The Bible, Christianity and Ancient Slavery

One of the most common objections to Judaism and Christianity comes from the legal recognition of slavery in the Bible. Slavery was known and recognised in ancient Israel, and the Mosaic Law permitted extremely harsh punishment of slaves, even allowing their eventual death from beatings administered by their masters as long as they did not die immediately. If God is truly loving and just, it is argued, then He would not allow such brutal exploitation of humans by other humans. This is really just argumentum ad verecundiam, an argument from outrage. Now it is true that the Bible does indeed recognise slavery, and that slavery persisted in the West in the Roman Empire even after the establishment of Christianity as the official religion. Contemporary Christian theologians are well aware of the evils of slavery, and are certainly not complacent about the continued persistence of it around the world today, in the form of debt slavery in parts of asia and Brazil, or real slavery in Mauretania and the Sudan. Despite its recognition of slavery, the laws governing it in the Bible provided for its humane regulation and eventual abolition. Understanding the Bible’s attitude to slavery, and how it managed to achieve this, requires understanding the nature of slavery and law within ancient near eastern and Roman society.

Biblical Laws on Slaves 

The Mosaic Law itself limited slavery only to gentiles, and outlawed it completely for Jews. Leviticus 25: 39-55 stipulated that poor Israelites who sold themselves to other Jews should be treated as hired servants, and given their freedom in the year of Jubilee, that is, after seven years’ service. Only the neighbouring peoples and the foreigners who lived in Israel could be owned as slaves. Additionally, the Israelites were commanded to buy out of slavery those Jews who had, through poverty, sold themselves to gentiles. These slaves were to be treated as hired servants, and were either to receive their freedom after seven year’s service, or be allowed to purchase their freedom from their fellow Jew. That part of Law stressed that while the former slave was serving his Jewish master, he should be treated leniently – in the words of Leviticus 25: 53,  ’the other shall not rule wtih rigour over him in thy sight’. Thus for Jews, slavery in ancient Israel was commuted to indentured servitude. Indeed, the enslavement of Jews was a capital offence. Deuteronomy 24:7 commands that ‘If a man be found stealing any of his brethren of the children of Israel, and maketh merchandise of him, or selleth him; then that theif shall die; and thou shalt put evil away from among you.’ Hebrew slaves could only be retained if he had been given a wife by his master, and did not wish to leave to her and his children. As for female Hebrew slaves who had been purchased as wives Exodus 21:7-11 stated that they had to be freed if they did not please their masters. If their owner subsequently married, they had to be supported. If their master failed to do this, they were to be given their freedom. Female slaves given to the master’s son were to be treated as daughters. While the law stated that the owner whose slave died a day or two after being beaten by his master would not be punished, ‘for he is his money’ (Exodus 21:21), in other words, because he had lost his property, nevertheless the master who beat his slave to death was to be punished. Leviticus 21:26-27 further provided that masters who struck out their slaves’ eyes or teeth had to free them. Furthermore, legislation existed to protect slaves from goring by livestock. Exodus 21:32 stated that if an ox pushed a male or female slave, it was to be put to death and the slave’s master given thirty shekels of silver. Moreover, the death penalty for adultery was commuted to scourging for the female partner, if she was a slave and betrothed to another man, while the man had to make a trespass offering. This was ‘because she was not free’, according to Leviticus 19:20. Furthermore, Hebrew slaves freed after six years’ service were to be liberally provided from their master’s flocks, grain and wine stores, according to the provisions of Leviticus 15:13-14. Furthermore, female prisoners of war who had been captured for a wife, was to be freed and not to be sold as a slave if she displeased her new husband, according Deuteronomy 21:14, because he had humiliated her. Runaway slaves were not to be returned to their masters. Deuteronomy 23:15-16 states that ‘though shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto the: he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.’ This effectively granted runaway slaves their freedom.

Archaeological Evidence for Manumission by Jews 

There is archaeological evidence for the manumission of slaves by their Jewish masters surviving from the ancient world. An inscription from Panticapaeum in the Crimea records the manumission of the slave Heraclas by his mistress, Chreste, the widow of Nicias, son of Sotas, at the local synagogue in January, 81 AD. 1Thus slavery in ancient Israel was subject to legislation ameliorating it and guaranteeing some protection to slaves and protecting those vulnerable to enslavement.

Slavery and Ancient Society 

Despite this relatively humane regulation and transformation of slavery, there is still the objection that slavery nevertheless existed, and that rather than regulating it, God should have removed it completely. In practice it would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to abolish slavery completely in the ancient world. Slavery was such a part of ancient political theory and society that they found it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine an alternative system. Contemporary society is built around wage labour, and it’s taken for granted that the workers’ ability to leave their jobs and seek employment elsewhere doesn’t wreck the economy, but instead is a pillar and a major motivating force for economic and social progress. Yet this was not how it was seen in the ancient world. ‘In the context of universal history, free labour, wage labour, not slavery, is the peculiar institution. for most of the millennia of human history in most parts of the world, labour power was not a commodity which could be bought and sold apart from, abstracted from, the person of the labourer.’ 2 Indeed, it has been noted that ‘in early societies, free hired labour (though widely documented) was spasmodic, casual, marginal. significantly, in neither Greek nor Latin was there a word with which to express the general notion of ‘labour’ or the concept of labour ‘as a general social function’. 3 It has been estimated that 2/3 of the population of the Roman Empire were slaves, who could not have been freed without severe disruption of the economy and social structure. Ancient society was profoundly conservative, and to the ancients, slavery was a necessary evil as there was no conceivable alternative.

The concept of slavery profoundly affected ancient views of the very nature of power and the structure of authority. Even kings and potentates saw themselves, or presented themselves, as the slaves of superior kings. Thus, Abdi-Heba, the mayor of Jerusalem, began his letter to his overlord, the Egyptian pharoah Amenhotep III or IV, with the phrase ‘[To the king]my lord, [speak: Message of] Abdi-Heba, [your]servant. [At the feet of the king], my lord, sevenfold [seven times I fall].’ 4 

Professional Opportunities and Status of Slaves

In the Roman world, slaves also had the opportunity for social advancement and the ability to perform a range of what would now be considered professional and managerial jobs. In ancient Athens, some slaves were allowed by their masters to live on their own with their families and pursue a trade. ‘These slaves, to all intents and purposes, lived like free men.’ 5 In Rome, the medical profession was dominated by slaves and freedmen, mostly from the Hellenistic east and particularly Egypt. Harpocras, the doctor who treated the younger Pliny, was a freedman -  a former slave who still owed some service to his former masters. In return for his treatment, Pliny requested the emperorer to grant him Roman citizenship. 6 Thus ‘members of the Roman elite, in sum, went to slaves and freedmen for medical treatment, and paid for it. Escape from payment was possible only if the doctor was on’es own freedman or the freedman of a friend.’ 7 They also acted as businessmen and agents on behalf of their masters, through a peculium system that regarded the property the slaves managed as that of their masters while a complex system of legislation developed which recognised the fact that it was the slave managing the business, not the master. 8 There exist numerous business contracts from the Roman world documenting the renting and management of property by slaves and other commercial transactions. One such contract, of July 2, AD 37, by Diogenes, the slave of Gaius Novius Cypaerus, records the rental of a warehouse in Puteoli, full of Alexandrian rice-wheat, by Hesicus, the slave of a freedman, Evenus. The rice-wheat was a security advanced to Hesicus, along with 200 sacks of beans. 9 Furthermore, it was possible for the descendent of a slave to reach positions of respect and high office. The father of the Roman poet, Horace, was a freedman, a business agent and broker, who was able to finance his son’s definitely aristocratic eduction. 10 The great Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, a slave belonging to the freedman Epaphroditus, was aware of the upward mobility of certain slaves, whose children joined the ranks of the senatorial aristocracy. He used the possibility of slave social advancement, and possible slave ancestry even for the most aristocratic, in his works to challenge conventional assumptions by the leading citizens that they were metaphysically free.

 ’”How can I be a slave?” he says; ” my father is free, my mother is free, no one has bought me; nay, I am a senator, and a friend of Caesar, I have been consul and have many slaves.”

In the first place, most excellent senator, perhaps your father too was a slave of the same kind as you, yes and your mother and your grandfather and the whole line of your ancestors.’ 11

Masters and their slaves would also end up working together on certain tasks. For example, during the construction of the Erechtheum, the temple in the Athenian Acropolis in the fifth century BC, of the 86 craftsmen working on the site, 24 were Athenian citizens, 42 non-citizens and 20 slaves. All of the workmen who were paid a daily wage received the same rate of pay, regardless of whether they were slave or free. Most of the slaves were working alongside their masters in the same trade on the same particular task, so that, for example, the craftsman Simias had five of his slaves working with him. 12 Now the slaves would have paid their masters a percentage of their wages, but nevertheless the fact that the Athenian state gave them the same rates of pay as free workmen is interesting.

Community of Interest between Slaves and Poor Free

The result of this seems to be that rather than be wholly identified as a self-conscious, separate class, Roman slaves and the free poor strongly identified with each other. Thus, when all the slaves in the household of Pedanius Secundus were ordered to be executed after the murder of their master by a few of the household slaves, there were demonstrations by the plebs, which eventually turned into a riot when the senate confirmed the order. 13 While the existence of slavery was unquestioned, there does seem to have been a real sense of community between the free poor and the slaves. Many of the plebs were freedmen or the descendents of slaves, and associated with slaves in their daily lives. 14 In the third century, a slave businessman, Callistus, even became pope. 15

Canon Law and Slavery

Christian canon law, when it emerged, did not attempt to abolish slavery because of its perceived indispensability to the society and economy. Nevertheless, Christian attitudes to slavery differed from traditional pagan Roman attitudes. While Aristotle considered that there were indeed natural slaves, Christians, like the pagan Stoics, held that slavery was unnatural and in an ideal world all humans should be free. 16 St. Augustine held that slavery was the result of sin, citing as an example the enslavement of defeated enemies in war. 17 Canon law stipulated that masters must treat their slaves humanely and provide for their religious needs. It also differed from conventional Roman law in allowing slaves to marry legitimately. In order to protect slave families, it restricted the rights of the masters to split them up and separate married slaves from their spouses and children. 18

Challenge of Christianity to Psychological Basis of Slavery

Furthermore, Christianity also posed a challenge to one of the psychological justifications for slavery. Slavery as an institutions depends on a perceived fundamental difference between those enslaved and their masters – that slaves are somehow innately inferior, and do not deserve or are unsuited to freedom. Aristotle provided one such justification with his doctrine that there were natural slaves. Roman law linked slaves with animals, while the Greeks termed them andropoda – man-footed beings – after tetrapoda, quadrupeds, the term for that type of animal. 19 St. Paul stated in Galatians 3:28 that ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ.’ While this referred to spiritual freedom, rather than any secular liberty, nevertheless Christianity offered religious opportunities to slave that were not offered, or only offered to a limited extent, by contemporary Roman pagan religions. ‘Christianity did not offer unusual opportunities for status: what it did offer was moral and religious teaching, and shared ritual, that extended to women, slaves and the poor’. 20 Like their free fellows, slaves were active members of the congregation in their local churches, and participated in the election of bishops. While Varro stated that the slave was an implement, like oxen or ploughs, Christian writers like Clement of Alexandria and Lactantius insisted on their common humanity. Clement firmly stated that ’slaves are men like us’ to whom the Golden Rule applied, while Lactantius stated ‘Slaves are not slaves to us. We deem them brothers after the spirit, in religion fellow servants.’ 21Although the Church certainly owned slaves, it also consecrated them as deacon, priests and bishops, and although pagan tombs mention the slave status of the deceased, this is not known from the Christian tombs in the catacombs. 22

Christianity and the Amelioration and Abolition of Slavery

Thus the Bible did not urge the abolition of slavery, as this was not considered possible in the ancient world. Indeed, so ingrained was the idea of slavery for the ancients that any legislation against it would have been extremely difficult to enforce. Despite the Biblical prohibition against the enslavement of other Jews, letters surviving from Samaria from the time of the Persian occupation showed that this was widely disregarded. Over half of the documents are deeds of ownership for Jewish slaves. Moreover, ancient slaves did have opportunities for social advancement and may have been considered part of the community with the free poor that was certainly not the case for the African chattel slaves of the 17th to 19th centuries. Revelation has to apply to the people of the time it is received, and in the ancient world, slavery was not quite the issue it became for modern moralists, theologians and politicians. Christianity did, however, demand the regulation of slavery and the humane treatment of slaves. Indeed, Christianity’s insistence of the essential humanity of the slave and the common identity with the rest of the community did lay the grounds for later ecclesiastics such as St. Gregory of Nyssa to attack slavery itself in the seventh century and the eventual abolition of slavery completely in the 19th century.

Notes

1. C.K. Barrett, The New Testament Background: Selected Documents (Nw York, Harper & Row 1961), p. 53.

2. Moses I. Finley, ed. Brent. D. Shaw, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (Princeton, Markus Wieners Publishers 1998), p. 299.

3. Finley, ed. Shaw, Ancient Slavery, p. 136.

4. Eva von Dassow and Kyle Greenwood, ‘Correspondence from El-Amarna in Egypt’ in Mark. W. Chavalas, ed., The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing 2006), p. 209.

5. Esmond Wright, ed., History of the World: Prehistory to the Renaissance (Feltham, W.H. Smith/ Newnes Books 1985), p. 159.

6. Finley and Shaw, Ancient Slavery, p. 174.

7. Finley and Shaw, Ancient Slavery, p. 175.

8. Finley and Shaw, Ancient Slavery, p. 176.

9. Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold, Roman Civilization: Selected Readings – The Empire (New York, Columbia University Press 1990), p. 109.

10. Finley and Shaw, Ancient Slavery, p. 166.

11. Epictetus, Discourses IV, in Barrett, New Testament Background, p. 68.

12 Finley and Shaw, Ancient Slavery, p. 169.

13. Finley and Shaw, Ancient Slavery, p. 171.

14. Finley and Shaw, Ancient Slavery, p. 171.

15. Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2004), p. 36.

16. James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London, Longman 1995), p. 14.

17. Anthony Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, Clarendon 2005), p. 258.

18. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law, p. 14.

19. Finley and Shaw, Ancient Slavery, p. 167.

20. Clark, Christianity and Roman Society, p. 30.

21. Herbert B. Workman, Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford, Oxford University Press 1980), p. 61.

22. Workman, Persecution, p. 61.

Stalin, The Gulags and Christianity

Wakefield Tolbert, one of the great commentators on this blog, has pointed out here at http://beastrabban.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/rrs-kelly-rants/#comment-597 that Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have blamed Stalin’s Eastern Orthodox upbringing for the atrocities committed by his regime. Now I’ve already blogged explaining how Hitler wasn’t a Christian, and the genocide of the Nazis was not based on Christianity. Now also I’ve heard from a number of other people who’ve come across the same assertion that Christianity is somehow responsible for Stalin’s atrocities. This is demonstrably untrue, and deserves rebuttal.

Religious Nature of Communism

It is true that many researchers and scholars of Communism have noted a strong religious quality within the movement itself and the devotion it aroused in its adherents. Of 221 former Communists studied by one sociologist, almost half came from homes where religious interests were important. 1 Marxism can be seen ‘as a modern prophetic movement, proclaiming the way to justice’. 2 The search for ‘an overwhelmingly strong power’  on which the individual can rely may lead people to God can also lead others to embrace the Communist party. In the West, many of the recruits to Communism in the 1930s were highly sensitive and bewildered by modern social confusion. These idealists sought a programme that would solve the problems of modern society they felt so keenly. ‘They found in the authoritative program of communism and in its seeming dedication to justice an ‘escape from freedom’ that gave them both a sense of belonging and a sense of power. They were no longer the alienated; they had a ‘home’ and a program’. 3 Thus some of the scholars studying former Communists, concluded that the rejection of their parents’ religion by those with a devout religious background was not an antireligious statement, ‘but a redirection of interest to a movement that was embraced with religious fervor.’ 4

Stalin himself added a religious element to Soviet Communism. His oration at Lenin’s funeral was modelled on the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, and included the response ‘We vow to be faithful to they precepts, O Lenin.’ Lenin’s held the orthodox Marxist view that the individual has no importance in history. This caused him to reject any cult of personality around himself through the belief that if he had hadn’t led the revolution, it would have occurred anyway under someone else. Stalin, in opposition to this, created a distinct cult around Lenin through the establishment of Marxism-Leninism as the official Soviet ideology, and Lenin’s mausoleum as a public monument and site of pilgrimage.

Inadequacy of Religion as Explanation for Stalinism

Despite this, I have to say I’m not impressed by the argument as it’s too close to some very similar assertions I’ve come across which are very clearly wrong. Jack Chick in one of his rabidly anti-Roman Catholic comics claimed that Stalin’s regime was all a Roman Catholic plot, because Stalin had been a Roman Catholic priest. Er, no. Stalin was Georgian Orthodox, and did intend study for the priesthood, but got kicked out of the seminary for reading Adam Smith and Charles Darwin. The fact that many Communists were idealists and came from a religious background does not necessarily mean that the atrocities committed by Stalin were due to his religious upbringing. Communism is a highly idealistic political system, even if this idealism expresses itself in a brutally utilitarian attitude to human life and political strategy. The membership of people from religious backgrounds in the Communist simply shows that the type of idealistic individuals who traditionally sought meaning in religion then sought it in Communism. The religious trappings around the cult of Lenin don’t demonstrate an innate religiosity in Stalin so much as a cynical appreciation of the way the collective, corporate aspects of religion by a traditionally religious people could be used to provide a sense of community and collective purpose amongst them. However, this is a tactical development, and does not demonstrate any deeper continuity in ideology or outlook between Communism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Communist Persecution of Orthodox Christians and Other People of Faith

 As a convinced Communist, he was certainly not a Christian. Furthermore, as Timothy Ware points out in his book on Orthodoxy under the Communists, the Soviet regime was militantly atheist, and had no compunction about killing and torturing Orthodox clergy long before Stalin came to power. In 1918 and 1919, the Communists killed 28 bishops. From 1923 to 1926 fifty more were martyred. By 1926, 2,700 priests, 2,000 monks and 3,400 nuns had been killed. It has been estimated that from 1917 to 1964 12,000 priests alone had been murdered by the regime, or died of illtreatment at their hands. And this is only Orthodox clergy.  5 It does not include the laymen and women.

Similar massacres of laypeople and clergy were also experienced by other faiths long before Stalin. Just before Christmas, for example, Channel 4 screened a fascinating programme of very early colour documentary film shot by a French traveller to China, India and Mongolia about the time of the First World War. It was excellent material documenting these nation’s way of life before the turmoil of the succeeding decades. What was particular poignant was the footage of Buddhist monks in a Mongolian lamasery. When the Communists took power, these were closed down and the monks martyred. About 15,000 were killed by the Communists. Now part of Mongolia was indeed annexed by the Soviet Union, but this also occurred in the independent part. So, Stalin was clearly not responsible, or not wholly responsible, for the atrocities committed there.

Middle Eastern Ethnic Violence and the Genocides of Stalin

In fact, some historians do consider that Stalin’s cultural background did play a role in the horror of the Gulags. The crucial factor here, however, is not his religious background, but the clan and tribal orientation of Georgian culture and society, and indeed through the peoples of the Caucasus. The Caucasus has been called ‘the mountain of tongues’ because of the wide variety of languages and dialects spoken there. There has been a history of fierce nationalist violence between the various peoples of the Caucasus. Stalin’s began his revolutionary career as a Georgian nationalist, taking the codename ‘Koba’ after the Georgian people’s great national hero, who fought for their country against the invading Turks. It’s been suggested that Stalin’s slaughter of whole families, and even whole nations, comes from this background in nationalist violence, in which clan feuding, and the slaughter of the relatives of one’s enemies as part of the feud, was practiced. Stalin applied this tactic of clan violence at the level of whole nations.

In fact state action against, including the exile and extermination of opposing subject nations, had been a policy of the Turkish and Persian Empires that dominated the area. The Turkish conquest of the Balkans in the Middle Ages included the mass deportation of the Turks subject peoples. This use of mass exile was a distinctive feature of the absolute nature of Turkish rule: ‘Equally characteristic of absolutist rule was the employment of mass deportation. Albanians, Serbs and Greeks were transferred in vast numbers to Anatolia and – after 1453 – to Constantinople, while Anatolians (often nomads) were transplanted to Thrace, Bulgaria and the border zones of the Balkans.’ 6 The great Persian historian, Muhammad-Kazim, in his Name-yi ‘Alamara-yi Nadiry, the Book of the World-Ruling Nadir, documents various pogroms against and the exile of various ethnic groups, such as the Tatars in Merv c. 1725-6. 7 This use of mass terror against subject nations continued into late 19th and early 20th century, when it culminated in the Armenian massacres of 1915, when 750,000 to 1.8 million Armenians were murdered by the Ottoman Turks in 1915. 8 The inaction of the European powers and their complete lack of interest in protecting the Armenians convinced the Nazi leadership that the great powers would also be completely indifferent over the fate of the Jews when they planned the Holocaust. Given Stalin’s own background in the Caucasus, it’s possible that the Armenian atrocities similarly convinced him of the effectiveness of genocide as an instrument of state policy.

Lenin as Founder of Communist Tyranny 

Hitchen’s and Harris’ assertion that Stalin’s atrocities came from his Eastern Orthodoxy is also similar to the Marxist and Trotskyite claim that the brutality and repression of institutional Soviet Communism was solely the result of Stalin’s psychology, rather than the product of Communism. According to this view, Lenin was the great hero who brought freedom and equality to the Soviet people, until his ideas and system was corrupted by Stalin. The socialist state created by Lenin was then twisted into a ’state capitalist’ dictatorship.

The problem with this is that, while Lenin wasn’t the monster that Stalin was, he was certainly no democrat. Lenin established the policy of ‘democratic centralism’ which severely curtailed democratic discussion in the Communist Party, made the former Soviet Empire a one-party state, and began the creation of the labour camps that expanded so rapidly under Stalin. Contrary to the depiction of the Russian Revolution presented by the brilliant Russian cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein in his film October, the 1917 revolution wasn’t a mass uprising. It was a military coup against a democratically elected government, led by Kerensky. The biggest party in the duma – the Russian parliament – at the time were the Kadets, or Constitutional Democrats. They stood for the extension of the franchise to the ordinary people, and improving conditions for the workers and peasants, as well as welfare reforms. They were liberals, or left liberals, but not Marxists. During the coup, the Communist troops surrounded the duma and prevent the delegates from taking their seats, thus seizing power. The use of force to seize and legitimate power was thus a feature of the regime from its foundation.

Lenin also deliberately curtailed freedom of speech within the Communist through the institution of ‘democratic centralism’. This meant the process by which the free discussion of ideas on a particular topic was only possible when the leadership invited it, such as when a particular problem needed addressing, but no policy had yet been formulated to tackle it. Once the leadership made a decision, however, no further discussion was permissible. Lenin created this policy in order to centralise power in the Communist Party, and prevent the factionalism that had divided the Socialist Revolutionaries. These had been the main Russian revolutionary movement. They were agrarian socialists, rather like the Populist Party in America but without the racism. However, despite their use of violence and assassination, the Socialist Revolutionaries were deeply divided. Lenin felt this had hampered their effectiveness as a revolutionary organisation. To prevent the nascent Communist party suffering the same fate, Lenin established democratic centralism to ensure a rigid party discipline.

As for the labour camps, these too were a creation of Lenin. After the Revolution Soviet Russia experienced a famine. As an emergency measure, the government began requisitioning supplies of food. Hoarders were strictly punished. A group of 100 peasants were found guilty of hoarding food, and sentenced to imprisonment in a labour camp in the Russian north. This marked the beginning of Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Gulag Archipelago’.

Pre-Communist Origins of Soviet State Propaganda and Secret Police

Other authoritarian features of the regime were taken over from Kerensky’s government. Kerensky himself was well aware of the propaganda value of the cinema. Indeed, his government created a system of mobile cinemas that travelled the country showing propaganda movies for his regime. Lenin took this over, similar fashioning Soviet cinema as the instrument of state propaganda. Kerensky’s regime had also included a secret police, ultimately derived from the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, led by Felix Dzherzinsky, whose job was to guard the regime from counter-revolutionary activity. Lenin took this over too, and made Dzherzinsky the head of the new, Soviet secret police. Thus the instruments of repression Stalin used were inherited from previous regimes, including Lenin’s.

Constitutional Weakness of Pre-Fascist and Communist Nations 

Historians examining the rise of the Communist dictatorship in Russia have noticed parallels with other dictatorships, including the Fascist tyrannies of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. These common features are considered to be the crucial elements in the creation and perpetuation of these regimes. Common to both the Communist and Fascist dictatorships was the use of military force to seize power. Both Germany and Russia were constitutionally very weak, with very little democratic tradition, thus enabling the nascent democracies in those nations to be overthrown by its determined enemies. Stalin’s soviet dictatorship was thus the product the country’s general consititional weakness and the use of military force by secular regimes to enforce their power, rather than just the grotesque psychology of Stalin himself.

Authoritarianism and 19th Century German Constitutional Theory

One can also trace the authoritarianism of Soviet Communism back to Marx himself and the 19th century German political philosophy. Political philosophers have suggested that there is a difference between British and German philosophical views on constitutional theory. British political theory tended to view the state as a system of checks and balances to prevent one element in the state gaining too much power at the expense of the others, thus preserving their freedom. German political philosophy, on the other hand, is held to view the state as an administrative machine, and is less concerned with preserving the freedom of its citizens than with the efficient operation of that machine in governing society. This view is probably overstated, however. 19th century German constitutional theory certainly believed in the separation of power in the state, and the operation of checks and balances characteristic of British and American constitutional theory. This system was, however, limited by the power of the Wilhelminian monarchy, a fact brilliantly sent up by the German radical, Adolf Glasbrenner, in his satirical essay, Konschtitution. Deliberately written in the Berlin dialect as a father’s explanation of the German constitution to his son, the piece satirises the situation with the statement ‘Constitution, that is the separation of power. The king does what he wants, and the people, they do, what the king wants.’ 9 Nevertheless German 19th century political theory didn’t quite see the state as the monolithic governmental machine as some have considered it did.

There were also strongly authoritarian tendencies within the German Social Democrats in the 19th century. Historians of German socialism in this period have noted the strongly authoritarian nature of Ferdinand Lasalles leadership of the party. However, by the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th the German Social Democrats were far less rigid in their party discipline. Lenin, with his absolute insistence on the revolutionary struggle, could not understand how the notorious reformist, Eduard Bernstein, retained his party membership. When, during a visit to Germany, the German Social Democrat’s leading political theorist, Karl Kautsky, explained to him that they allowed dissent and discussion even of fundamental issues like that in the German party, Lenin went berserk, hurling a string of invective at him. Before then, Lenin had had great admiration for the German Social Democrats. Afterwards he had very little to say in their favour. Arguably, this shows the origin of the dictatorial nature of Russian communism as due less to the nature of German socialism, and more to the rigid and doctrinaire attitude of Lenin.

Revolutionary Leader as Strong Man 

In fact you can also see in Lenin as well as Stalin the insistence that the ruler should be personally a strong man of iron constitution. Stalin was an assumed name, meaning ‘man of steel’. Stalin’s real name was Iosip Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. He took the name ‘Stalin’ as a deliberate statement of his personal strength and to symbolise his strong leadership. Lenin similarly believed that the true revolutionary was a man of iron following the dictum of earlier Russian revolutionaries that the true revolutionaries should physically toughen himself, metaphorically recommending that he should sleep on a bed of nails.

Sense of Personal Inadequacy Cause of Stalin’s Brutality

In fact some psychiatrists and historians have also seen the origin of Stalin’s brutality in a sense of inferiority, supposedly shared by other dictators who were similarly less than physically imposing. Stalin, like Hitler, Mussolini and Napoleon, was short, though he attempted to disguise this by wearing great coats too large for him, and selective camera work in photographs. Mussolini similarly tried to disguise his lack of height by a variety of tricks, and literally stood on soap boxes when haranguing the crowd during Fascist rallies. These were then airbrushed out in official photographs of the occasion. Stalin was also physically disabled – he had a withered arm. The German psychiatrist Adler considered that Stalin’s dominating urge to power came from a sense of ‘organ inferiority’ due to his disability and short stature. Stalin’s ruthless acquisition of power and massive destruction of human life was an attempt to compensate for this feeling of inferiority. The crucial factor in the creation of Stalin’s authoritarian and dominating personality was his sense of personal inadequacy, not his religious upbringing.

Genocide in Writings of Marx and Engels

However, one can go further and see the genocidal elements of Stalin’s regime in some of the very writings of Marx and Engels. Marx and Engels, as Hegelians, saw the dialectical process as leading society from lower levels of culture and civilisation to successively higher stages of development before culminating in socialism and finally world communism. Although bitterly critical of capitalism, they enthusiastically embraced as a liberating force from feudalism. They also took over Herder’s notion of ‘historic states’. True states were only those which had a history behind it. Thus, Marx and Engels were supportive of the desires of Polish revolutionaries to gain independence for their country, as Poland had had a history as an independent nation. Engels in his 1847 speech commemorating 17th anniversary of the Polish revolution of 1830 stated ‘German princes have profited from the partition of Poland and German solideries are still exercising oppression in Galicia and Posen. It must be the concern of us Germans, above all, of us German democrats, to remove this stain from our nation.’ 10

They were, however, bitterly opposed to the national aspirations of some of the other Slavonic peoples, whom they saw as not possessing a historic identity and thus excluded from the process of historic development towards higher stages of civilisation. These nations, like Scots Gaels and the Celtic Bretons in France, represented a lower stage of civilisation that should rightly become extinct as they were absorbed and assimilated into more advanced peoples. ‘There is no country in Europe that does not possess, in some remote corner, at least one remnant-people, left over from an earlier population, forced back and subjugated by the nation which later became the repository of historical development. These remnants of a nation, mercilessly crushed, as Hegel said, by the course of history, this national refuse, is always the fanatical representative of the counter-revolution and remains so until it is completely exterminated or de-nationalized, as its whole existence is itself a protest against a great historical revolution.

In Scotland, for example, the Gaels, supporters fot he Stuarts from 1640 to 1745.

In France the Bretons, supporters fo the Bourbons from 1792 to 1800.

In Spain the Basques, supporters of Don Carlos.

In Austria the pan-Slav South Slavs, who are nothing more than the national refuse of a thousand years of immensely confused development.’ 11 

Engels himself was vehemently opposed to the nationalist campaigns by these Slav peoples during the turmoil of 1848, the ‘year of revolutions’. He saw them as constituting a threat to true revolutionary socialism, because of what he viewed as these societies’ socially backward nature, and urged their suppression in chilling, even genocidal terms. He considered that the Slav nationalist campaigns in 1848 would lead to a global war which would exterminate the Slav nations utterly: ‘The general war which will then break out will scatter this Slav Sonderbund, and annihilate all these small  pig-headed nations even to their very names.

The next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance.’ 12

‘We reply to the sentimental phrases about brotherhood which are offered to us here in the name of the most cuonter-revolutionary nations in Europe that hatred of the Russians was, and still is, the first revolutionary passion of the Germans; that since the revolution a hatred of the Czechs and the Croats has been added to this, and that, in common with the Poles and the Magyars, we can only secure the revolution against these Slav peoples by the most decisive acts of terrorism. We now know where the enemies of the revolution are concentrated: in Russia and in the Slav lands of Austria; and no phrases, no references to an indefinite democratic future of these lands will prevent us from treating our enemies as enemies … Then we shall fight ‘an implacable life-and-death-struggle’ with Slavdom, which has betrayed the revolution; a war of annihilation and ruthless terrorism, not in the interests of Germany but in the interests of the revolution!’ 13 Thus Engels himself advocated a policy of genocide in the interests of the revolution, a policy which Stalin ruthlessly implemented in his regime of terror.

Scientific Socialism and the Rejection of Moral Sentiment

One factor which may have facilitated the acceptance of this policy amongst Stalin’s colleagues in the Communist party was the ’scientific’ nature of Marxism and its rejection of moral theory as the basis of revolutionary action and sentiment. Many of the non-Marxist European radicals and socialists had come to their views from a profound sense of moral outrage at the poverty, squalor and oppression experienced by the poor in the Europe of the time, rather than from any commitment to a philosophical or economic theory. The great British Socialist and leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, told an interviewer that he had absolutely no interest in Marx’s theory of surplus value. Russian Marxists, on the other hand, like Lenin, saw Marxism as superior to the other forms of socialism because it was based on what they saw as objective fact – economic laws and the dialectic of history – rather than moral sentiment, and sneered at those socialists who did base their socialism on a moral critique of society. This is not to say that they didn’t have a moral sense, but it was circumscribed by their sense of the impersonal movement of history, economics and society that legitimated the revolutionary struggle aside from or against moral concerns. This sense that they were acting from entirely objective, ’scientific’ principles, principles which would inevitably lead to a better society, acted to suppress their moral instincts that revolted at the horrors they inflicted.

Conclusion 

Thus, despite the superficial trappings of religious ritual around Lenin, the atrocities of the Stalin era had their basis in the authoritarian nature of the Russian Communist party created by Lenin; an apparatus of state repression and propaganda inherited from Tsarism and Kerensky; a history of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe and the Middle East; the establishment of the true revolutionary as a physically strong man, complemented by Stalin’s own ruthless urge to power through a sense of personal inadequacy; and an advocacy of genocide by one of the founders of Marxism, Friedrich Engels himself, coupled with a notion of scientific objectivity that rejected morality in favour of impersonal societal forces as the basis for political action and commitment. This was further exacerbated by a political ideology that saw individuals as unimportant and which viewed the collective group or interest – the working class and the nation as a whole – as the centre of moral concern to whose interests the individual could be ruthlessly sacrificed.

Rather than Stalin’s atrocities arising from Christianity, they came from the brutal tactics of secular rulers in the Middle East, and authoritarian, genocidal ideologies within Russian Communism itself, based on the ideas of that ideology’s founder, magnified to truly horrific levels by Stalin’s own personal paranoia and brutality. The irony here is that Marx declared himself to be a Humanist, and Soviet Communists viewed Marxism as the only true Humanism.  

Notes

1. J.M. Yinger, ‘Secular Alternatives to Religion’ in Whitfield Foy, ed., The Religious Quest: A Reader (London, Routledge 1978), p. 548.

2. Yinger, ‘Secular Alternatives’, in Foy, Religious Quest, p. 547.

3. Yinger, ‘Secular Alternatives’, in Foy, Religious Quest, p. 547.

4. Yinger, ‘Secular Alternatives’ in Foy, Religious Quest, p. 548.

5. Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (London, Penguin Books 1964), p. 156.

6. Daniel Waley, Later Medieval Europe: From St. Louis to Luther (London, Longman 1985), p. 166.

7. N.D. Miklukho-Maklaya, ‘Introduction’, in Muhammad-Kazim, Name-yi ‘Alamara-yi Nadiry (Miroykrashayushaya Nadirova Kniga), volume 1, (Orientalist Institute of the Soviet Academy of Science, Moscow 1960), p. 6.

8. ‘Armenia’ in Andrew Wilson and Nina Bachkatov, Russia Revised: An Alphabetical Key to the Soviet Collapse and the New Republics (London, Andre Deutsch 1992), p. 17.

9. Adolf Glasbrenner, ‘ Konschtitution’ in Florian Vassen, ed., Die Deutsche Literature in Text und Darstellung: Vormarz (Stuttgart, Philipp Reklam 1979), p. 230. (My translation).

10. David Fernback, ed., Karl Marx: The Revolutions of 1848 (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1973), p. 100.

11. Friedrich Engels, ‘The Magyar Struggle, in Fernbach, ed., Karl Marx, p. 222.

12. Engels, ‘Magyar Struggle’, in Fernbach, Karl Marx, pp. 225-226.

13. Engels, ‘Democratic Pan-Slavism’, in Fernbach, ed., Karl Marx, p. 244.

Dawkins: I’m a Cultural Christian

Last week Richard Dawkins announced that he was ‘a cultural Christian’ who liked singing carols as much as anybody else. He denied wishing to ban Christmas, and stated that he had no intention of removing Britain’s Christian heritage. The danger of that, according to Dawkins, comes from other religions, not from atheists. Frank’s already blogged about this at Atheism Sucks, and I’ve left a few comments there. However, considering what an apparent volte face this appears to be, I thought I’d go into it on here as well, especially as Mattghg has particularly asked what I make of it all.

 I have to say I’m not impressed. For the first part of the statement – that Dawkins is ‘a cultural Christian’ who likes singing carols, this appears to me to be mostly true. The religious scholars and philosophers who have investigated Humanism have pointed out that for the most part its morality is based very definitely on Christianity. It diverges from Christianity in its sexual morality – premarital sex and abortion are regarded as acceptable, but broadly it conforms to Christian moral principles. As for Dawkins’ comment that he likes singing Christmas carols as much as anyone else, well, I’ve no doubt he does. Daniel C. Dennett also, apparently, has his atheist friends gather for a ‘Christmas sing-song’.

At another level, Dawkins’ description of himself as such is false, and there seems to be an element of deception in it, of what Rabbinical Law describes as ’stealing the mind’. This ’stealing the mind’ or genebath daath has been defined as ‘misrepresentation of the truth, such as is practisd by the confidence trickster who seeks to influence his victim to think or to act against his own interest or what would ahve been his better judgement.’ 1 Dawkins’ tactic towards Christianity and religion in general is to try to keep its adherents culturally secure by not excluding from society while doing his level best to undermine their faith. He has stated that he likes the British system of a state church and the bishops of the Anglican Church sitting in the House of Lords, as with it British Christians don’t feel excluded from government as has occurred in America with the separation of Church and State. My guess is that this attitude is merely a cultural sop to keep believers happy. His real attitude to religion is shown in his unrelenting hostility to it, demands for the closure of faith schools and denunciation of a religious upbringing for children as a form of child abuse.

Now organised atheism in Britain and America has attempted to remove these nations’ Christian heritage. There have been several cases in America where atheists have campaigned against the public celebrations of Christian festivals, like Christmas, by the state authorities or in schools. Similar cases have been brought in Britain, such as by the elderly lady I’ve already mentioned who tried having Christmas banned a few years ago because it infringed her human rights as an atheist. There was also the campaign by a Humanist group to have a cross removed from a crematorium under the pretext that this would be offensive to other faiths. Now the crematorium in that instance was secular, but it had been a church, and the crucifix was a legacy from the period when it had served the Christian community. The council that received the complaint from the irate atheists noted that no non-Christian group using the crematorium had complained about the crucifix. It had only been the Humanists that had complained.

Now this says something about the process of secularisation in general. Various councils in Britain have attempted to secularise Christmas in the past on the pretext that Britain is a multicultural society, and some non-Christian religious groups would find Christmas offensive. Birmingham did this a few years ago when they replaced Christmas with a ‘Winterfest’. Again, one of the comments about this process is that very few non-Christians had complained. Quite often when this occurs the local paper will do a straw poll and interview people in the street. The Muslims and Hindus canvassed have no objection to the celebration of Christmas at all. In the case of Islam, although Muslims don’t view Jesus as the Son of God, they do revere Him as ‘the purest of the prophets’, believe in the Virgin birth, and, at least in Shia Islam, see Him as inspired by the Holy Spirit. Given this high, but not divine, conception of our Lord, the celebration of Christmas is certainly not an affront to Islam. Yet whenever objections to Christmas, or any other Christian festival or celebration, is raised, it is always under the pretext that this will be offensive to other faiths. My own attitude here is that this attitude is partly from a genuine fear of giving offence amongst some governmental groups, and partly a tactical attitude by secular groups or individuals who would like to have religion removed completely from the public sphere, and the possibility of offending non-Christian individuals is merely a pretext for doing so.

Dawkins’ comment also touches on some quite deep issues of cultural ownership. Unlike the other, non-Christian faiths, Christianity seems to be a target for ridicule in the West because, while these other religions are still perceived as marginal and not part of the general British cultural heritage, because Christianity has been part of British and Western culture for so long it is still perceived as being part of the heritage of those who no longer believe, and have no qualms about sneering at it or wishing to undermine it. Dawkins clearly believes he has the right to sing Christmas carols because of his membership in the culture which produced them, whereas, I suspect, he would be far more hesitant to sing some of the classic Hebrew hymns to the Lord, such as the piyyutim in the Jewish prayer book, or recite the Qu’ran. These aren’t part of general Western culture, and so people outside those faith communities – Judaism and Islam – rightly feel they have no claim over them. But this attitude is becoming increasingly uncomfortable as society becomes more secularised. Christians in Britain and elsewhere do feel themselves to be a minority that isn’t given the same respect as Islam, Judaism or Hinduism, for example. From this perspective, Dawkins’ designation of himself as a ‘cultural Christian’ is false, as he has repudiated Christianity and so has no claim on its cultural products.

I’d also strongly argue that his conception of ‘culture’ and ’heritage’ is itself deficient. He seems to view culture largely from the standpoint of aesthetics, as a system of literary, pictorial and musical signs and motifs. So he will say, as he did when promoting his book, Unweaving the Rainbow, that Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion will move him to tears.  I’m sure that’s true, but culture and heritage go beyond simple aesthetics. From the anthropological perspective, culture is the defining characteristic of society as a whole, affecting how its members view the world and each other, the way they dress and behave. Clearly Dawkins is not a cultural Christian in this sense, as he is trying to attack the cultural role of Christianity in this broader, societal sense. If he was sincere about preserving the Christian heritage, I doubt he would have made such sneering comments about the British Airways staff member who sued for religious discrimination because she had been banned from wearing her crucifix outside her uniform. After all, if people’s heritage is inviolable, then from a purely secular, multicultural standpoint the lady had every right to wear something that was culturally significant to her. 

This attitude also extends to Christian-based school assemblies. Under British law, schools are required to hold assemblies in the morning which have a basis in Christianity. Now I know some militant atheists who are vehemently opposed to this. However, if Christianity is seen merely as a system of literary and aesthetic signs with a moralising message, there can be no possible objection to this. After all, the Christians of the Middle Ages took over the ancient Pagan literature and read and enjoyed them as literature. Durign the Renaissance, Classical pagan myths were incorporated into European art, literature and music, frequently with a moralising purpose. These pagan myths were seen as part of the general cultural heritage of Europe, and were so taken over and used, even though the members of that Christian society did not believe they existed and would have severely disapproved of attempts to revive their worship.

Thus Dawkins’ claim to be a ‘cultural Christian’ who is no threat to the country’s Christian heritage is confused, deceptive and contradictory. One could argue that if he’s serious about preserving Christian cultural heritage, then he should actually support the faith schools he so vehemently hates, as in it are being brought up the next generation of the real custodians of that culture and heritage.

As for the general principles of cultural ownership, my own view is that there are degrees of ownership here, comparable to ownership and usufruct in law. Usufruct is the right to use someone else’s property. For example, in the Middle Ages a peasant cultivator may have had the right to pasture his animals and gather wood and mast for his pigs on his lord’s land. He didn’t own the land, but nevertheless had certain rights to use it. At the level of cultural property, one could argue that through membership of the general European culture whose Christian members produced the great religious works of art and literature that atheists like Dawkins admire, such as St. Matthew’s Passion, the general population certainly has some rights to use it. However, true ownership and guardianship of that culture lies with that faith group. In this case, it’s Christianity. And however much Dawkins might admire some of its cultural products, he’s repudiated Christianity and so has relinquished any deep claim to it or participation in it as a cultural force.

So Dawkins’ claim to be a ‘cultural Christian’ really is actually quite shallow, and deliberately intended to present his bitter opposition to Christianity as far less threatening than it is. Well, there’s a passage in Proverbs which tells you to beware when your enemy puts his arm around you. It’s what Dawkins has been metaphorically trying to do with this comment. The best course of action in this instance is not to be deceived and push him away. 

Notes

1. Isidore Epstein, Judaism (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1959), p. 148.

Rational Perspectives

Rational Perspectives

Posted by Beast Rabban

Richard Dawkins – Enemy of Reason?

Over the next few weeks, Channel 4 in Britain are screening a two-part series, Enemies of Reason, in which Richard Dawkins puts aside his career attacking religion for the moment to go after ‘astrology, tarot, psychics, homeopathy and other forms of gullibility’. It’s fair to say that the profusion of New Age and occult practices has been a concern of very many people, not just atheists, who are afraid that unscrupulous frauds are exploiting people’s natural desire for contact with the divine and transcendent to enrich themselves. There have been a number of cases in cities like Philadelphia and elsewhere where the city authorities have attempted to prosecute fraudulent and exploitative psychics. However, while Dawkins and his supporters believe that he is qualified, as an exponent of atheistic reason, to do what James Randi and CSICOP have been doing for the past three decades or so, it’s questionable whether Dawkins himself is any less superstitious or unreasonable than the New Age hippies he’s now targetting.

Indeed, if you’re looking for an ‘enemy of reason’, then in very many ways Dawkins himself fits the bill. Here’s why.

 Firstly, Dawkins’ own worldview is philosophically threadbare. It’s a throwback to the Logical Positivists of the 1930s. Adopting a rigidly Naturalistic approach to philosophy, they declared that only empirical science was rational and derided ‘disreputable’ metaphysics. Dawkins’ oft-repeated pronouncements that religion has no object could have come straight from A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer declared that only language about concrete objects could be meaningful, and so religious language about God was absurd, meaningless. And where Ayer went, Dawkins follows.

However, the very rationality of the universe is problematic for philosophers. The British philosopher, Roger Trigg, in his book, Rationality and Science, points out that the very success of science in explaining the cosmos requires a philosophical explanation that has to be apart and beyond science itself. For theists raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the intelligibility of the cosmos isn’t surprising. The Bible describes God creating the world through His transcendent Wisdom – the Logos, or Word – of the Bible. Sir Francis Bacon, the pioneering theorist of the scientific method, argued that the world was rationally ordered by God’s divine reason. It was intelligible, and so, following the Medieval doctrine of the Two Books, nature could be read by Christians, and would reveal something of the nature of its author.

 Bacon wasn’t alone either, and his views in that regard weren’t revolutionary or even particularly innovative. St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Contra Gentiles has a chapter setting forth the view that ‘the consideration of creatures is useful for instruction of faith’. He recognised that the philosopher and the theologian saw nature in different ways, yet nevertheless stated that knowledge of creatures served to destroy errors concerning God. The rational exploration of the nature of the created world was a product of medieval theology. Indeed, historians of philosophy have noted that by the 14th century, 40 per cent of the medieval university arts syllabus was devoted to questions of natural philosophy. Medieval theologians debating the nature of God used the same Aristotelian logic natural philosophers used when examining nature, and were strongly interested in the way the cosmos operated. The quodlibet debates in which theological scholars argued about the nature of God are permeated with scientific discussions which are actually tangential to the main theological points in question. God Himself was considered to be supremely rational and conceived in the same logical terms. The British astronomer John Barrow, in his book, Theories of Everything, pointed out that if you removed the word ‘God’ from much medieval philosophy and replaced it with ‘mathematics’, the passages would still make sense. As well as being an Age of Faith, some historians and philosophers have argued instead that the Middle Ages were also an age of reason, before that concept was appropriated by the atheist philosophes of the Enlightenment.

Yet Dawkins ignores all this, and simply repeats the tired, and increasingly falsified view of antichristian historians like Draper that the Middle Ages saw the suppression of science, and science and religion are implacable enemies. Yet Dawkins’ scientism is itself unable to explain the rationality of the cosmos.

 Now the Logical Positivists themselves wrestled with that problem, and eventually rejected their narrow focus of empirical science. As Karl Popper realised, to explain the success of science, you had to return to metaphysics. Even A.J. Ayer himself towards the end of his life admitted he was wrong. Yet Dawkins himself carries on taking the intelligibility of the cosmos for granted. When challenged on this point, about science’s need for metaphysics to make sense of science’s very success, Dawkins’ admirers rather than accept the point simply fall back on a flat denial of such a need. Instead of presenting a set of arguments against metaphysics or God, they merely repeat that the existence of God isn’t scientific, and ask rhetorically why you should want to believe in God to move beyond science.

 Now this is irrational. You aren’t supposed to want to seek a deeper explanation. Just accept that the universe is intelligible. Don’t ask why. Just believe science is sufficient to explain everything, even when it needs an explanation for itself.

Then there is the nature of Dawkins’ fervent belief in evolution. Dawkins has stated that even if there were no good evidence for Darwinism, he would still believe in it, as it is to him the best explanation around. This is actually a statement, not of scientific scepticism, but of blind faith. He has admitted that even if the evidence were not good – and supposedly even if the evidence actually contradicted Darwinism – he would still believe it, as it is to him the best explanation. Well, it explains the venom with which he attacked Dr. Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution in his review, and the paucity of any arguments based on science. Dawkins’ attitude to Darwinism is one based on faith, not sceptical reason, which could lead to its rejection.

The point becomes clearer when you find out how he claims he turned to Darwinism. He was, he said, raised as an Anglican (Episcopalian) Christian. Then when he hit his early teens and started to find out about the other religions in the world, he started having doubts. He was then a pantheist for a little while, before reading Darwin when he was 15. It was this experience which led to him to reject theism when he ‘really understood Darwin’. Thus, he believed in Darwin as a solution a metaphysical crisis of religious worldview, rather than as a simple scientific hypothesis.

And it could be argued that Dawkins’ own conception of evolution is essentially superstitious. It’s a religious abuse, a substitute for God, an idol, rather than a rational worldview. I’ll explain why.

 For theists who accept evolution, Natural Selection is merely the process by which God creates the wonderful profusion of creatures that populate our splendid, beautiful world. Only God creates. But for Naturalists like E.O. Wilson, who admitted wishing to set up a religion of evolution, and indeed Dawkins, evolution becomes a kind of God-substitute as Creation itself. One can draw a comparison between this view and the ancient Israelites’ explanation for the rise of Paganism among the peoples around them. There’s one passage in the Apocrypha where the origins of paganism is considered to be due to pagans seeing the order of the stars and their movements, and natural processes elsewhere on the Earth, and seeing them as gods in themselves, rather than God’s creation. Dawkins and Wilson effectively do the same, mistaking the ordered process of creation in evolution with notions of transcendence. In doing so, they’ve created an idol. And as the British philosopher Mary Midgeley amply demonstrates in her book, Evolution as a Religion, the language in which evolutionary scientists like Dawkins, Wilson, Jacques Monod, Theodosius Dobzhansky and co is absolutely saturated with religious motifs and assumptions.

 Dawkins himself makes no secret about the intensely mystical feelings he has when contemplating the cosmos, though he strongly denies that these are in any way ‘religious’. In answer to a question from the audience in 1997 when he appeared at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature promoting his boo

Rational Perspectives

Rational Perspectives

Posted by Beast Rabban

Richard Dawkins – Enemy of Reason?

Over the next few weeks, Channel 4 in Britain are screening a two-part series, Enemies of Reason, in which Richard Dawkins puts aside his career attacking religion for the moment to go after ‘astrology, tarot, psychics, homeopathy and other forms of gullibility’. It’s fair to say that the profusion of New Age and occult practices has been a concern of very many people, not just atheists, who are afraid that unscrupulous frauds are exploiting people’s natural desire for contact with the divine and transcendent to enrich themselves. There have been a number of cases in cities like Philadelphia and elsewhere where the city authorities have attempted to prosecute fraudulent and exploitative psychics. However, while Dawkins and his supporters believe that he is qualified, as an exponent of atheistic reason, to do what James Randi and CSICOP have been doing for the past three decades or so, it’s questionable whether Dawkins himself is any less superstitious or unreasonable than the New Age hippies he’s now targetting.

Indeed, if you’re looking for an ‘enemy of reason’, then in very many ways Dawkins himself fits the bill. Here’s why.

 Firstly, Dawkins’ own worldview is philosophically threadbare. It’s a throwback to the Logical Positivists of the 1930s. Adopting a rigidly Naturalistic approach to philosophy, they declared that only empirical science was rational and derided ‘disreputable’ metaphysics. Dawkins’ oft-repeated pronouncements that religion has no object could have come straight from A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer declared that only language about concrete objects could be meaningful, and so religious language about God was absurd, meaningless. And where Ayer went, Dawkins follows.

However, the very rationality of the universe is problematic for philosophers. The British philosopher, Roger Trigg, in his book, Rationality and Science, points out that the very success of science in explaining the cosmos requires a philosophical explanation that has to be apart and beyond science itself. For theists raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the intelligibility of the cosmos isn’t surprising. The Bible describes God creating the world through His transcendent Wisdom – the Logos, or Word – of the Bible. Sir Francis Bacon, the pioneering theorist of the scientific method, argued that the world was rationally ordered by God’s divine reason. It was intelligible, and so, following the Medieval doctrine of the Two Books, nature could be read by Christians, and would reveal something of the nature of its author.

 Bacon wasn’t alone either, and his views in that regard weren’t revolutionary or even particularly innovative. St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Contra Gentiles has a chapter setting forth the view that ‘the consideration of creatures is useful for instruction of faith’. He recognised that the philosopher and the theologian saw nature in different ways, yet nevertheless stated that knowledge of creatures served to destroy errors concerning God. The rational exploration of the nature of the created world was a product of medieval theology. Indeed, historians of philosophy have noted that by the 14th century, 40 per cent of the medieval university arts syllabus was devoted to questions of natural philosophy. Medieval theologians debating the nature of God used the same Aristotelian logic natural philosophers used when examining nature, and were strongly interested in the way the cosmos operated. The quodlibet debates in which theological scholars argued about the nature of God are permeated with scientific discussions which are actually tangential to the main theological points in question. God Himself was considered to be supremely rational and conceived in the same logical terms. The British astronomer John Barrow, in his book, Theories of Everything, pointed out that if you removed the word ‘God’ from much medieval philosophy and replaced it with ‘mathematics’, the passages would still make sense. As well as being an Age of Faith, some historians and philosophers have argued instead that the Middle Ages were also an age of reason, before that concept was appropriated by the atheist philosophes of the Enlightenment.

Yet Dawkins ignores all this, and simply repeats the tired, and increasingly falsified view of antichristian historians like Draper that the Middle Ages saw the suppression of science, and science and religion are implacable enemies. Yet Dawkins’ scientism is itself unable to explain the rationality of the cosmos.

 Now the Logical Positivists themselves wrestled with that problem, and eventually rejected their narrow focus of empirical science. As Karl Popper realised, to explain the success of science, you had to return to metaphysics. Even A.J. Ayer himself towards the end of his life admitted he was wrong. Yet Dawkins himself carries on taking the intelligibility of the cosmos for granted. When challenged on this point, about science’s need for metaphysics to make sense of science’s very success, Dawkins’ admirers rather than accept the point simply fall back on a flat denial of such a need. Instead of presenting a set of arguments against metaphysics or God, they merely repeat that the existence of God isn’t scientific, and ask rhetorically why you should want to believe in God to move beyond science.

 Now this is irrational. You aren’t supposed to want to seek a deeper explanation. Just accept that the universe is intelligible. Don’t ask why. Just believe science is sufficient to explain everything, even when it needs an explanation for itself.

Then there is the nature of Dawkins’ fervent belief in evolution. Dawkins has stated that even if there were no good evidence for Darwinism, he would still believe in it, as it is to him the best explanation around. This is actually a statement, not of scientific scepticism, but of blind faith. He has admitted that even if the evidence were not good – and supposedly even if the evidence actually contradicted Darwinism – he would still believe it, as it is to him the best explanation. Well, it explains the venom with which he attacked Dr. Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution in his review, and the paucity of any arguments based on science. Dawkins’ attitude to Darwinism is one based on faith, not sceptical reason, which could lead to its rejection.

The point becomes clearer when you find out how he claims he turned to Darwinism. He was, he said, raised as an Anglican (Episcopalian) Christian. Then when he hit his early teens and started to find out about the other religions in the world, he started having doubts. He was then a pantheist for a little while, before reading Darwin when he was 15. It was this experience which led to him to reject theism when he ‘really understood Darwin’. Thus, he believed in Darwin as a solution a metaphysical crisis of religious worldview, rather than as a simple scientific hypothesis.

And it could be argued that Dawkins’ own conception of evolution is essentially superstitious. It’s a religious abuse, a substitute for God, an idol, rather than a rational worldview. I’ll explain why.

 For theists who accept evolution, Natural Selection is merely the process by which God creates the wonderful profusion of creatures that populate our splendid, beautiful world. Only God creates. But for Naturalists like E.O. Wilson, who admitted wishing to set up a religion of evolution, and indeed Dawkins, evolution becomes a kind of God-substitute as Creation itself. One can draw a comparison between this view and the ancient Israelites’ explanation for the rise of Paganism among the peoples around them. There’s one passage in the Apocrypha where the origins of paganism is considered to be due to pagans seeing the order of the stars and their movements, and natural processes elsewhere on the Earth, and seeing them as gods in themselves, rather than God’s creation. Dawkins and Wilson effectively do the same, mistaking the ordered process of creation in evolution with notions of transcendence. In doing so, they’ve created an idol. And as the British philosopher Mary Midgeley amply demonstrates in her book, Evolution as a Religion, the language in which evolutionary scientists like Dawkins, Wilson, Jacques Monod, Theodosius Dobzhansky and co is absolutely saturated with religious motifs and assumptions.

 Dawkins himself makes no secret about the intensely mystical feelings he has when contemplating the cosmos, though he strongly denies that these are in any way ‘religious’. In answer to a question from the audience in 1997 when he appeared at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature promoting his book, Unweaving the Rainbow, he declared that science would in time take on the aspects of religion ‘but with a greater degree of truth’. That’s a very moot point.

So when Richard Dawkins steps onto the small screen next week to tell British viewers that anything vaguely supernatural is an affront to reason, it’s fair to say it’s going to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, as Dawkins himself is an exponent of irrationalism and, by the strict theological terminology of the Middle Ages, superstition. It’s something to think about the next time you see his eyes glaze over in awe as he starts praising Darwin.

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