole nations had been corrupted by its folly. His solution to the problem was to recommend that children be taught two catechisms. The first was to be a catechism of humanity, in which children would be instructed in their rights and duties as members of the human race. This was to be succeeded by a second catechism, which would teach them their rights and duties as members of society and the laws and government of their particular nation. Grimm attempted such a catechism himself in his Essai d’un catechisme pour les enfants of 1755. 1 This was succeeded by Saint-Lambert’s Catechisme universel for children of 12-13, which set out in question and answer format the author’s conception of humanity and morality. The morality expounded in the catechism was very much hedonistic. Humanity should pursue pleasure and avoid pain in order to achieve happiness.This happiness could only be attained through reason and correct self-love, which meant seeking to know others and not separating their happiness from one’s own. 2 When Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology, invented his own atheistic philosophy of Positivism in the 19th century, he specifically conceived it as a ‘religion of humanity’. He thus assumed leadership of his new religion as its priest, writing a Positive Catechism, drawing up a list of notable historical characters who were to act like saints within Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and even invented rituals for his new church. 3 Similarly, the Ethical Church founded by Moncure Conway, who preached at the Unitarian Chapel in Finsbury in London from 1864 to 1897 used the form of a religious service while following a strongly atheist philosophical stance. There were no prayers, and instead of hymns, edifying compositions were sung, while readings consisted of suitable poems and other pieces by appropriate writers. Instead of a sermon, the service concluded with a talk on an ethical or scientific subject. 4

When Secular Humanism first emerged in the early 20th century, it too adopted some of the trappings of conventional religion. The Humanist ideologue, Corliss Lamont, in his 1949 Humanism as a Philosophy advocated that Humanist artists and writers should construct rituals and ceremonies that would ‘appeal to the emotions as well as the minds of people, capturing their imagination and giving an outlet to their delight in pomp and pageantry’. 5 One way this was to be achieved was through the appropriation and remodelling of existing religious festivals. Christmas was to become a secular celebration of the joy of existence, the feeling of human brotherhood and the ideal of democratic sharing. Easter was to be ‘humanistically utilised’ to celebrate the renewal of the vital forces of nature and humanity.’ 6 He also wished to create Humanist wedding and funeral services from which all supernatural elements had been removed. As part of this project, he himself wrote A Humanist Funeral Service. 7 Despite the vehement insistence by Humanists such as Paul Kurtz that Secular Humanism is a form of atheism or agnosticism, sociologically Humanism has many elements in common with theistic religions. 8 Thus, despite the protests of Kurtz and others that Humanism is no such thing, it can indeed be considered a form of religion.

The diverse nature of religion, and religious experience itself, means that it is not possible to define it solely terms of a belief in the supernatural, which Humanists like Kurtz consider to be the distinguishing feature of religion as against their philosophy. For anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, religion is a cultural system consisting of

’1. a system of symbols which acts to

2. establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in people by

3. formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and

4. clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that

5. the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.’ 9

Thus, Geertz suggested that ‘the religious perspective … is … not the theory that beyond the visible world there lies an invisible one (though most religious men have indeed held, with differing degrees of sophistication, to some such theory); not the doctrine that a divine presence broods over the world (though, in an extraordinary variety of forms, from animism to monotheism, that too has been a rather popular idea); not even the more difficult opinion that there are things in heaven and earth undreamt of in our philosophies. Rather, it is the conviction that the values one holds are grounded in the inherent structure of reality, that between the way one ought to live and the way things really are there is an unbreakable connection. What sacred symbols do for those to whom they are sacred is to formulate an image of the world’s construction and a programme for human conduct that are mere reflections of one another.’ 10 Now contemporary organised atheism clearly has a disinct worldview, which it regards as uniquely real, and which supplies the rationale for action and conduct. Its conception of the world as purely Naturalistic clearly leads to a vehement denial of the value of metaphysics, the privileging of science as the only legitimate form of enquiry, and varying degrees of hostility towards religion. In the case of Humanism, this was expressed by the establishment by the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism in the 1980s of two subcommittees, one dedicated to attacking the truth of the Bible, the other to disproving faith healing, under the control of a Committee for the Scientific Exploration of Religion, along with campaigns against public or state celebration of religious festivals and publications critical of religion.

Indeed, neither respect for science nor a vehement opposition to supernatural religion necessarily mean that organised atheism or Humanism is not a religion itself. The American sociologist, J.M. Yinger, in his examination of secular alternatives to religion noted that for some rationalist, secularist and humanist groups the faith in science was actually part of a gradual development from liberal and radical forms of traditional theistic religion. In his view, July Huxley’s Religion Without Revelation and John Dewey’s A Common Faith were extensions, not departures, from ‘left-wing’ Christianity. 11 Something of this process can be seen in the 18th century, when the country doctor and Unitarian minister, Joseph Priestley, combined a thoroughly materialist view of humanity with a rationalistic Christianity in which he fully supported the historicity of the miracles reported in the Bible. Indeed, he considered that Christianity would not have spread if it were not true and the miracles had not proved it to be so beyond dispute. 12 The British biologist, Sir Alister Hardy, similarly wished to found an experimental faith that combined a scientific methodology with elements of Christian theology. 13 Noting St. John’s statement that ‘God is love’, Hardy observed that ‘brotherly love – the agape of the New Testament – is certainly at the heart of Christianity. Comradeship in striving for a common purpose may cvonvert a secular movement into a fervour that is almost religious. I am far from being a Communist, yet I must admit that those so-called ‘Anti-God’ posters that came out of Russia in the 1930s struck me as being the most passionately religious pictures that have appeared in the present century.’ 14 Arthur Koestler also described the profoundly religious meaning Communism held for him, viewing it very much in terms of a religious conversion.

‘By the time I had finished with Feuerbach and State and Revolution, something had clicked in my brain which shook me like a mental explosion. To say that one had ‘seen the light’ is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows (regardless of what faith he has been converted to). The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubt and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past – a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don’t know.’ 15

Other religious scholars have also noted the profound similarity of secular alternatives to religion. Mindful of the differences between traditional transcendental religions and the modern, secular alternatives, and the strong opposition by Secularists to what they see as the ‘terminological aggression’ that categorises their movements as ‘religious’, these scholars instead view them as quasi-religions. The Christian philosopher and theologian John E. Smith considers that amongst the reasons for classifying them as such is ‘the strong sense present among the followers of these secular movements that they are meant to provide a source of significance and purpose in human life and a general pattern for behaviour as a whole.’ 16 Smith bases his conception of religion on the definition of religion as ‘ultimate concern’ developed by the Christian theologian, Paul Tillich. Tillich viewed religion as ‘the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life. Therefore this concern is unconditionally serious and shows a willgness to sacrifice any finite concern which is in conflict with it.’ 17 Clearly, to those atheists and secularists who join anti-religious organisations to attack religion and develop a secular, atheist morality and way of life, atheism in indeed an ‘ultimate concern’ to which all other finite concerns have been sacrificed.

In Smith’s analysis, the defining feature of recognised, transcendental religions is that of a diagnosis of what is wrong with the human condition, leading to a quest for the solution and finally to a deliverer in the form of that religion’s particular doctrine of salvation, redemption or enlightement:

‘Though differing in crucial respects from each other, they exhibit a common pattern that makes it possible to compare tehm with each other. That pattern, briefly stated, is threefold, starting with a diagnosis of the human predicament based on the nature of the religious ultimate aimed at locating what is wrong with our natural existence and what separates us from an ideal fulfillment in God, or Nirvana or the One. The apprehension of this separated or ‘fallen’ state of humanity leads naturally to a quest for the reality which has the power to overcome the flaw in our being disclosed in the diagnosis. The quest is for a deliverer which overcomes the flaw and restores the wholeness of our being. The deliverer is whatever form it may take – the Torah of Jahweh, the Enlightenment of the Buddha, the atoning work of Christ, the insight concerning Brahman and Atman in the Vedanta – is always the central focus of religious devotion because of its power to bring release, salvation or deliverance from the flaw in human existence revealed in the diagnosis.’ 18

There are, of course, important differences between quasi-religions like Humanism and the established world religions. Firstly, Humanism does not recognise a transcendent, supernatural reality and so confines itself to this-worldly endeavours. 19 It also strongly rejects the religious idea of a single, degrading flaw in nature and humanity, such as the doctrine of the Fall in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. H.J. Blackham, in his article ‘A Definition of Humanism’ states that in Humanism there is no difference between what humanity is and what it should be. According to Blackham, there is ‘no entelechy, no built-in pattern of perfection. Man is his own rule and his own end.’ 20 However, Humanists clearly do have a conception of an ideal human condition, in which people are autonomous, free, creative, applying science and reason to human problems, enjoying the beauties of nature and culture, free of superstition and religion, supporting democracy, peace, and opposing tyranny. Against this Humanism condemns ignorance, prejudice, supersitition, injustice, violence, tyranny and supernatural religion. 21Humanism, as a quasi-religion, also shares with traditional religion the function of providing a source of significance and purpose in human life, and providing a general model of behaviour. 22 Moreover, despite their vehement opposition to being labelled a religion, Humanists do recognise the continuity between traditional religion and their philosophy. Corliss Lamont stated of traditional religion that ‘at its best it has given to [people] the opportunity of losing themselves in something greater than any individual and of finding themselves thereby in consecration to an ideal. This historic function of religion any present philosophy worthy of the name must fulfill.’ 23 In the view of scholars such as Smith, this admission justifies the designation of Humanism, even when considering itself a philosophy, as a quasi-religion. 24

Of course, Secular Humanism is only one form of atheism. One can also cover as forms of atheism Nihilism, atheist Existentialism, Marxism and Randian Objectivism. Nevertheless, the criticisms of Secular Humanism and religious fervour that informed Marxist anti-religion can be applied to many forms of contemporary organised atheism. Like religion, it acts as a cultural system of symbols providing its adherents with a distinct conception of the fundamental reality of the world, an ‘ultimate concern’ which grounds subsequent conceptions of ethics and moral behaviour. It shares with religion a conception of what constitutes an ideal of human existence, and a diagnosis of what prevents the fulfillment of this ideal. As part of its programme to supersede religion, it has a history of appropriating and remodelling religious forms, such as composing appropriate rituals and catechisms intended to support and inculcate its worldview and a common sense of fellowship and purpose amongst its members. Thus the opening of the atheist or Humanist pre-school last week really wasn’t anything unusual, but part of a long tradition in which organised atheism functioned as a form of religion.

In fact there is also one other important difference between quasi-religions, such as organised atheism, and the conventional religions. Although conventional religion has all too often promoted tyranny and ignorance against knowledge, democracy and human dignity, in Christianity at least it also possessed what Paul Tillich called ‘the Protestant principle’. If religions have sanctioned oppression, they have also condemned and attacked it. Indeed, the great Lutheran theologian Reinhold Neibuhr also attacked the ‘ideological taint’ which masked human corruption and self-interest in religion, politics and society throughout history. Yet traditionally quasi-religions have found self-criticism very difficult, especially those with the aim of attacking religion. The belief of these anti-religions that their self-perceived basis in science and reason is no guarantee against corruption, hypocrisy and oppression. 25 The persistent failure of organised atheism to address the evil committed in its name can be seen very clearly in the repeated denial of atheist ideologues like Richard Dawkins that such oppression has ever been done by atheists in the name of atheism. While members of the established religions are all too aware of the dangers of religious intolerance, the failure of organised atheism to recognise the oppression and intolerance committed in its name marks it off very distinctly from mainstream religion in this respect.

Notes

1. Paul Hazard, trans. J. Lewis May, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, Pelican Books 1954), pp. 185-6.

2. Hazard, European Thought, p. 186.

3. ‘Positivism’ in Christopher Cook, ed., Pears Cyclopedia 95th Edition (London, Pelham Books 1986), pp. J40-41.

4. ‘Ethical Church’, in Cook, ed., Pears Cyclopedia, p. J18.

5. Corliss Lamont, Humanism as Philosophy (1949), p. 306, cited in John E. Smith, Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Basingstoke, MacMillan 1994), p. 26.

6. John E. Smith, Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Basingstoke, MacMillan 1994), p. 26.

7. John E. Smith, Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Basingstoke, MacMillan 1994), p. 26.

8. John E. Smith, Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Basingstoke, MacMillan 1994), p. 39.

9. Clinton Bennett, In Search of the Sacred: Anthropology and the Study of Religions (London, Cassell 1996), p. 102.

10. Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago, The University Press, 1968), p. 97, cited in Bennett, In Search of the Sacred, pp. 102-3.

11. J.M. Yinger, ‘Secular Alternatives to Religion’ in Whitfield Foy, ed., The Religious Quest (London, Routledge 1978), p. 546.

12. Basil Wiley, The Eighteenth Century Background (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books 1940), p. 184.

13. See the chapters ‘Towards a New Natural Theology’ and ‘An Experimental Faith’ in his book The Biology of God: A Scientist’s Study of Man the Religious Animal (London, Jonathan Cape, 1975), pp. 196-233.

14. Hardy, The Biology of God, p. 175.

15. Arthur Koestler, The God that Failed (London, 1950), p. 23, cited in Foy, The Religious Quest, p. 548.

16. Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 13.

17. Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 2.

18. Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 3.

19. Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 7.

20. H.J. Blackham, ‘A Definition of Humanism’, in Paul Kurtz, ed., The Humanist Alternative: Some Definitions of Humanism, cited in Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 29.

21. Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 42.

22. Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 13.

23. Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 13.

24. Smith, Quasi-Religions, p. 13.

25. Smith, Quasi-Religions, pp. 13-14.

The Natural History Of Religion

Amongst the various atheist texts attacking religion published recently, several have tried to undermine religion by attempting to provide a scientific, materialist account for its origin. Thus we have Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust and Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, along with similar works by Pascal Boyer amongst others. The other week in the online comments section of the British liberal newspaper, the Guardian, Sue Blackmore, a psychology lecturer at the University of the West of England, was declaring that once it was realised how religion had evolved, people would be able to break free of it. The assumption behind these works is that religion has somehow evolved to satisfy psychological and sociological needs within humans through entirely materialistic processes, without any type of intervention or contact with any gods or other transcendent or supernatural beings. The assumption here is that once people realise that religion and god is merely the product of such impersonal, materialistic evolutionary, sociological and psychological forces, they’ll be able to see that it’s all false and they’ll become atheist rationalists, like the books’ authors.

Similar atheistic, rationalist attacks on the transcendent basis of religion have been made for centuries, since before ancient Rome so there’s nothing particularly new about these arguments. All of them are open to criticism on historical, anthropological and philosophical grounds. The evolutionary accounts of the origin of religion are actually particularly vulnerable. Evolutionary psychology is by no means firmly established, and many psychologists and philosophers are extremely sceptical about attempts to trace the origin of consciousness from the minds of contemporary humans. Indeed, there are aspects of the human psychology, such as aesthetics, which actually resist reduction to evolutionary origins. A transcendent realm of beauty and value, which for theists will include God, does indeed exist. And even if religion can be shown to have evolved, this may merely be the actualisation of the human awareness of the Almighty, rather than a construction of a mental idol. Finally, evolutionary approaches to the origin of religion also present problems for the atheist. For a trait to have arisen, it must confer some benefit on the organism. Furthermore, until very recently all human societies were theist or religious. Thus rather than being the default position of humanity, atheism is the sociological and psychological anomaly that needs to be explained and which, if the conventional logic of evolution is followed, confers no benefit to the organism.

Atheist Explanations of Religion in Euhemerus and Philo of Byblos

One of the earliest rationalist attempts to explain the origins of religion was that of Euhemerus, writing c. 320 BC, who believed that the Greek myths were merely legendary accounts of the lives of real people. This view strongly influenced the ancient Phoenician writer, Philo of Byblos. In his Cosmogony, Primitive History and History of the Uranides Philo presented the Phoenician gods as a race of mortals, albeit with superhuman powers, who arose from natural forces to discover the great inventions of civilisations. In his Cosmogony, the first principle was a troubled and windy air or dark chaos, which lasted for many centuries. From this troubled and windy air came the first principle of creation, Desire, and Mot. Far from being the god of death and drought of Canaanite religion, according to Philo, ‘some say that this was slime and others a rotting of aquatic composition. From it came all the germs of all created things and it was the origin of everything’. 1 From this slime appeared plants, animals and eventually the humans who became worshipped in their turn as gods. These first people ‘deified the products of the earth, considered them to be gods and worshipped them, ‘for from the earth they drew their substance, they and those who followed them and all those who had been before them; and they made libations and ritual aspersions’’. 2 Philo’s History of the Uranides in particular ‘treats the gods as ordinary mortals who take part in a series of adventures from which result the creation of royalty, the foundation of the first town, the invention of the plough and the cultivation of wheat, the institution of votive sacrifices and of human sacrifices, the construction of temples, the transition from free love to polygamy and finally monogamy.’3 Philo was writing at the end of the 1^st century AD, so 1,700 years before Darwin there was an attempt to provide a rationalist account of the origin of religion and humanity through something like naturalistic evolution.

Hume’s Natural History of Religion

With the rise of modern Scepticism in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the attempt to present a rationalist account of the origin of religion was revived, and was given its most influential treatment in David Hume’s The Natural History of Religion. Attacking the Christian doctrine that humanity had originally known only the one God, before falling into sin and idolatry, Hume created the modern scheme of the evolution of religion whereby humanity had originally been polytheists, rather than monotheists, and had gradually progressed to monotheism. ‘As far as writing or history reaches, mankind, in ancient times, appear universally to have been polytheists. Shall we assert, that, in more ancient times, before the knowledge of letters, or the discovery of any art or science, men entertained the principles of pure theism? That is, while they were ignorant and barbarous, they discovered truth: But fell into error, as soon as they acquired learning and politeness.’ 4

Humanity, according to Hume, had to come by its conception of God through a process by which primitive ideas of God were first gained from observation of the world around them, before being criticised and rejected as humanity moved on towards a more noble conception of the Lord. ‘It seems certain, that, according to the natural progress of human thought, the ignorant multitude must first entertain some grovelling and familiar notion of superior powers, before they stretch their conception to that perfect Being who bestowed order on the whole frame of nature. We may as reasonably imagine, that men inhabited palaces before huts and cottages, or studied geometry before agriculture; as assert that the Deity appeared to them a pure spirit, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, before he was apprehended to be a powerful, though limited being, with human passions and appetites, limbs and organs. The mind rises gradually, from inferior to superior: By abstracting from what is imperfect, it forms an idea of perfection: And slowly distinguishing the nobler parts of its own frame from the grower, it learns to transfer only the former, much elevated and refine, to its divinity. Nothing could disturb this natural process of thought, but some obvious and invicible argument, which might immediately lead the mind into the principles of theism, and make it overleap, at one bound, the vast interval which is interposed between the human and the divine nature. But though I allow, that the order and frame of the universe, when accurately examined, affords such an argument, yet I can never think, that this consideration could have an influence on mankind, when they formed their first rude notions of religion.’ 5

19th Century Views of the Evolution of Religion

This idea of an evolution in religious thought through which humanity progressed from the deification of natural forces to the idea of a universal God powerfully affected Enlightenment and 19^th century philosophical and anthropological accounts of the origin of religion. The German philosopher Hegel, for example, considered that the original religion was a Naturreligion of magic and fetishism, in which no duality was perceived between nature and spirit. The dialectical process in human culture of thesis-antithesis-synthesis separated ‘spirit’ from the material world, and then made spirit a ‘subject’ – an independent, personal deity, who worship contrasted with the lack of recognition given to the finite, created world. This, however, had been replaced by the ultimate stage in which God and the material world had been reconciled. For Hegel, this was in the conception of a transcendent yet immanent God in Christian dogma. 6

Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, took this rationalist view even further. Totally rejecting the reality of God in favour of religion of humanity, Comte viewed religion as entirely the projection of human characteristics on to a supposedly supernatural being. Not having a suitable rational explanation for the world and its natural phenomena, primitive humanity had attempted to explain them with the imaginative invention of a variety of gods, demons and ghosts. Humanity had first been animists, believing that gods existed within various natural forces, before moving to polytheism and finally to monotheism. This monotheism would be superceded in its turn by science. 7 Herbert Spencer, on the other hand, in his evolutionary account of the origin of religion, considered that primitive humanity was ‘beyond rational conjecture’, and so turned to dreams to provide a rational explanation for the natural world. The self they experienced in their dreams convinced them of the immortality of the soul, and that a similar self inhabited animals, plants and material objects. Later, these ancestral ghosts became worshipped as gods. 8 Edward Burnett Tylor, who became Oxford’s first professor of anthropology in 1896, believed that the origin of belief in the soul, and other spiritual beings, was an attempt to explain life’s crises like death, dreams, illness and disease by primitive humanity. 9 Finally, James George Frazer, drew on Comte to produce his own tripartite scheme of human intellectual progress. For Frazer, the final stage of human intellectual development was science, which naturally superceded religion. However, the origin of religion was not animism, but magic. Magic was originally an attempt to manipulate nature without respect to any deity. However, when primitive humanity realised that it could not control the world through magic, it attempted to explain this lack of success through the belief that this was because there were beings like humans, but far stronger, who really controlled the universe, and which must be propitiated. This resulted in an animistic conception of the universe, which finally yielded to monotheism. Magic was a primitive attempt at science, and religion was opposed to both science and religion. 10

H.G. Wells’ Views on the Evolution of Religion

H.G. Wells also attempted to provide a rationalist account of the origin of religion. He viewed primitive humanity as child-like. ‘Primitive man probably thought very much as a child thinks, that is to say, in a series of imaginative pictures. He conjured up images or images presented themselves to his mind, and he acted in accordance with the emotions they aroused.’ 11 These child-like first people created religion from their dreams and the animist conception of the world seen in children. These inspired stories, which were then established as legends as they were recounted by women. ‘The dreams, imaginations and fears of a child are far more vivid and real than those of a modern adult, and primitive man was always something of a child. He was nearer to the animals also, and he could suppose them to have motives and reactions like his own. He could imagine animal helpers, animal enemies, animal gods. One needs to have been an imaginative child oneself to realise again how important, significant, portentous or friendly strangely shaped rocks, lumps of wood, exceptional trees or the like may have appeared to the men of the Old Stone Age, and how dream and fancy would create stories and legends about such things that would become credible as they were told. Some of these stories would be good enough to remember and tell again. The women would tell them to the children and so establish a tradition. To this day most imaginative children invent long stories in which some favourite doll or animal or some fantastic semi-human being figures as the hero, and primitive man probably did the same-with a much stronger disposition to believe his hero real.’ 12

Wells also seems to have been strongly influenced by Freud’s theory that religion was based upon the respect for the father in the ur-human community, elaborated by their appearance in dreams after their death. ‘Some speculative writers would have us believe that respect and fear of the Old Man and the emotional reaction of the primitive savage to older protective women, exaggerated in dreams and enriched by fanciful mental play, formed a large part in the beginnings of primitive religion and in the conception of gods and goddesses. Associated with this respect for powerful or helpful personalities was a dread and exaltation of such personages after their deaths, due to their reappearance in dreams. It was easy to believe they were not truly dead but only fantastically transferred to a remoteness of greater power.’ 13 Following Frazer, he also found the origin of religion in fetishism, in a confused account of cause and effect used by primitive humans to control their environment: ‘There is no sort of savage so low as not have a kind of science of cause and effect. But primitive man was not very critical in his associations of cause with effect; he very easily connected an effect with something quite alien to its cause. “You do so and so,” he said, “ and so and so happens.” You give a child a certain berry and it dies. You eat the heart of a valiant enemy and you become strong. There we have to bits of cause and effect association, one true, one false. We call the system of cause and effect in the mind of a savage, Fetich; but Fetich is simply savage science. It differs from modern science in that it is totally unsystematic and uncritical and so more frequently wrong.’ 14 The result of this was that, for Wells, magic and fetishism was the origin of religion, and the tribal magicians the origin of later priesthood. ‘The expert in Fetich, the Medicine man, was the first priest. He exhorted, he interpreted dreams, he warned, he performed the complicated hocus pocus that brought luck or averted calamity. Primitive religion was not so much what we now call religion as practice and observance, and the early priest dictated what was indeed an arbitrary primitive practical science.’ 15

Julian Jaynes and the Bicameral Mind

The development of neurology and the scepticism of some of those in the hard sciences for the theory and methodology of psychoanalysis resulted in attempts to provide a neurological, rather than psychological explanation for the rise of religion in the formation of modern human consciousness. In the 1980s the neurologist Julian Jaynes suggested in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, that originally the two hemispheres of the human brain had not been fully integrated. Humanity experienced the promptings of the brain’s left hemisphere, which controlled intuition and creativity, as the voices of gods and ancestors. As the capacity to receive such sudden insights and mystical states became increasingly rare as humans integrated the two halves of their brains, those who were more easily able to achieve these states became venerated as shamans. Shamanism was the origin of later religion, whose priests mechanically followed the techniques and teachings of the ecstatic founders of their religion. Jaynes’ theory has been widely criticised and rejected by most, if not all, neurologists, though Daniel C. Dennett attempted to defend it in the essay ‘Julian Jaynes’s Software Archaeology’.16

Rationalist Critiques of Paganism in the Apocrypha

Now Judaism and Christianity have certainly not been opposed to finding rational explanations for certain types of religious phenomena. The ancient Hebrews believed that idolatry had arisen because humanity, separated from the true knowledge of God by the Fall, had mistaken natural phenomena for gods. The writer of the Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha states this clearly ‘Surely vain are all men by nature, who are ignorant of God, and could not out of the good things that are seen know him that is: neither by considering the works did they acknowledge the workmaster; But deemed either fire, or wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars, or the violent water, or the lights of heaven, to the gods which govern the world.’ 17 Amongst deified natural phenomena, humans also created false gods from images made of their own leaders by subjects eager to please them and demonstrate their loyalty, and the grief-stricken fathers of dead children. ‘For a father afflicted with untimely mourning, when he hath made an image of his child soon taken away, now honoured him as a god, which was then a dead man, and delivered to those that were under him ceremonies and sacrifices. Thus in process of time an ungodly custom grown strong was kept as a law, and graven images were worshipped by the commandment of kings. Whom men could not honour in presence, because they dwelt far off, they took the counterfeit of his visage from far, and made an express image of a king whom they honoured, to the end that by this their forwardness they might flatter him that was absent, as if he were present. Also the singular diligence of the artificer did help to set forward the ignorant to more superstition. For he, peradventure willing to please one in authority, forced all his skill to make the resemblance of the best fashion. And the multitude, allured by the grace of the work, took him now for a god, which a little before was but honoured as a man. And this was an occasion to deceive the world; for men, serving either calamity or tyranny, did ascribe unto stones and stocks the incommunicable name.’ 18

The Wisdom of Solomon’s description of paternal mourning as the origin of one form of idolatry could be an attempt to account for the cult of the dead found in ancient Syria and Palestine. The Ras Shamra texts refer to ‘offerings at the aperture of the divine ancestor’, which may refer to apertures such as the pipes leading into bottomless jars so that libations could be poured into them. The dead were venerated in ancient Syria as bestowers of fertility who communicated supernatural revelations to their descendents. An inscription of King Tabnith of Sidon, dating from the 5^th century BC, possibly refers to them as ‘divine’. Canaanite kings were particularly concerned to have their subjects continue to venerate their spirits after death so that they could enjoy companionship with their gods in the afterlife. In an inscription dated to c. 750 BC, the Aramaean king Panammu requests his descendents to invoke him when sacrificing to Baal, so that ‘his soul may eat and drink with Baal’. It has been suggested that the ban on offering a portion of the sacrifice to the dead in Deuteronomy 26:14 was a prohibition on giving these offerings to the dead.19 If that is the case, then the account of the rise of idolatry from mistaken grief given by the Wisdom of Solomon was a further attack on the custom by providing a rational account of its origin in addition to the ban imposed by Scripture.

Similarly, the statements in the Wisdom of Solomon that the images of kings were also responsible for their promotion into gods may also be a critique of the claims to divinity made by some of the kings in the ancient Near East. The Egyptian pharaoh, for example, was considered to be the son of Ra, the Sun god. 20 These kings partly enforced their authority through the production of images. When the Roman Empire later arose, the emperor was similarly considered a god. There was an official cult of the emperor’s numen, his spiritual principle, served by priests who made sacrifices before his image. It has been suggested that this identification of the ruler with his image is behind the Biblical statement in Genesis that men and women are formed in the image of God. Rulers expressed their authority through their graven image. However, God’s authority is shown in his image, men and women, who in their position, nature and functions are images and deputies of the Almighty on Earth. 21 If this is the case, then Genesis represents a radical attack on the institution of divine kingship and a democratisation of the notion of a divine element in humanity. In ancient Egypt the king, as a god, was kept rigorously separate from ordinary mortals. Yet by being made in the image of God, the Bible sees ordinary men and women as participating in the divine. The statement by the Wisdom of Solomon that the construction of idols had its origin in the worship of kings by their subjects provides a further, rational attack on the institution of pagan divine monarchy, supplementing the implications in Genesis.

This, however, is the difference between the attempt by the writers of the Apocrypha to provide a rationalist critique of pagan religion, and the attempts of the atheists to explain it away. The Wisdom of Solomon does not seek to undermine religion, or deny the existence of God. Rather it attempts to provide a rational explanation for wrongful religion, the creation of idols and false gods by humanity as a substitute for the true religion of the one God. Atheism took this critique of idolatry, and applied it to all religion. Every god, including the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, incarnated in Jesus Christ, was declared to be a human invention.

Criticisms of Theories of the Evolution of Religion

This attempt to explain away and dismiss religion as a whole is radically flawed. It depends deeply on prior materialist assumptions and from the projection into the past of behaviour observed in the present. And frequently, as in the description of the mind of ancient man as being child-like, was based on explicitly racist assumptions, which have been rejected by modern scholars. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, specifically attacked the Freudian assumption that children’s minds somehow recapitulated that of ancient man, and criticised those who sought to defend Freud by saying that exiled sons had not really killed their father in the remote, ur-human past. 22 Freud’s theory that religion had its roots in neurotic and obsessive behaviour generated by the trauma of violent events in the history of early humanity has now been discredited. It seems to me that the rise of recent books attempting to explain religion away are partly a response to the failure of one particularly influential atheist critique of religion. One atheist explanation of religion has been found false, so more must be promoted in case the atheist critique of religion as a whole be shown to be wrong.

Neurological accounts of the origin of religion, like Julian Jaynes, are similarly problematic. No physical tissue from early humans has so far survived, and discussions of the consciousness of early humanity depend strongly on the analysis of their material culture – the artefacts they left behind – and their comparison with similar behaviour by hunter-gatherer cultures today. Thus Palaeolithic rock art is considered by many archaeologists to be the product of shamanic religious experiences through analogy with similar rock art produced by similar cultures, like the San people of South Africa, which have been recorded by anthropologists. While the archaeologists and anthropologists who have suggested this have presented a convincing case, nevertheless the neurology that produced and produces such artwork is that of modern humans. Human cognitive evolution therefore remains very much a contested area. Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind has been severely criticised and rejected because of its highly conjectural nature, and of the severe mental disabilities a society composed of people who possessed such a consciousness would suffer. A friend of mine, a psychiatric nurse, pointed out to me that the people Jaynes suggests in his book had such a sharply differentiated mind would have been acute schizophrenics. In his opinion such people would have found it extremely difficult to cope with normal life, let alone produce the glories of art found in the Palaeolithic past.

Similarly, attempts to trace a linear development from some earlier stage of religion – fetishism, animism, Shamanism or magic have also been found to be extremely problematic because of the existence of these forms of religion amongst much higher conceptions of God. Frazer’s view of magic has been thoroughly rejected by anthropologists. The Anglo-Polish anthropologist, Boleslaw Malinowski, who was an admirer of Frazer, stated that Frazer’s theory of magic was untenable. Primitive humanity was well aware of the scientific laws of natural process. They knew the laws of cause and effect, and were aware of the difference between their subjective associations and external, objective reality. Frazer, on the other hand, had assumed that they did not. 23 Thus Frazer’s account of the origin of religion from magic is inaccurate, and rejected.

Tylor’s views on the origin of religion have also been rejected. Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, commenting on Tylor’s belief that religion arose from wrong ideas about natural phenomena and dreams and trances, asked why it was that belief in the soul should have lasted for millennia and continued to be held by millions of civilised people today. 24 Tylor’s own disciple, Andrew Lang, noted that alongside their animistic and totemistic beliefs, primitive people often had a far higher conception of God than many races far more advanced in civilisation. In his The Making of Religion of 1898, Lang stated ‘that the savage theory of the soul may be based, at least in part, on experiences which cannot, at present, be made to fit into any purely materialistic system of the universe.’ There was also ‘evidence tending to prove that the idea of God, in its earliest shape, need not logically be deduced from the idea of spirit, however that idea itself may have been attained or evolved. The conception of God, then, need not be evolved out of reflections on dreams and ‘ghosts’.’ 25 This statement that the conception of God could not have evolved from ghosts or spirits influenced a number of Christian scholars, including the missionary, Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt, who found evidence of monotheism amongst the peoples considered most archaic, Aboriginal Tasmanians and Andaman Islanders. 26 Scholars of traditional Siberian religion, such as Dr. Ronald Hutton, have also pointed out the ambiguous nature of the evidence for Palaeolithic Shamanism. The dancing figures with animal heads found in cave paintings in southern France, sometimes considered to be pictures of shamans, could also represent gods, spirits or hunters disguised in animal skins to confuse their prey. They are never shown in trance or dancing before an audience. 27 Furthermore, even if these are shamans, this does not mean that shamanism itself is a survival from the Palaeolithic. ‘The problem is that nobody has any way of determining whether these are cases of survival from a common Palaeolithic heritage or of parallel evolution of customs by peoples with roughly similar social organisations in roughly similar environments.’ 28 If that is the case, then Shamanism could be a form of religion into which people could descend, rather than from which they progress, following the general Positivist evolutionary schema.

The Existence of Monotheist Elements in Polytheism

Supporters of the idea of an original monotheism, from which early humanity descended in polytheism, such as Fr. Schmidt, pointed to the fact that many polytheistic religions nevertheless had a conception of a supreme god close to the Judaeo-Christian conception of God. The conception of the god Kwoth in Nuer religion, considered as a benevolent father, who is particularly associated with the sky, but not identical with it, immaterial and omnipresent, is similar in many ways to the God of the Bible. 29 The Indians of the American Great Plains similarly believed in an all-powerful and invisible supreme being, the Great Spirit, Master of Life, our Father the Sky or the Great Mystery, who was not represented as possessing a definite form, but through symbols, such as that for dawn. 30 Similarly the Pericu Indians of California also believed in a supreme deity, Niparaya, who created heaven and earth and gives food to all creatures. Although he possesses a wife, by whom he had children, Niparaya was a spirit, invisible and without a body. 31 Thus in the religions and mythologies of peoples across the world there was an element of monotheism, even if this was not fully realised. This makes the idea of a straightforward evolution from polytheism to monotheism problematic.

Criticism of Hume’s Assumptions about the Evolution of Religion

In fact Hume’s argument for the evolution of religion from polytheism to monotheism is based on primarily on his belief that monotheism itself is such a lofty doctrine that no people who heard it and were convinced of it could fall away into polytheism. However, this is to ignore the witness of the Bible. Even after the establishment of the Mosaic Law and covenant with the Lord, Israel and its kings repeatedly fell into apostasy and the worship of the Canaanite gods. Hume even contradicts himself on this point. In the Natural History of Religion he states that simple observation of the universe presented convincing evidence that there was only one God. However, part of the argument against natural theology in his Dialogues is that the unity and order of the universe is not necessarily evidence that it was created by only one God. He also devotes part of the Natural History of Religion to arguing that ancient paganism was more tolerant than monotheists. ‘The intolerance of almost all religions, which have maintained the unity of God, is as remarkable as the contrary principle of polytheists. The implacable narrow spirit of the Jews is well known. Mahometanism set out with still more bloody principles; and even to this day, deals out damnation, though not fire and faggot, to all other sects. And if, among Christians, the English and Dutch have embraced the principles of toleration, this singularity has proceeded from the steady resolution of the civil magistrate, in opposition to the continued efforts of priests and bigots.’ 32 This argument, that paganism is naturally more tolerant than monotheism, has been one of the major motives in the contemporary pagan revival. Thus while Hume was an agnostic, rather than pagan or atheist, he himself provides arguments against monotheism as a doctrine which is so intellectually convincing, that no rejection of it is possible once it has been established.

Religion as Encounter with a Transcendent ‘Thou’

Hume, Tylor and Frazer were also mistaken about the essential nature of religion. They felt it was to provide some kind of explanation for the existence of world and its phenomena, or else to provide solutions to the problems from which humanity suffers, like death, disease, famine and so on. This is undoubtedly part of the function of religion, but it is not the whole or the central, definitive feature of religious experience. For those scholars who follow the view of the great German Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, the essential feature of religion is a relationship between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’. The world as experienced by the ‘I’ of the religious believer isn’t an object, but a ‘Thou’ – a living personality to which they must respond. This ‘Thou’ can be experienced in separate phenomena, and so be conceptualised in different, even contradictory forms. As simple explanations, these competing forms clearly contradict each other, but as expressions of a controlling ‘Thou’ behind them, they may find an equal place in the pantheon. ‘We see, again, that the ancients’ conception of phenomenon differed according to their approach to it. Modern scholars have reproached the Egyptians for their apparent inconsistencies and have doubted their ability to think clearly. Such an attitude is sheer presumption. Once one recognizes the processes of ancient thought, their justification is apparent. After all, religious values are not reducible to rationalistic formulas. Natural phenomena, whether or not they were personified and became gods, confronted ancient man with a living presence, a significant ‘Thou’, which, again, exceeded the scope of conceptual definition. In such cases our flexible thought and language clearly modify certain concepts so thoroughly as to make them suitable to carry our burdens of expression and significance. The mythopoeic mind, tending toward the concrete, expressed the irrational, not in our manner, but by admitting the validity of several avenues of approach at one and the same time. The Babylonians, for instance, worshipped the generative force in nature in several forms: its manifestation in the beneficial rains and thunderstorms was visualised as a lion-headed bird. Seen in the fertility of the earth, it became a snake. Yet in statues, prayers, and cult acts it was represented as a god in human shape…We should not doubt that mythopoeic thought fully recognizes the unity of each phenomenon which it conceives under so many different guises; the many-sidedness of its images serves to do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon.’ 33

Materialism Assumed but not Proved by Atheist Critiques of Religion

A more profound failing of these attempts to explain away religion is their basis in materialism. Hume assumes that humans must have moved from polytheism to monotheism based on rational analysis of the phenomenon around them, and not by revelation. He does not, however, provide any arguments against revelation. He just assumes it does not exist. Yet if revelation does exist, and God clearly spoke to the ancient Hebrews saying ‘You shall have no other gods before me’, then clearly his entire scheme of the evolution of religion is thrown into serious doubt, if not entirely contradicted.

Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer, in their analysis of religion, treat is an entirely sociological phenomenon. It exists merely to satisfy sociological needs – for moral laws, a coherent scheme for appropriate conduct and behaviour creating a moral community. In this view, people continue to believe in supernatural beings and practice their religions because it brings them this-worldly benefits, like success in hunting, harvests or work, a sense of community with their fellows and so on. Now undoubtedly it is the case that people practice their religion in expectation that they will receive some material benefits. The Mosaic Law creates the conditions through which one may be included in the congregation of Israel, a member of Israel as a religious community. Correct observance of the Law brings the promise of a long and successful life. The commandment to ‘honour thy father and mother’ has the condition ‘that thou may live long in the land that I, the Lord, shall give you.’ Yet religion is not reducible merely to a set of sociological principles. While social anthropologists like A. Radcliffe-Brown attempted to reduce society to general principles, Evans-Pritchard instead adopted a hermeneutic approach, attempting to understand religion through its ideas, metaphors, and the meaning of its rituals, thus understanding it as an independent system in its own right. 34

Cognitivist Approaches to Religion

Other scholars have turned from a sociological perspective towards a Cognitivist approach to analysing religion. This draws heavily on evolutionary psychology to state that humans have produced representations of the gods because humans evolved to do so. ‘Evolutionary science postulates no change in the human brain and mind which would have rendered them markedly different now from what they were and how they functioned in classical antiquity. Quite the contrary, we may safely assume that we form our representations of supernatural beings, to all intents and purposes, just as the ancients did. Any adaptive changes, so cognitive theory argues, took place in earlier and far longer epochs as our remote ancestors passed through the hunter-gatherer phase, and they took place in response to the exigencies of the hunter-gatherers’ environment. They occurred because they gave those hunter-gatherers with these adaptations a competitive and reproductive edge over those without.’ 35 Thus humans believe in gods not because they belong to a particular culture, but simply because this is part of human evolutionary nature. ‘We form representations of supernatural beings not by virtue of membership in societies and cultures but by virtue of membership in the species Homo Sapiens. Our particular societies and cultures shape and standardise our representations, conforming them to the various explicit tradition current and licensed in our various times and places. But it is we who construct the gods, not ‘society’, not ‘culture’; and ‘we’ means the human mind functioning in the human brain.’ 36

Despite the radical reductionism of the Cognitivist approach to religion, this clearly presents problems for the atheist. Firstly, it religion has evolved to confer a benefit on the species, then it is not the negative force which atheism views it. Indeed, it may be atheism that is, in evolutionary terms, a negative phenomenon. Furthermore it corroborates the statement by Calvin that people naturally have a ‘sensus divinitatis’ or sense for the divine.

Criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology

Also, socio-biology and evolutionary psychology themselves are highly conjectural approaches to human psychology. Despite claims that these approaches will provide satisfying accounts of human behaviour, philosophers have objected that they are radically incomplete. Human self-consciousness means that humans are rational agents in a way other parts of the universe are not, and make decisions and act in ways that do not conform to Darwinian principles. Indeed some philosophers have argued that evolutionary psychology is actually pre-scientific in the way it presents man as part of the cosmos in a manner similar to the conception of humanity as the microcosm – the universe in miniature – in ancient Greek philosophy. ‘Far-fetched as Socrates as microcosm might seem today, those who would wish to explain human behaviour without reference to mind, and who would disparage explanations of actions in terms of doing what is for the best as folk psychology, are making an analogous move in reverse rather than treating the macrocosm by analogy with the microcosm, they are treating the microcosm as analogy with the macrocosm. They are treating the microcosm (man) as it if were just part of the macrocosm, and guided and animated by the same principles. But this is surely misguided. Whatever we decide about or ultimate destination and origin, it remains the case that we, as human beings and as self-conscious agents, can question our standing in the world in a way no other part of nature can. This, indeed, is part of what ‘acting for the best’ comprises: raising questions about our relationship to the rest of nature and to each other. The normativity, the search for truth for its own sake, which this involves, engages us in types of considerations which are not found in the scientific descriptions and explanations, whether those of physics or of biology.’ 37

Rudolf Otto on the Evolution of Religion

In fact the inadequacy of evolutionary theory for providing a complete account of the origin of religion, or of explaining it away, was discussed nearly a century ago by the great German religious scholar, Rudolf Otto, in his 1917 The Idea of the Holy. Evolutionary theory could only offer partial or inadequate solutions, as it could not study early hominids, like Pithecanthropus, directly, but only make inferences about them through modern human behaviour, a process that was nevertheless flawed because of the highly conjectural nature of such similarities. Nor could it explain the soul and the emergence of life from dead matter. Rather, there existed in humanity a predisposition to religious experience that was activated and developed through evolution.

‘The justification of the ‘evolutionist’ theory of to-day stands or falls with its claim to ‘explain’ the phenomenon of religion. That is in truth the real task of the psychology of religion. But in order to explain we must have the data from which an explanation may be forthcoming; out of nothing nothing can be explained. Nature can only be explained by an investigation into the ultimate fundamental forces of nature and their laws; it is meaningless to propose to go farther and explain these laws themselves, for in terms of what are they to be explained? But in the domain of spirit the corresponding principle from which an explanation is derived is just the spirit itself, the reasonable spirit of man, with its predispositions, capacities, and its own inherent laws. This has to be presupposed: it cannot itself by explained. None can say how mind or spirit ‘is made’ – though this is in effect just what the theory of epigenesis is fain to attempt. The history of humanity begins with man, and we have to presuppose man, to take him for granted as he is, in order that from him we may understand his history. That is, we must presuppose man as a being analogous to ourselves in natural propensities and capacities. It is a hopeless business to seek to lower ourselves into the mental life of a pithecanthropus erectus; and, even if it were not, we should still need to start from man as he is, since we can only interpret the psychical and emotional life of animals regressively by clumsy analogies drawn from the developed human mind. To try, on the other hand, to understand and deduce the human from the sub-human or brute mind is to try to fit the lock to the key instead of vice versa; it is to seek to illuminate light by darkness. In the first appearance of conscious life on dead unconscious matter we have a simple, irreducible, inexplicable datum. But that which here appears is already a manifold of qualities, and we can only interpretit as a seed of potentiality, out of which issue continually maturer powers and capacities, as the organization of the body increases in stability and complexity. And the only way we can throw any light upon the whole region of sub-human psychical life is by interpreting it once again as a sort of predisposition’ at a second remove, i.e. a predisposition to form the predispositions or faculties of the actual developed mind, and standing in relation to this as an embryo to the full grown organism.’ 38 For Otto, the experience of the numinous came from the deepest part of the human soul. It was not created by sense experience, but was merely stimulated and actualised by it. ‘the numinous is of the latter kind. It issues from the deepest foundation of cognitive apprehension that the soul possesses, and, though it of course comes into being in and amid the sensory date and empirical material of the natural world and cannot anticipate or dispense with those, yet it does not arise out of them, but only by their means.’ 39 The numinous – the experience of the holy – was thus a transcendent concept as independent of sense experience as the pure reason postulated by Kant. 40 Criticising the origin of religion in animism and magic suggested by scholars like Tylor and Frazer, Otto turned it these notions on their heads. They could not explain religion, but only be explained by the later development of religion. Religion was primal aspect of the human constitution that was purely unique and could not be understand through anything else. ‘If the examples number 1 to 8 may be termed ‘pre-religion’, this is not in the sense that religion and the possibility of religion are explicable by their means: rather, they are themselves only made possible and can only be explained from a religious basic element, viz. the feeling of the numinous. This is a primal element of our psychical nature that needs to be grasped purely in its uniqueness and cannot itself be explained from anything else. Like all other primal psychical elements, it emerges in due course in the developing life of human mind and spirit and is thenceforward simply present.’ 41

Religion as A Priori Concept

Although rejecting the notion of primitive monotheism as ‘missionary apologetic’, and firmly believing that humanity moved from primitive forms of religion, such as the belief in ghosts and demons to monotheism, Otto nevertheless appreciated that higher forms of religion certainly existed among polytheist peoples. ‘But they do point to facts, which remain downright riddles, if we start from any naturalistic foundation of religion – whether animism, pantheism or another – and must in that case be got out of the way by the most violent hypotheses. The essence of the matter is this, that elements and strands are to be found in numerous mythologies and the stories of savage tribes, which reach altogether beyond the point they have otherwise attained in religious rites and usages. Notions of ‘high gods’ are adumbrated, with whom the savage has often hardly any relations in practice, if any at all, and in whom he yet acknowledges, almost in spite of himself, a value superior to that of all other mythological images, a value which may well accord with the divine in the highest sense.’ 42 The idea of the holy is an a priori concept, according to Otto, an innate truth. And the existence of this innate truth is demonstrated by the fact that subsequent developments in the idea of divinity are accepted when they are first announced, without any logical necessity. ‘How should it be logically inferred from the still ‘crude’, half-daemonic character of a moon-god or a sun-god or a numen attached to some locality, that he is a guardian and guarantor for the oath and of honourable dealing, of hospitality, of the sanctity of marriage, and of duties to tribe and to clan?’ 43 Indeed, when Socrates in Plato’s Republic declares that God is single, true, unchanging and does not deceive others, what is remarkable is not the new, impressive conception of God formed by the great Greek philosopher, but the dogmatic tone in which he pronounces it and the fact that it is uncritically accepted as true by his companion, Adeimantos. ‘And his assent is such as implies convincement; he does not simply believe Socrates; he sees clearly for himself the truth of his words. Now this is the criterion of all a priori knowledge, namely, that, so soon as an assertion has been clearly expressed and understood, knowledge of its truth comes into the mind with the certitude of first-hand insight.’ 44 The a priori nature of the religious feeling is demonstrated in Luther’s own comments about the innate feeling of God present throughout humanity. ‘The knowledge of God is impressed upon the mind of every man by God. Under the sole guidance of nature all men known that God is – without any acquaintance with the arts or sciences; and this is divinely imprinted upon all men’s minds. There has never been a people so wild and savage that it did not believe that there is some divine power that created all things’. 45 This did not mean that everyone possessed an idea of God – Otto distinguished between a priori conceptions and innate conceptions. Rather it meant that there was a predisposition towards the knowledge of God that everyone had the potential to possess, but which often needed to be awakened by a higher nature, such as a prophet or the Son of God. 46

For Rudolf Otto knowledge of God was a transcendent capacity, which existed in humanity like Kant’s pure reason. Biological evolution developed this and brought it out, but did not create it. Some evolutionary biologists have concurred at least partly with this view. The British evolutionary biologist, Sir Aleister Hardy, considered that religion was indeed the product of human biological and psychological evolution, but that nevertheless it corresponded with and was based on a real external, objective experience, and quoted the great French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, on the objective reality of the religious experience.

Evolution of Religion based on Transcendent Reality

‘Our entire study rests upon this postulate that the unanimous sentiment of the believers of all times cannot be purely illusory. Together with a recent apologist of the faith [William James] we admit that these religious beliefs rest upon a specific experience whose demonstrative value is, in one sense, not one bit inferior to that of scientific experiments, though different from them.’ 47 Hardy believed that when praying ‘we are making contact with what we call the Divine which is in part within ourselves, in our subconscious, but in part beyond ourselves.’ 48 It’s remarkable, and unorthodox view of God, but nevertheless has contacts with and indeed corroborates the perfectly orthodox Christian doctrine that God has written a consciousness of Himself on humanity’s hearts, an inner consciousness that points to His objective existence.

Similarly, attempts to explain religious ritual behaviour as the product of human evolution through analogy with the behavioural rituals of various animals, such as those of Julian Huxley and Konrad Lorenz, and Eugene d’Aquili’s and Andrew Newberg’s claim that human religious experience may be hard-wired through evolution, based on their brain-imaging scans of Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns in prayer, may actually point to an ultimate transcendental origin of religion. If that is the case, then brain imaging scans have nothing to say about the reality of the religious experience. ‘One could say that the brain wiring developed as our ancestors responded to a transcendent reality. Every claim about reality, whether of a table, an electron, or another person’s love, requires neural activity in the brain. The reality of the referent of our symbols can never be determined by examining the brain.’ 49

This perhaps explains the increasing desperation amongst some atheist polemicists to provide a materialistic explanation for religion, and the shrill tone of atheist denunciations of religion as a maladaptive form of evolutionary behaviour. Rationalist criticisms of religion have failed to explain religion away, and the major 19^th century attempts to account for its origin have now been rejected. Freudianism in particular is no longer taken seriously by scholars as such an explanation of religion. Similarly attempts to explain religion as based on the child-like thinking patterns of primitive people have been demonstrated as being scientifically wrong and based on racism. Dawkins’ pronouncement in The God Delusion that belief in God was like children’s imaginary friends has more than a passing resemblance to these discredited theories and is no more convincing. Religion, like so much else in human nature, cannot be simply reduced to evolutionary explanations. Instead, such explanations, rather than disproving religion, may demonstrate that religion confers a benefit upon humans as biological organisms and point to its basis in the transcendent reality of the Almighty. Indeed, these may even act to provide some support to the traditional Christian doctrine that a knowledge, or predisposition to the knowledge of God is ubiquitous throughout humanity. The ancient Hebrews were able to use rationalist critiques of ancient religions to demonstrate their falsity against the true religion of the one God. However, rationalist attempts to explain away religion as a whole have proven to be extremely problematic, and have paradoxically succeeded in rendering atheism problematic, irrational, and a potentially destructive evolutionary anomaly.

Notes

1. ‘Phoenician Mythology’ in Felix Guirand, ed., Richard Addington and Delano Ames, trans. New LaRousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (London, Hamlyn 1968 p. 82.
2. Philo of Byblos, Primitive History, cited in ‘Phoenician Mythology’ in Guirand, Mythology, p. 83.
3. ‘Phoenician Mythology’ in Guirand, Mythology, p. 83.
4. ‘The Natural History of Religion’ in David Hume, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion (Oxford, OUP 1993), p. 135.
5. Hume, ed. Gaskin, Natural History of Religion, pp. 135-6.
6. Clinton Bennett, In Search of the Sacred: Anthropology and the Study of Relgion (London, Cassell 1996), p. 25.
7. Bennett, In Search of the Sacred, p. 28.
8. Bennett, In Search of the Sacred, p. 30.
9. Bennett, In Search of the Sacred, p. 36.
10. Bennett, In Search of the Sacred, p. 40.
11. H.G. Wells, A Short History of the World (London, Watts & Co 1929), p. 36.
12. Wells, History of the World, pp. 37-8.
13. Wells, History of the World, p. 37.
14. Wells, History of the World, p. 38.
15. Wells, History of the World, p. 39.
16. ‘Julian Jaynes’s Software Archaeology’ in Daniel C. Dennett, Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (London, Penguin 1998), pp. 121-130.
17. Wisdom of Solomon 13: 1-2, The Apocrypha (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 65.
18. Wisdom of Solomon 14: 12-21, The Apocrypha, p. 66.
19. ‘Syria and Palestine’ in Encyclopedia of World Mythology (London, Peerage Books 1975), p. 109.
20. John A. Wilson, ‘The Function of the State’ in Henri Frankfort, Mrs. H.A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson and Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1949), p. 81.
21. ‘Old Testament Theology’ in D. Guthrie, J.A. Motyer, A.M. Stibbs and D.J. Wiseman, eds., The New Bible Commentary Revised (Leicester, Inter-Varsity Press 1970), p. 21.
22. ‘Freud’s Evolutionary Fantasy’ in Stephen Jay Gould, The Richness of Life (London, Vintage 2007), pp. 467-480.
23. Bennett, In Search of the Sacred, p. 40.
24. Bennett, In Search of the Sacred, p. 37.
25. Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion, 1898, p. 2, cited in Bennett, In Search of the Sacred, p. 37.
26. Bennett, In Search of the Sacred, p. 38.
27. Ronald Hutton, The Shamans of Siberia (Glastonbury, The Isle of Avalon Press 1993), p. 14.
28. Hutton, Shamans of Siberia, p. 15.
29. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘God in Nuer Religion’, in Whitfield Foy, The Religious Quest (London, Routledge 1978), pp. 557-576.
30. ‘Mythology of the Two Americas’ in Guirand, New LaRousse Encylopedia of Mythology, p. 431.
31. Mythology of the Two Americas’ in Guirand, New LaRousse Encylopedia of Mythology, p. 434.
32. Hume, ed. Gaskin, Natural History of Religion, p. 162.
33. H. and H.A. Frankfort, ‘Myth and Reality, in Frankfort, Frankfort, Wilson and Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, pp. 28-9.
34. ‘Evans-Pritchard, Sir Edward’ in John Bowker, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford, OUP 1997), p. 326.
35. Roger Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire (Oxford, OUP 2006), p. 90.
36. Beck, Mithras Cult, p. 89.
37. Anthony O’Hear, Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation (Oxford, Clarendon 1997), p. 12.
38. Rudolf Otto, John W. Harvey, trans., The Idea of the Holy (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1959), pp. 131-2.
39. Otto, Idea of the Holy, p. 130.
40. Otto, Idea of the Holy, p. 131.
41. Otto, Idea of the Holy, p. 141.
42. Otto, Idea of the Holy, p. 146.
43. Otto, Idea of the Holy, p. 153.
44. Otto, Idea of the Holy, p. 154.
45. Luther, Table Talk, quoted in Otto, Idea of the Holy, p. 156.
46. Otto, Idea of the Holy, pp. 194-5.
47. Alister Hardy, The Biology of God: A Scientist’s Study of the Religious Animal (London, Jonathan Cape 1975), p. 77.
48. Hardy, Biology of God, p. 230.
49. Ian Barbour, Nature, Human Nature and God (London, SPCK 2002), p. 48.

Many Gods, but None True?

One of the common arguments against the existence of God is that humanity has produced a vast number of gods in the mythologies of the world’s peoples, each one different from the other. As each of these gods is different from all the other gods in which people have ever believed, so it is argued that the very concept of god is contradictory and incoherent. And if there is no good reason to believe in one particular god or conception of god, so it is reasoned or implied that there is no good reason to believe in another. All ideas of God are held to be equally invalid.

There’s nothing new in this argument. The Roman Sceptical philosopher, Sextus Empiricus, advanced them in the 2^nd century AD in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, stating that

‘Since, then, some of the Dogmatists assert that God is corporeal, others that he is incorporeal, and some that he has human form, others not, and some that he exists in space, others not; and of those who assert that he is in space some put him inside the world, others outside; how shall we be able to reach a conception of God when we have no agreement about his substance or his form or his place of abode? Let them first agree and consent together that God is of such and such a nature, and then, when they have sketched out for us that nature, let them require that we should form a conception of God. But so long as they disagree interminably, we cannot say what agreed notion we are to derive from them.’ 1

Indeed, the modern use of the argument dates from the decades immediately following the first Latin translation of his complete works in 1569, and it’s become one of the major influences on modern atheism.

It is not, however, such a convincing rebuttal of theism as it might appear. Since the 16^th century, for example, religious scholars have pointed to the near ubiquity of belief in gods of some kind amongst multitude of the world’s cultures as proof of the existence of God. The fact that just about every people has an idea of supernatural beings with some responsibility for and control over the Earth, despite differences of geography and culture suggests that God really exists, and that humans have an intuitive concept of the Lord.

Some religious scholars have gone even further, and suggested that many of the world’s religions may have a common origin in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob described in the Bible. Winfried Corduan, in his book Eternity in their Hearts very much takes this position, based on the experience of the Christian missionaries around the world who discovered elements in the indigenous religions of the peoples to whom they were preaching that resembled elements of the Judeo-Christian conception of God. Many polytheistic cultures, despite their plurality of gods, nevertheless believe in a single high god who is the creator of the world and the other, subordingate gods. For Corduan, this argues for an original monotheism, which declined into polytheism over time with the ‘disease of language’. The argument that polytheism is a secondary development, a decline from this primeval monotheism is based on the observation that generally in the history of a religion, gods multiply, rather than are simplified into a single deity. For example, contemporary Hinduism features a number of gods, who don’t feature in the Vedas, the ancient scriptures of the Indian peoples. It was also suggested in the 19^th century by the great British anthropologist and scholar of Indian religion, F.W. Muller, that a major cause of polytheism was the subsequent conception of different names for the same god as separate gods as language became more elaborate. A similar idea appears in Judaism regarding the theological basis for the different names for God used in the Bible. According to Jewish tradition, God Himself explained this to one of the rabbis, explaining that, for example, the name ‘El Shaddai’, translated into English as ‘Lord of Hosts’, referred to God in His military aspect as head of the celestial army, and certainly not to a separate, competing deity.

It’s fair to say that the argument for a primeval monotheism as the origin of all the worlds religions is highly speculative and has been out of favour amongst scholars and philosophers of religion since the 1930s. Nevertheless, many extra-European peoples have argued for the essential dignity of their pre-Christian beliefs as a ‘preparation for the Gospel’, as ancient Platonic philosophy was for the Roman world, based on the concepts of single, transcendent creator above the other gods found in their religions. The pioneering British anthropologist, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, noted in his research amongst the Nuer people of the Sudan, for example, that they worshipped a supreme God, whom they called Kwoth, Spirit, and who believed resided in the heavens. However, Kwoth was not simply a personification of the sky, and although he was most strongly associated with the sky, he wasn’t solely based there. The Nuer believed that Kwoth is everywhere. He is cak ghaua, the creator of the universe, and also kwoth me gargar – the omnipresent/ limitless God. He is also perceived as a distinct person, who loves humanity and who is addressed by the Nuer as gwandong – grandfather, gwandan, our father, and gwadin, the respectful word for ‘father’, for example. 2 Although Nuer religion is very different from Christianity, nevertheless its conception of God, as recorded by Evans-Pritchard, is strikingly similar in some respects. Thus many religions are not so different from each other as to undermine the concept of God itself, as argued by Sceptics like Sextus Empiricus, and so the existence of similar concepts of God in a multitude of different religions across the world could be seen as supporting the existence of God.

If the existence of gods in the cultures across the world argues for the objective existence of God, the differences between these various concepts of God can be seen as the product of human limitation. God, as infinite and transcendent, is conceived in Judaism and Christianity as fundamentally beyond human comprehension. All statements about God, according to the great Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas, were analogies, metaphors, to explain to the limited human intellect what God was like.3 Thus the various names of God were a product of the limited human intellect’s inability to comprehend God wholly:

‘For since we cannot know Him naturally except by reaching Him from His effects, it follows that the terms by which we denote His perfection must be diverse, as also are the perfections which we find in things. If, however, we were able to understand His very essence as it is, and to give Him a proper name, we should express Him by one name only: and this is promised in the last chapter of Zacharias, to those who will see Him in His essence: In that day there shall be one Lord, and His name shall be one.’ 4

Thus, although there may be an innate knowledge of the existence of God, the limited nature of the human intellect, which is only able to comprehend the Lord through analogies with His creations, can produce false images of God, and even false gods altogether. In traditional Christian theology, the crucial factor in the lack of authentic human knowledge of and communion with God is the Fall, which critically separated humanity from God and gradually led to the rise of polytheism and idolatry as humanity mistook God’s works for gods.

Thus, rather than disproving the existence of God, the great variety of gods conceived of and worshipped by humanity actually does the reverse, and acts as evidence for God’s existence. Rather than the great difference in humanity’s gods demonstrating the incoherence of the concept of God itself, it’s evidence only of the inability of the human intellect to form a true conception of an ultimate, transcendent being, an inability created by humanity’s Fall and the resulting separation from both the Lord’s presence and clear knowledge of Him.

Notes

1. ‘Sextus Empiricus: Concerning God’, in P. Helm, ed., Faith and Reason (Oxford, OUP 1999), p. 39.
2. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘God in Nuer Religion’, in Whitfield Foy, ed., The Religious Quest (London, Routledge 1978), pp. 557-558, 562.
3. ‘That Terms Applied to God and Creatures Are Employed Analogically’ in Rev. M.C. D’Arcy, ed., Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings (London, Everyman’s Library 1939), pp. 152-153.
4. ‘That The Divine Perfection And The Plurality of Divine Names Are Not Inconsistent With The Divine Simplicity’, in D’Arcy, ed., Aquinas: Selected Writings, pp. 147-8.

The Cult of Dawkins

Actually, the more Richard Dawkins’ career as a preacher of atheism is examined, the more it strongly it appears to conform to the sociological definition of a cult. Dawkins is certainly a powerfully charismatic figure, as is shown by the admiring members of the audience who annually troop to his talks at the Cheltenham Festival of Science, eyes aglow, and faces shining with a joy usually reserved for the saints who’ve been privileged to see a foretaste of paradise, as they have actually seen RICHARD DAWKINS.

Way back in the 19th century, the British philosopher and writer Thomas Carlyle discussed the tendency of people’s personal heroes to become a personal religion. By this he did not mean the articles of faith that they formally professed, but what they actually believed as expressed in their actions, even if they never admitted such beliefs even to themselves. In his ‘Heroes and Hero Worship’ Carlyle stated their personal religion consisted of ‘the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cvases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. This is religion, or it may be, his mere skepticism and no-religion; the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-world; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the things he will do is.’

-cited in Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of Charismatic Movement (FontanaPress, 1996), pp. 3-4.

Noll in the above book uses the definitions and observations of personal and charismatic cults from Carlyle and the great German sociologist of religion, Max Weber, to present the case that Jung actually founded a charismatic religion in the psychoanalytic school that bears his name, rather than a medical system. I don’t know enough about Jungian psychology to know how accurate some of Noll’s comments are, though he presents a convincing case.

However, the same points can be said with equal value about the burgeoning atheist cult surrounding Richard Dawkins as a preacher of anti-theism.

Going further, Weber defined a charismatic group – a cult – as consisting of anywhere from a dozen or so to hundreds of thousands of followers, who have a shared belief system, a high level of social cohesiveness, are strongly influenced by the groups behavioural norms and impute charismatic or divine power to the group or its leadership. See Noll, The Jung Cult, pp. 16-17.

Now there clearly is a distinct ‘Dawkins’ cult out there. He has a website and a forum, inhabited by his fans. Going through the web, one can find similar websites from atheists strongly influenced by Dawkins and his arguments. They list his books as favourite reading, along with those of Carl Sagan. They have a distinct basis in the particular atheist, gradualist view of evolution, both biological and social, articulated by Dawkins. This has clearly affected their attitude to religion, as they are not content to ignore it, but to attack and argue against it, using his arguments. Whether they have a high degree of mutual cohesion is a moot point, though given the way he has started selling merchandising and ‘atheist’ branded clothing it’s possibly only a matter of time before they start taking on the social uniformity one associates with other cults or special interest groups.

As part of his argument that Jung was essentially a charismatic prophet, Noll compares Jung as a scientist with unique insights into human nature with the ancient philosophers and early Christian hermits, who were also supposed to have gained special charismatic insight and power through retreating from society to develop a unique relationship with nature. Now Dawkins clearly is not a hermit, but his vocation as a biologist has given him the status of someone with a special connection and insight into nature and the cosmos. Thus Dawkins also seems to partake of the role of a prophet, just as Sagan did when he was articulating his own unique pantheism in Cosmos back in the 1980s.

Charismatic cults tend to ossify into more bureaucratic structures as they grow and there develops a greater need to regulate their functioning, such as laying down basic standards of belief, and norms of practice and organisational structure. Weber called this process the ‘routinization of religion’. For Weber the ‘principal motives’ for this process are ‘(a) the ideal also the material interests of the followers in the continuation and the continual reactivation of the community; (b) teh still stronger ideal and also stronger material interests of the members of the administartive staff, the disciples or other followers of the charismatic leader in continuing their relationship’.

-see Noll again, pp. 276-7.

Again, Dawkins and the contemporary cult surrounding him fits this pattern perfectly. He has money coming in from TV and radio appearances, lectures, books and newspaper articles, and even his own Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason to disseminate and routinise his ideas, and which clearly have provided him with a good living while recruiting yet more followers to his cause.

So, rather than being a liberator, Dawkins has instead stopped people from thinking for themselves, if that was ever his gaol. Rather than teaching people to think critically for themselves, he is now acting as any other religious figure with a material interest in maintaining his hold over people’s minds and wallets. If there are atheists seriously concerned to think for themselves, I suggest they might make a good start by taking a very serious, sceptical look at Dawkins, and stop believing what he says.