Archive for the ‘Catholicism’ Category
Stephen Jay Gould, NOMA and a couple of popes
I’ve been making my way through my second collection of Stephen Jay Gould essays, Leonardo’s mountain of clams and the Diet of Worms, published in 1998, having read his 1993 collection, Eight little piggies, a couple of years ago, and I was surprised to come across ‘Non-overlapping magisteria’ as number 14 in the collection. I read it today. I’d heard that he promulgated his famous – or infamous, depending on your perspective – thesis on NOMA in a book called Rocks of Ages, so I wasn’t expecting such a treat, if I can put it that way, when I turned over the page to that essay.
As it turns out, Rocks of Ages, subtitled Science and religion in the fullness of life, was published in 1999, immediately after the collection I’m reading, and it presumably constitutes an elaboration and refinement of the earlier NOMA essay. So maybe one day I’ll get to that, but meanwhile I’m itching to get my teeth into this first ‘attempt’ – reminding myself of the original meaning of the term essai, in the hands of Montaigne.
Gould begins his essay with a story of a conversation he has, in the Vatican – half his luck – with a group of Jesuit priests who also happened to be professional scientists. The Jesuits are concerned with the talk of ‘Creation Science’ coming out of the US. One of them asks Gould:
‘Is evolution really in some kind of trouble, and if so what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both utterly satisfying and entirely overwhelming. Have I missed something?’
Gould assures them that this development, though big in the US due to the peculiarities of evangelical protestantism there, is quite localized and without intellectual substance. He wonders, in the essay, at the weirdness of an agnostic Jew ‘trying to reassure a group of priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief.’
This was the first point at which my (highly primed) sceptical sense was roused. First, the priest had been taught, or told, that no doctrinal conflict existed between Catholicism and evolution. One hardly gets the impression that he’s nutted this out for himself. What about the doctrine of the human soul? What about the absolutely central Judeo-Christian idea that humans were specially created in their god’s image? Can anybody honestly say that evolution casts no doubt upon these notions? To me, making such a claim would defy credibility. I mean, isn’t that precisely why so many Christians, of every denomination, have such difficulty with evolution? Second, Gould tells us that he was able to reassure the priests that evolution wasn’t under threat (fine, as far as it goes), and that it was ‘entirely consistent with religious belief’. Eh what? Did he show them or just tell them? Of course we get no detail on that.
Gould gives other examples of his fatherly reassurance, e.g. to Christian students, of the complete compatibility of Christian belief with evolution, which he tells us he ‘sincerely believes in’, but still without providing an argument. Finally he claims that, notwithstanding fundamentalism and biblical literalism, Christians by and large treat the Bible metaphorically. He seems to feel that this smooths away all incompatibilities. The six days of creation, ensoulment, original sin, humans in god’s image, salvation from sin through Jesus, his resurrection, his virgin birth, his miracles, etc etc, these are just stories. Is that what most Christians believe? Or just that some of them are stories, some of the time, for some believers? This question of literalism and metaphor is in fact a great can of worms that Gould doesn’t even glance into. It’s important, for isn’t literal truth also empirical truth, and doesn’t science have something to say about that?
In any case, having ‘established’, to his satisfaction, all this compatibility, Gould moves on to his central thesis:
The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise – science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains – for a great book tells us both that the truth can make us free, and that we will live in optimal harmony when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.
This is NOMA in a nutshell, together with some unobjectionable remarks about harmony, justice, mercy and humility, all vaguely associated with religion. Yet I’ve read a lot of history, and this has made me sceptical of the role of religion in promoting such values. If you examine sermons and priestly speeches through the centuries, you’ll find them very much parroting the ethics of their time – with a certain lag, given the inherent conservatism of most religious institutions. The Bible, that multifarious set of texts, is ideal for quote-mining for every Zeitgeist and Weltanschauung, but really we don’t need history to inform us that our ethical values don’t come from religion, a point made by many philosophers, anthropologists and cognitive psychologists. Religion is essentially about protection, hope and human specialness, all emanating from a non-worldly source, and all of these elements have been profoundly buffeted by the scientific developments of the last few centuries, precisely because the domains of scientific exploration and religious conviction overlap massively, if not completely. As Gould writes in another essay in this collection:
‘Sigmund Freud argued that scientific revolutions reach completion not when people accept the physical reconstruction of reality thus implied, but when they also own the consequences of this radically revised universe for a demoted view of human status. Freud claimed that all important scientific revolutions share the ironic property of deposing humans from one pedestal after another of previous self-assurance about our exalted cosmic status.’
Another, simpler way of putting this is that science – which after all is only the pursuit of reliable, verifiable knowledge – is perennially confronting us with our own contingency, while religions, and most particularly the Abrahamic monotheistic religions, seek desperately to keep us attached to a sense of our necessity, our centrality in God’s plan. It’s hard to imagine two activities on a more complete collision course.
Gould’s first essay on NOMA was apparently triggered by an announcement of Pope John Paul II to the effect that his Church endorsed evolutionary theory and found it compatible with Catholic dogma. This was much hyped in the media, and Gould considered it much ado about nothing, as it merely repeated, or so he thought, an earlier papal proclamation:
I knew that Pope Pius XII…. had made the primary statement in a 1950 encyclical entitled Humani Generis. I knew the main thrust of his message: Catholics could believe whatever science determined about the evolution of the human body, so long as they accepted that, at some time of his choosing, God had infused the soul into such a creature. I also knew that I had no problem with this argument – for, whatever my private beliefs about souls, science cannot touch such a subject and therefore cannot be threatened by any theological position on such a legitimately and intrinsically religious issue.
Now, it seems to me, and to many others, that this question of a soul, possessed only by humans, is an empirical question, unless the soul is to be treated as entirely metaphorical. If empirical, all our understanding of humans and other mammals, derived from evolution but also from zoology in general, tells against the existence of such an entity. We see clearly, and can map, through neurophysiology, genetics and other disciplines, the continuity of humans with other mammals, and with earlier hominids, and there is no trace of, or place for, a Homo sapiens soul. If metaphorical, the religious implications are enormous, for if the soul, which supposedly lives on after the body’s demise, were metaphorical, wouldn’t that make heaven, hell and the afterlife also metaphorical?
This is a real problem for the believers in such an entity, and a source of some amusement for non-believers. In a debate with Richard Dawkins a while back, George Pell, the Catholic archbishop of Sydney was apparently challenged on the exclusivity of the human soul and came up with the view that souls inhabit all living things but that the human soul was ‘infinitely more complex’ than those of other organisms. So now we know that white ants do indeed have souls, as well as blue-green algae and amoebae. This sounded like a physiological claim to me, and I wondered how well synchronised it was with official Catholic doctrine on the matter – or is that non-matter? It seemed much more likely that the good archbishop was making it up as he went along, just as Dawkins accuses such authorities of doing.
Gould, though, congratulates Pius XII, because he ‘had properly acknowledged and respected the separate domains of science and theology’. We get here a whiff of the authoritarian arrogance of Gould, which grates from time to time. He presents separate domains as virtually an established fact and ‘proper’, and so takes on the role of chiding those who don’t subscribe to it, because he himself has ‘great respect for religion’. He also claims, but without any evidence, that the majority of scientists think like him. It was a questionable claim in 1998, and is even more so in 2013.
Still, Gould recognises that there’s a problem, because, according to him, the two non-overlapping domains are not widely separated, like the USA and Australia, but share a troubled border, a la Pakistan and Afghanistan. This seems a concession, but it goes nowhere near far enough. Gould himself uncovers the problem while probing the detail of Pius’s Humani Generis, and finding that the fifties pope was rather less well-disposed towards evolution than he’d thought. What’s more, Pius seems aware of the conflict Gould is so keen to avoid, as he writes of ‘those questions which, although they pertain to the positive sciences, are nevertheless connected with the truths of the Christian faith.’ Pius elaborates on these questions by castigating claims, in particular as regards evolution, that might not be in keeping with ‘divine revelation’, which naturally he regards as some kind of truth. One of these truths is that ‘souls are immediately created by God’, which contradicts the evolutionary idea that all that is human is derived, through incremental moderation, from previously existing creatures. Gould provides a gloss on this by essentially claiming that Pius is patrolling the border between science and religion, intent on preserving the integrity of religious territory. I’m not convinced.
Gould then turns to the more recent statement on evolution by John Paul II. John Paul makes the point that in the 50 years or so since Human Generis, the strength of evolution as an explanatory theory has grown to the point that it’s pretty well unassailable. So he seems to have none of the qualms of Pius, yet still he makes empirical claims about matters ‘spiritual’ while claiming them not to be empirical, something which Gould prefers to obscure with a lot of self-congratulatory language about respect for ‘that other great magisterium’. Here is a slab of John Paul’s argument:
‘With man, then, we find ourselves in the presence of an ontological difference, an ontological leap, one could say. However, does not the posing of such ontological discontinuity run counter to that physical continuity which seems to be the main thread of research into evolution in the field of physics and chemistry? Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seem irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation.’
It’s a nice try, but the ontological difference described here is ‘just saying’. But the ‘just saying’ has a lot of religious energy behind it, because so much of monotheistic religion is tied up with human specialness, and even necessity. We are in the creator-god’s image, we’re the ultimate end-point of the universe, and other hubristic clap-trap. What John Paul is trying to ‘say into being’ is the spiritual realm, no less. The ‘spiritual transition’, the emergence of soul-stuff, is real but beyond scientific observation. Thus it is both empirical and non-empirical, which is impossible.
There’s a good reason why Gould’s claim about NOMA is bogus. All we have to do is look at what he claims these ‘magisteria’ cover. To quote Gould:
‘The net of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.’
That the second sentence in this quote is false should be obvious to everyone after only a moment’s reflection. The central thesis in all monotheistic religions is surely that their one and only god exists and is real. We can’t possibly be talking in metaphorical terms here. Thus, an empirical claim lies at the very heart of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and there’s just no way of arguing yourself out of this. The fact that this empirical claim appears to be unprovable doesn’t make it any less of an empirical claim. The statement ‘Unicorns exist’ is also an empirical claim that is essentially unprovable. We can be pretty certain that unicorns don’t exist on our planet, but how can we prove that a creature fitting that description has no existence in the whole universe, or the multiverse, if there is a multiverse?
What’s more, religion is much more about empiricism than it is about ‘moral meaning and value’, because what is absolutely central to the monotheisms is that moral meaning and value derive from that real and existent being, and as such are themselves real and existent. That’s certainly the point that William Lane Craig bangs on about in all his debates – the empirical reality of his god, and of the values this male being espouses and somehow bequeaths to us.
In fact, on reflection, the statement that ‘God exists’ is not quite of the same type as ‘Unicorns exist’. It’s much closer to the statement ‘Dark matter exists’. Unicorns can only be contingent entities – they may exist in some corner of the universe, but if they suddenly went extinct on the planet Gallifrey it would make little difference. However, dark matter is necessary, as far as I’m aware, to the standard model of the universe and its mass. That’s why the search is on, big-time, to find it, to identify it, to learn more about it. To the religious, their god is also necessary, and it becomes a matter of urgency to ‘find God’, to know him, to understand him, etc. That’s why proof of their god’s existence is important, and always will be. Of course, the religious obviously believe they already have the proof, but an increasing percentage of inhabitants of our western world are unimpressed with such claims.
the trend away from religiosity, or not – various countries, part 2
Okay, to continue my survey of religiosity in more or less arbitrarily selected nations. Most of this data comes from Wikipedia, which has a series of entries, ‘Religion in (name your country)’, so I haven’t bothered with the time consuming process of linking to every source.
Italy
As you might expect, with the ‘Papa’ nerve-rackingly nearby, most Italians identify as Catholic Christians – with recent polls ranging from nearly 92% to 77%. The 2005 Eurobarometer poll, quoted in my summaries of other countries, found that:
- 74% of Italian citizens responded that they believe there is a God;
- 16% answered that they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force;
- 6% answered that they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force.
Italy’s 1947 constitution guarantees freedom of religion, and under a revised accord with the Vatican in 1984, the disestablishment of the Catholic Church was made complete. However, the dominance of the Catholic church has continued to be problematic, with Protestants being persecuted even up to recent times. There have been protests against the displaying of Catholic symbols in state schools, with governments and courts evading the issue by claiming these are ‘cultural’ rather than ‘religious’ symbols. However, in an entry on freedom of religion in Italy, Wikipedia reports this:
In 2009 the European Court of Human Rights, in a case brought by an Italian mother who wanted her children to have a secular education, ruled against the display of crucifixes in the classrooms of Italian state schools. It found that ‘The compulsory display of a symbol of a given confession in premises used by the public authorities… restricted the right of parents to educate their children in conformity with their convictions’ and that it restricted the ‘right of children to believe or not to believe’.[3] This ruling was in marked contrast with the position of the Italian courts that had ruled in 2005 that crucifixes were allowed to be present in polling stations and, in 2006, that display of crucifixes in state schools was allowed on the basis that the crucifix symbolised core Italian social values.
The same Wikipedia entry states that according to a 2006 poll (but no details are given), four million Italians are atheist or agnostic, a much higher number than for any other religion apart from Christianity. We should also be sceptical that those identifying as Catholic are anything other than nominal Catholics.
Bulgaria
I’ve picked this country out at random as an Eastern European country. Needless to say, there’s no such thing as a typical Eastern European country. Bulgaria does have a religious question in its census, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, a variant of eastern orthodoxy, is the prevalent and traditional religion in the country, with 59.4% of the population identifying with it in the 2011 census. No previous censuses are recorded, sadly. Some 9.3% identified as atheists, and 21.8% didn’t answer the question. 7.8% identify with Islam, a result of years of Ottoman rule, and interestingly neither Protestants nor Roman Catholics can claim even 1% of the population. The number of Jews in Bulgaria is minuscule, and anti-Semitism appears to be rife. Also, the number of practising orthodox Christians is quite low, and likely falling, though I have no figures on that.
United Kingdom
I was born in Scotland, so this region still interests me, in spite of the transcendental cosmopolitan plane that I now inhabit. The situation there is much the same as in other western European countries – predominantly Christian but with church attendance dropping sharply in the late twentieth century and still declining, and with immigration bringing an increase in other religions, but from a very low base. Anglicanism became the established religion in England thanks to the shenanigans of Henry VIII, but Scotland has remained, at least until recently, largely Presbyterian. There’s been much talk about disestablishing the Anglican church in England in recent times. I think it’s inevitable. It has already been disestablished in Wales and Ireland. Wikipedia presents census figures for England for 2001 and 2011, which shows that identification with Christianity has dropped from 71.7% to 59.4% in 10 years – a really significant drop. Various other surveys show lower figures though, indicating again that the framing of the question makes a big difference. Everything suggests that a large proportion of the population identifies with Christianity out of habit rather than conviction. This can perhaps be more accurately described as cultural religiosity, which, as I’ve reported, is a common feature of Catholicism. Finally in Britain, as elsewhere, secular law is becoming less deferential to the claims of religion. The Equality Act of 2010 is making life more uncomfortable for denominations that continue to discriminate, though it remains to be seen how the law deals with the rise of largely unenlightened religions such as Islam.
South Korea
I’ll finish where I started, with an Asian country that appears to have embraced many western values and practices, including secular democracy. Needless to say I’m not doing justice to the enormous complexity of religious tradition in any of these countries, but it seems that Koreans, like many of their Asian neighbours, have been eclectic in their religious practices over the centuries. Korean shamanism, or Muism, goes back a long way, and has been overlain with Confucianism, Buddhism and more recently Christianity, which had its heyday there from the sixties to the nineties, leaving South Korea the most Christianised Asian population apart from the Philippines and East Timor. The South Korean National Statistical Office reported these figures in 2005: 46.5% non-religious (but many of these apparently maintain shrines to traditional religions in their homes), 22.8% Buddhist, 18.3% Protestant, 10.9% Catholic. The Wikipedia entry here points out the difficulties in measuring religious practice and adherence, with Confucianism, for example, being practically impossible to measure. There is also a proliferation of smaller religions in Korea that are likely to be under-reported. The late Sun Myung Moon started up a new Christian-based religion in South Korea in the sixties, hailing himself as the new Messiah, etc. It enjoyed moderate success in his home country and in the USA in the seventies, possibly because of its strong anti-communist rhetoric. It seems that in recent years Christianity has been fading, and there has been some slight resurgence in traditional Muism, but I can’t find any figures on religious trends in general.
So that’s a few blurry snapshots of religious trends in an assortment of countries, which show I think that Christianity at least has peaked in western Europe and in some Asian countries. I’ve also heard, in the wake of the new Latino pope, that Catholicism is on the wane in Latin America, a trend that this papal election is unlikely to substantially reverse. Generally it seems that Christianity sells well in poorer countries these days, but starts to fade as the nations find their feet economically, and their inhabitants get access to a decent education. Many of the world’s poorer countries are in Africa and the Middle East – but nations like Pakistan and Afghanistan are too doctrinally Islamic to be much of a hunting ground for Christians. Rural China remains a promising area of course, but the scenario changes daily. My attitude is that we shouldn’t be too impatient, we should just keep plugging away with our fascination with this world, the only one we have.
the trend away from religiosity, or not – various countries, part 1
who says they don’t have a soul?
I wrote a piece a while back on what the Australian census tells us about religiosity in this country, and in that piece I talked also about trends, comparing the censuses of the past. I also wrote more recently on the overall trend away from religiosity in the west, quoting some interesting recent figures out of the USA.
So, as I find this quite an exciting and encouraging topic, I’ve decided to look at more countries to get a broader and deeper perspective on religiosity and how it’s faring, particularly in the west.
Japan
This is a country I’ve long wanted to find out more about, because it’s so often cited as a non-religious country, or the least religious country in the world, and so forth. The traditional religions of Japan have been Shinto and Buddhism, and more often than not a combination of the two, but these entwined religions have faded from the landscape over the last century, and especially since the war. Wikipedia tells us that about 70% of Japanese ‘profess no religious membership’, and it cites 2 sources for this claim, the first being a newspaper article in the Seattle Times (which itself doesn’t cite any source), the second being a rather more interesting meditation on religion and spirituality in Japan, from 2008, in an online mag called Japan Society. It contains the statement, ‘polls tell us that two thirds of Japanese profess no religion’. A number of other figures are mentioned from censuses and surveys, and obviously the figures vary depending on the wording of the questions, sample sizes and so forth, but it’s equally obvious that the trend is towards secularization., and it’s safe to say that more than half of the Japanese population are not religious. Apparently religion is measured in the Japanese census, as Wikipedia tells us ‘In census questionnaires, less than 15% reported any formal religious affiliation by 2000’. However, I can find no Japanese census figures online. As to Christianity, only 1% to 2% of Japanese have succumbed to that peculiar persuasion.
To get a clear trend, you need to keep the sample stable, and the question stable, over time. A stable sample, for example , would be the entire adult population of a nation, as in a typical census. I can’t access these censuses, so I can’t find out whether the same question has been asked over time, and the other surveys mentioned are all over the place in terms of sample sizes and questions asked. All I have to go on is the quote above – 15% with no religious affiliation by 2000, which, if reliable, proves a clear trend away from religiosity in one of the world’s least religious countries.
Norway
In May of last year, the Norwegian government voted almost unanimously to disestablish its state religion, the Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Vikings of Norway had become Christianized by 1050. In the sixteenth century, the nation moved firmly away from Catholicism, and has since, it seems, moved firmly away from Christianity. A 2005 Gallop poll conducted in 65 countries found that ‘Norway was the least religious country in Western Europe, with 29% counting themselves as believing in a church or deity, 26% as being atheists, and 45% not being entirely certain’, which is quite an interesting finding (I mean the uncertainty factor). Interestingly Norway has phased out questionnaire-based censuses, conducting its last in 2001, and I haven’t even been able to find out if religion was part of the census. A Eurobarometer poll of 2010 has different results, though, with 22% of Norwegians believing in God, compared to 18% in Sweden and Estonia, and 16% in the Czech Republic. The same poll finds that 94% of Turks and Maltese and 92% of Romanians believe in God. Islam is now the second most practised religion in Norway, though still at very low numbers. However, this is definitely a cause of dissension, as it is in neighbouring countries.
France
France is typical of the European, or at least western and northern European trend towards reduced observance of religion. Again, a wide array of polls is mentioned in Wikipedia, with some funny findings. For example, a 2006 Le Monde poll found that 51% of French people claimed to be Catholic, but only half of these said that they believed in God! I mean, wtf!!! Seriously, though, a number of other polls probing Catholic beliefs in France raise questions about Catholicism everywhere, as clearly many of them are wedded to the religion for non-religious reasons, if that makes sense. There has been a lot of violent religious conflict, leading governments from the early 1800s to move to a more secularised political system. In 1905 a law was passed separating church and state, which clarified and regularised ideas first put forward in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Nevertheless the law caused Catholic riots, as it profoundly affected Catholic prestige and funding. The government does not maintain any official figures on religious belief. The most recent private poll, from 2011, finds 45% to be Christian, 35% to be ‘irreligious, atheist or agnostic’, 10% not answering the question, and the remaining 10% dispersed among various other religions. Most French Christians are Catholic, but a recent poll amongst Catholics found that only 4.5% of them attended mass once a week or more in 2006, compared with 27% in the early fifties.
Germany
Germany brought in new constitutions in 1919 and 1949, guaranteeing freedom of faith and religion. It has never had a state religion, being in any case a newish country, growing out of nineteenth century Prussia and the complex Germanic and middle European principalities of earlier centuries. The most recent poll in 2011 (the same poll that I referred to in the France section) has 50% of Germans identifying as Christian, 38% identifying as non-religious, and 6% not stating, but again other polls give different figures, though always with Christianity trending downwards in recent times. The Christian population is divided more or less equally between Catholics and Protestants, with more Protestants in the north and more Catholics in the south. The west is more Christian than the east, probably due to the influence of communism in the former East Germany. As an amusing aside, the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, Martin Luther’s birthplace, is now the most non-religious state in Germany.
how to debate William Lane Craig, or not – part 7, objective moral values and duties
ceci n’est pas Jesus
Dr Craig’s sixth claim, that his god is the best explanation for objective moral values, is one I want to dwell on at some length, so please sit back in your electrified chairs and enjoy my reflections if you can. But please note that I dwell on the subject for my own interest’s sake, not because I find Dr Craig’s views require much work to overcome – far from it.
I suppose it’s fair to say that when it comes to moral issues, unlike with matters scientific, we all like to consider ourselves experts, and we’re all a little more committed and vociferous, because – it’s personal. So I’ll begin with some personal stuff. From earliest childhood I’ve always felt very emotional about issues of cruelty and injustice. I was often in tears on witnessing kids in my class being bullied – more often than not by teachers. When I was a little boy I read the Hans Andersen story, ‘the little match girl’, a simple but devastating story about a young girl out in the cold snow, trying to sell matches for her impoverished family, afraid to go home without having sold any. She finally dies, out in the cold, on the last night of the year. This tale of unfairness and cruelty and indifference, had me awash with tears at the time, and literally haunted my childhood. I think it’s fair to say that a sense of empathy was well developed in me from an early age. Needless to say, ethical ideas based on the harm principle, such as those articulated by the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, held great appeal for me, but further than this, active moral programs to protect and support individual human beings, such as those enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights and in the many conventions and protocols that have followed from that declaration, are programs that I hold dear.
The point I’m making here is that the starting point for my own moral values was an emotional one, a visceral one, if you like, and not something derived from any ‘higher consciousness’ or reflectivity or rationality. And I suspect that’s quite a common experience. We don’t generally choose to cry over or be haunted by an injustice. So where do these deep emotional feelings come from? I have absolutely no reason to associate them with a non-material being who has, as far as I’m aware, never communicated anything to me. Nor was I, during my childhood, convinced that everyone would feel the same way as I did if exposed to the story of the little match girl. Some would, I was sure, but others would be cruelly indifferent, and there would be a whole variety of responses along the spectrum. In short, my observations of life, even from an early age, told me that people valued things and experiences very differently from me, and very differently from each other, to a rather bewildering and unpredictable degree.
So, from the fore-going I hope it won’t come as a surprise to you that I don’t believe in objective moral values, but that I’m far from believing that this entails some kind of moral nihilism or amorality. In Dr Craig’s presentation of this argument, he suggests that those who don’t subscribe to objective moral values, by which he means, values that come from a male supernatural being, don’t see anything ‘really’ wrong with the massacre of schoolchildren. Let me put that in another way. He argues that my own deeply felt disgust, shock, anger and pain, when I hear about, and see, played out on my tv screen, those sorts of crimes, is not really real, because it isn’t connected to a non-material creator-protector god, which is how he defines objective morality. I find this a ridiculous argument, as well as an offensive one.
Firstly, Dr Craig’s version of morality is a sham because it exists nowhere. Dr Craig will not be able to give you a single instance of a command from his favoured deity. The decalogue, the ten commandments, were written by men, and though some of them may seem uncontroversial – don’t lie, steal, don’t kill – even these aren’t absolute. A starving person, in my view, would be justified in taking food belonging to another person, who had an abundance of such food, if the alternate was death. I have no difficulty with that. Some people would, as they have the view that private property is sacrosanct. And I could make similar arguments to justify lying, and even killing, under certain special circumstances. To me, there are no absolutes. Other commandments, such as keeping the sabbath day holy, I don’t take at all seriously, because I don’t believe a supernatural being made the world in seven days, though had I lived several thousand years ago, I might well have believed that. And so my morality would have been different then, just as my morality would be different if I were born, on the same day that I actually was born, but in the city of Basra, to a devout Moslem family. My morality, that I hold so dear, and which gives my life so much meaning, is the result of my particular upbringing, my peculiar variety of experiences and influences, the culture that I was born into, my genetic inheritance, and I’m sure there are other factors that I’ve left out. One thing I’m happy to leave out, though, is the command of a deity. I’ve never experienced such a command, and I have no reason to believe anyone else has either.
Now, there are atheists I know who argue for an objective morality, but obviously not grounded in a deity. Personally I find such rational arguments a bit weird, and I’ll say no more about them here, except to make the obvious point that being an atheist doesn’t commit you to any specific moral position, as it’s simply an absence of belief in a deity. That’s all.
What I do want to focus on is the claim that morality without a deity is merely subjective and not really real. That’s to say, without a deity we can do whatever we like and call it morality. Well, that’s not how I feel about morality, and it’s not how morality, and laws relating to morality (and most laws have some sort of moral reasoning behind them) have developed in our increasingly secular society. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is entirely secular, and I think it’s a grand step forward in global human interaction. And it’s more of an effect than a cause, it’s symptomatic of a gradual shift in our attitude to other cultures, in our attitude to race, whether the concept is a valid one or not. In the attitude of men to women, in the attitude of heterosexuals to homosexuals, in our attitude to and respect for children, and in our attitude to and respect for other species on this planet. All of these attitudes have changed drastically in the past 150 years or so. Living in an eternal present as we often do, we can easily overlook how thoroughly transformational these essentially moral developments have been, and they’ve owed nothing whatever to religion, which has generally dragged its heels at the rear. Look, for example, at the Catholic Church.
I’m an avid reader of history, and as such I’ve noted the social changes, particularly in western Europe, that occurred over the past 400 years or so. What has always struck me, in reading about the Thirty Years’ war or the English revolution of the 17th century, or the early slave trade, is how often and regularly God (the Judeo-Christian one) is invoked in the primary documents of those times. God appears on every page, often several times on every page, of every legal document. I’ve described the 17th century, and the centuries before, as a ‘god-besotted age’. And yet the everyday brutality, the callous inhumanity, the cruelty, the viciousness, the inequity, the impoverishment of basic human values of those times, were everywhere on display. If you think you’ve got problems now, transport yourself back to pre-Enlightenment Europe for a wake-up call. Arbitrary rulers, upstart priests, popular revolutionaries, all invoked the divine in order to invest themselves with authority, as still happens today. Think of the divine right of kings, and papal infallibility, and the dear leader and great leaders of North Korea, who promoted themselves as divine. In the past, monarchs regularly passed laws in the name of the god whom they represented. Nowadays, elected politicians pass laws in the name of the people who elected them. It seems to have been a great improvement.
Our morality and our laws are grounded, it seems to me, in our common, but changing, evolving human nature. This is not mere subjectivity. In fact it’s all we have to go on. We don’t make up our own morality as individuals because we’re essentially social beings who rely on each other for our survival and our thriving. We’re empathic because we see ourselves in others and others in ourselves. And we’ve evolved that empathic capacity to embrace species other than our own, which I think is a great step forward.
The theist has no ground for objective moral values because no single moral value, claiming to be objective, has ever been shown to come from a deity. I have no doubt that they’ve all come from human beings.
more cardinal sins
protesting too much
Lauryn Oates, an admirable woman in every way, has written an incisive little essay here, wishing the backward-facing hierarchs of the Catholic Church a hearty good riddance. Of course it’s all wishful thinking, of the kind all positive-thinking humanists indulge in, but you have to wonder why it is so many apparently educated, humane, intelligent people still cling to this awful institution. Is it force of habit? Is it fear of offending family and friends? Is it faith, whatever that may mean? Or is it, dare I say, profound intellectual analysis and reflection?
And let’s face it, the evidence of this institution’s awfulness is everywhere. Oates wrote her damning little piece before the latest scandal involving Keith O’Brien, the most senior Catholic clergyman in Britain no less, who has made admissions regarding sexual molestation accusations by a number of fellow priests. After all the focus, the relentless focus, on exploitative priests and cover-ups, we still find this sort of thing going on at the very top. However, O’Brien’s admission (it was feeble and vague – ‘I haven’t lived up to the standards expected of me’, and it’s unlikely anything further will be dragged out of him) is particularly devastating – and some illustrious figures would say, inevitable – because he was so rabidly homophobic in his pronouncements. So, now that his hypocrisy is revealed, the LGBT community is having a field day, and why not? (They recently named him their Bigot of the Year). I’ve just been acquainting myself with the many contemptible remarks this individual has made against homosexuality, and some interesting reflections on him, now that he stands exposed, so to speak. Some to the effect that he’s obviously a deeply troubled person who might be treated with compassion. The thing is, though, we can always find ways to more deeply understand, and even sympathise with, the behaviour of people who have done immense damage to others, but we always have to weigh the suffering they cause against the suffering they experience. And it seems to me obvious that O’Brian’s depredations, combined with his regular and lashing condemnations of the freely chosen sexual activities of others, from a position of exalted religious status, represents something pretty fundamentally disgusting and only partially mitigated by his own inner turmoil. Another mitigating factor, of course, is the gay orientation of many senior Catholic clergy, encouraged and cemented in their youth in seminaries the world over.
O’Brian has now been ‘retired’, and will take no further part in the Catholic Church, but he still retains his title of Cardinal, and he was planning to retire later this month anyway. There are those, though, who’ll be fighting to visit a more fitting punishment on the man, and I wish them well. The Church itself is to conduct an investigation into his activities, but I can’t take that seriously. The secular route is best, but it’s unclear as yet whether his behaviour has contravened the law. It may well be that he’ll end up being let off, if not exonerated, by the very liberal regime that he affects to despise.
a post about truth, knowledge and other heavy stuff
David Hume, still a cool dude
I’m just returning to blogging after a brief, disastrous spell of pretending to be a responsible teacher to young people in a field – transition to work – in which I have no expertise whatsoever. Fail, as the teens say. So it’s back to my irresponsible, unreliable, anti-authoritarian, perverse, ill-disciplined, reclusive, childishly dilettantish life of poverty and wafer-thin reflection on the dynamic world around me.
I note that, in my absence, my readership, small (but growing) though it ever was, has plummeted. So, time to pull the finger out, and to maybe occasionally have a go at communicating with others. Maybe.
I’ve been reading, among other things, a little book of ideas called Falling for Science, by Bernard Beckett, and I’ve found it both compelling and exasperating. My first impression was that it was going to be an attack on ‘scientism’, and that’s partially true, but it’s a bit more difficult to properly characterise it. Beckett is a novelist and maths-science educator, and the main purpose of his book appears to be an attempt to untangle science from story-telling and to explore the limits of science as ‘answer to everything’. Not that he’s anything but a hard-nosed science advocate, but he’s also fond of the Humean is-ought distinction – one that I’ve always been a bit dubious about. He’s actually very good at explaining stuff, and there’s a pretty good summary of Popper’s falsification thesis in chapter 3, as well as some stimulating story-telling, for example about how close some eighteenth century scientists, or proto-scientists, came to capturing the idea of natural selection, starting with Hume himself, who wrote:
Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out, much labour lost; many fruitless trials made, and a slow but continual improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world making.
Hume here plays dangerously, heretically, with the idea of time and infinity, and even a many-worlds hypothesis, but his key idea was the one that Darwin later had to battle for against the age-of-the-earth pronouncements of Lord Kelvin (William Thompson), that there might be time enough for ‘slow but continual improvement’ in the the evolution of worlds, and hence life. Then there was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who wrote this in 1753:
One could equally well say that the ape is of the family of man, that he is a degenerate man, that man and ape have a common origin; that in fact, all the families among plants as well as animals, have come from a single animal.
It’s striking, but Beckett presents an even more astute source, the mathematician and philosopher Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, who wrote, way back in 1751:
They would have owed their origin merely to some accidental formation in which the basic parts would not have preserved the arrangement present in their parents. Each degree of error would have created a new species, and from these repeated variations would have arisen the infinite diversity of animals that we see at the present day.
All of this is fascinating, and of course further evidence for the proposition that natural selection was a concept ripe for the picking by the mid nineteenth century, but I want to focus this post on what Beckett has to say about the debate, still raging, about evolution and its implications for the practice of religion.
Becckett’s broad argument is the familiar one that evolution isn’t incompatible with religious belief, and he seeks to distinguish between evolutionary theory and ‘evolutionism’, which he believes is a drawing of non-empirical conclusions from the empirical theory. The distinction he makes is a broad one between model and interpretation, with the latter being the story-telling, non-empirical, but nonetheless important, part.
Interestingly, Beckett starts his exploration of this issue with a mild version of a deconversion story, as someone brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition. This is interesting because I’ve recently been watching online deconversion videos that are truly harrowing and moving – young people brought up in close-knit more or less fundamentalist communities who, through an increasing unease about the truth-claims of their communities, have become alienated, isolated, suicidal and profoundly messed up. These of course are the stories of survivors – what of those who didn’t make it?
I mention this because it gripes me more than a little that Beckett’s argument against what he calls ‘evolutionists’ is that they’re wedded to a Platonic notion of truth. I find this argument completely spurious. First, I’m sceptical of hitching the notion of truth to some kind of Platonist idealism. To me, it’s an insult to those apostates who lost so much, in terms of family and community, in rejecting the false claims of Christianity. The author of Why I am no longer a Christian says at one crucial point in his video:
For the first time in my life I realised there was something more important to me than God, and that was truth, and for the first time in my life I learned that if I had to choose between God and truth, I would choose truth.
Compare Beckett’s remark toward the end of Falling for Science:
Unlike the Platonist I find no beauty in truth. Indeed I consider it an ugly word, a bludgeon wielded in battle by those who lack the social grace to back away. Yet all around us confident certainty abounds…
It seems the two here are at cross-purposes. The video author is making the point that living a lie, living in false consciousness as Sartre would say (remember him?) had come to be so painful to him that all his family and friends and the comfort and security they might offer, were no compensation – in fact their regular god-talk would’ve just added to his discomfort and misery. Beckett is talking about truth in a completely different way, as Truth with a capital, as the popes use it when they come out with their papal bull.
Beckett I think overplays his hand in coming out with this narrow and, I think, idiosyncratic way of treating truth. A shame, because he does have some useful things to say. In fact I agree with him about Truth, but not about truth. Truth isn’t an ugly word, but nor have I ever considered it beautiful in a Platonic sense – I’ve never been remotely sympathetic to Platonic idealism. Truth, rather, is a useful word, and even an essential one. Perhaps I can best explain that by avoiding, at least initially, the very word ‘truth’.
I’ve written before about how those twin drivers, curiosity and scepticism, move science forward. They’re also, I would argue, the drivers that drove our video author away from religious conviction. But you have to be curious and/or sceptical about something. As you can see in the deconversion video, the author began to explore the Bible critically and then to explore its authorship, and how Christianity, and Judaism before it, emerged from other religions. He also began to explore the psychology of religious belief. In other words, he was curious and sceptical about what was really going on within communities and in the individual minds of believers vis-a-vis religion, and how this all emerged and came together historically. It was a search for the truth. Not a search for certainty, but for a deeper understanding. And it is this search, this questing spirit, that drives science forward. A dissatisfaction with, or at least a doubt about, the answers so far given (scepticism) together with a push to know more, to understand more deeply (curiosity). You can talk about these forces towards knowing, and this questing drive towards a deeper understanding, without ever mentioning the word ‘truth’, but surely truth is what it’s all about.
To take an example I’ve often used, about my own initial exposure to religion via a Salvation Army Sunday School at the age of eight. Stepping into this world, having no religious background at all, and watching these adults, some of them uniformed, praying and singing naff songs (this was the mid-sixties and the Beatles were all over the airwaves – ‘Jesus loves me, this I know’ couldn’t really compare), and preaching about our heavenly father and maker and his love for us and how he was our lord and we worshipped him eternally and so on, I really thought, even at that age, that I’d entered into a madhouse, and I wanted no part of it. But I could also see that at least some of these people were otherwise normal, functioning people. So what was really going on here? Where did these ideas come from? What benefit were they deriving from this behaviour? Did they really believe in an invisible lord and master and protector, or were they just covering that particular, weird base just in case? Now you might think that an eight year old wouldn’t have the capacity to ask himself such questions, and I won’t pretend that I have a precise memory of my thoughts of the time, but I also think we tend to underestimate the sophistication of children’s thoughts, and my experience with children since then has confirmed that view. The point is that my curiosity and my scepticism were stimulated to the max. And even when we ask the basic question – wtf is going on here? – we’re talking about truth. We get an answer that fobs us off and we think, no no no, I want to know what’s really going on here. I want the truth, or at least something that makes sense. We don’t talk about the coherence theory of truth for nothing.
If you research the coherence theory of truth, and its ‘opponent’ the correspondence theory, you’ll have to grapple with propositions, truth conditions, entailment and the like, but broadly the coherence theory is about fitting things together in a most likely and coherent account. Young Earth Creationism, for example, is incoherent with respect to what we know of geology, cosmology and so much else, such as our tried and true methods of dating fossils. More controversially, the claim that the One True God, the Judeo-Christian one, is the creator of the world, is incoherent with respect to many things we’ve learned. We have cosmological theories about the origin of our planet, and of our solar system, and of our galaxy, and of our universe, which fit together and bear no resemblance to the Biblical account of creation. We also know that there have been many creator gods and creation myths, and that they all belong to an earlier, more speculative, pre-scientific era. And we know, or many of us know, that creator/protector gods who put humans at the pinnacle of their creation, and have a special interest in humans, are much more likely to be self-serving human fabrications than real existents. Our views on this are bolstered by our deeper understanding of a cosmos in which our planet is not at the centre, or anywhere near it, and our deeper understanding of a biosphere in which we are but a recently emerged life form clearly related to other life forms, on a planet in which life forms have come and gone with monotonous regularity.
All of this takes me back to what Beckett has to say on the evolution-religion battle, which he tends to portray as two groups of intransigent certainty-addicts head-butting each other. His attempt to find a pragmatic solution to this confrontation revolves around the distinction between model and interpretation, or theory (in its tight, scientific definition) and story. His argument is that ‘evolutionists’, as well as interested observers, often over-step the mark, moving from the truth of the evolutionary model, which is as empirically well-grounded as it can be, to the truth of their particular interpretation of that model, which has little or no grounding. For example, he quotes George Bernard Shaw on his personal response to the theory:
…when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration
Beckett is of course right in pointing out that there’s no warrant in the theory itself for this response, or for the very different remarks of Darwin – that there is grandeur in this way of thinking about life. These are of course perfectly legitimate personal responses, but they don’t follow in any logical sense from the theory.
What I’m not so convinced about is the claim that the model itself has no implications for religion, that only certain interpretations of the model have implications for certain interpretations of religion.
One of the problems is that, on the evolutionary side, certain facts provide real stumbling blocks for those religions (notably Judaism, Christianity and Islam) that stand or fall on a personal relationship between the creator god and his special beings or chosen people. We have a definite knowledge that we are a type of primate, that we share a common ancestry with chimps and bonobos, a slightly older common ancestry with gorillas, and further back with orang-utangs, and gibbons and so forth. The differences between us and other primates, though massive by any measure (other than genomic) are all explicable in purely material terms. This is model, not interpretation. Beckett is a bit cavalier in claiming that the religionist can say, ‘Ah, that’s how God did it’, for all this leaves her is an enfeebled, primum mobile-type deism. The Catholic Church, of course, steps over this mess by issuing the Truth that evolution is compatible with Catholic doctrine but nevertheless humans are their god’s special creatures – which is basically the same as saying, it’s compatible but incompatible. More serious and honest attempts have been made to rescue special creation from the evolutionary model, notably the book Finding Darwin’s God, by the highly-regarded biologist (and Catholic) Kenneth Miller, and although I haven’t read the book, I’ve read enough extracts from it and criticism of it to realize that it only highlights the difficulties of trying to effect such a rescue.
So I think evolution, the model itself, plays its part, along with other theories and models, whether geological, cosmological or psychological – with cognitive psychology allied to neurology having made great strides in recent years – in providing an increasingly coherent description of our world, a description which leaves no room for supernatural agency, especially not of the miraculously interceding kind. I agree with Beckett that accepting evolution doesn’t necessarily imply that you should love all the other critters on earth for being vaguely related to you, or that you should see them as competitors in the struggle for life. Yet I won’t let go of the idea that there are better interpretations of evolution and worse ones, and that the model itself, more thoroughly examined and more deeply understood, will help us towards those best interpretations.
I suspect that this is all a much more vexed question than Beckett allows it to be. It’s a well-known fact and ‘problem’ that sometimes researchers, often in the conclusions to their research papers, step aside, or forward, from the nuts and bolts of their experiments to consider the implications of their findings ‘for humanity’. They move from facts to interpretations or implications, from model to story, whatever. And critics and other scientists cringe, or criticize. Alternatively the researchers go the opposite way, refusing to speculate on implications, or playing them down as much as possible. In that case, informed and interested observers will inevitably step forward and make explicit those implications, or what they consider them to be. And the original researchers will cringe, and criticise. I think all this says something about human nature. I think Beckett is half onto this when he suggests replacing ‘truth’ in science with ‘usefulness’. It won’t do, because the curiosity and scepticism that drives science forward isn’t about usefulness, but about truth – ‘what’s really going on here?’ But it’s also human nature to look for implications, and applications, for any new piece of knowledge we’ve uncovered. Knowledge is power, but only if we apply it, surely. This is where fact and value, models and how we use them and what we draw from them, become difficult to disentangle – and my wondering question is – how important is it to disentangle them? Important, yes, but we should also be aware of what might seem obvious – that we pursue facts for value’s sake. We pursue knowledge in order to have greater control of our world. Why else? If we know what’s really going on, we feel in a better position to do something about it, to act, to decide, to fit what’s happening here into our larger world-view, thus refining and deepening it.
I’ve barely touched on a lot of complexities here, but I do feel that the frustrations felt by the PZ Myers and the Jerry Coynes of the world with the religious worldview, particularly vis-a-vis the world-dominating monotheisms, are seriously mischaracterised as dogmatic story-telling banging up against dogmatic story-telling. There’s so much more to say, but I’ll leave it at that.
keep up the pressure
This guy, Tarcisio Bertone, a cardinal, blames it all on homosexuality
Big problems for the college of cardinals in electing the next pope – and that’s a cardinal’s only real job. A number of them are under scrutiny for their action and lack of action over abusive clergy, and under pressure not to participate in the election, and much of the pressure’s coming from catholics themselves, in Italy and in the cardinals’ home territories. It’s an unprecedented situation, and it seems unlikely to me that this trend will be reversed – it’s more likely to grow. Cardinals under the spotlight include Justin Rigali and Roger Mahony (USA), Sean Brady (Ireland) and Godfried Danneels (Belgium).
Story from Nicole Winfield of Associated Press.
a more realistic pope? don’t hold your breath
‘Catholic’ kids in Haiti, and plenty more where they come from
Herr Ratzinger has resigned, citing ill-health and old age, and a consequently increasing inability to get his head around all the issues and complexities involved in pretending to be the moral and spiritual leader of all humanity, whether humanity likes it or knows about it or not.
It might be argued that the fact that the 85-year-old’s decision caused ‘shockwaves’ through his community is an indication of how ‘away with the fairies’ that community is, but with some 600 years’ history of the big papa holding onto power till his last gasp, they can perhaps be forgiven their complacent fantasies.
So there’ll be a new pope soon, and the rest of us – that’s to say, those who take little personal notice of the pronouncements of the pontiff and the organisation he heads, but who also realize that a worrying proportion of the human population does take him seriously – engage in the more or less slim hope that a new leader will have a more realistic and less hubristic outlook, in terms of attitudes to women, to homosexuals, to contraception, to knowledge and ideas, and so forth.
But of course we outsiders won’t have a say in the election of the next male spokesman for a decidedly male one-and-only god. Nor will most catholics.
So who elects the next pope? A college of cardinals (as opposed to a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows or a conspiracy of ravens), that’s who. And, amusingly, if you’re a cardinal and over 80, you’re not considered compos mentis enough to vote for the next incumbent. That at least seems more in line with realism, but I don’t hear any noises about mandatory retirement of pontiffs – or cardinals, for that matter.
In Australia, judges of the High Court, the highest court in the land, are mandated to retire at age 70. That ruling came in in 1977, and before that the appointment was for life. No doubt similar rulings have been made internationally. And these days, because of the onerous workload, judges often retire before the mandatory date.
The next pope will be elected by about 118 cardinals (depending on when the election takes place, with cardies hurrying over the 80-year cliff as fast as their ruby-red dresses permit). More than half of these blokes were appointed by Ratzinger, and the remainder by his equally ultra-conservative predecessor, Karol Wojtyla, so it’s unlikely that many of them would be overly infected with realism. And of course the problem is that realism, a fairly mundane and anodyne notion for most of us, has been seen as forbidden fruit to the hierarchy of this organisation for centuries. So a dose of realism always carries the risk of Vaticanonical anaphylaxis (quite proud of that one).
Consider the last ‘realistic’ pope (it’s a relative term), Angelo Roncalli, who called the second Vatican Council in the sixties. Certainly his papacy made a case for ecumenicism that has been pursued, at least, in name, ever since, but Vatican 2’s promise has been almost entirely unfulfilled, and Roncalli’s famous ‘open the windows’ pronouncement has fallen on clogged ears inside the Vatican. What’s more, the possibilities Vatican 2 just might have opened up have proved so scarey to the hierarchy that a veil of silence appears to have been cast over its very existence. I suspect their attitude to reform has something in common with the notions of that old fuddy-duddy Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, with his apparent loathing of softies, considered the Anglicans, with their female priests and their modern services and their acceptance of poofs and the like, to be far worse than the Catholics, who at least stood for something. The question is, is it better to stand for misogyny, homophobia, celibacy, anti-intellectualism and ignorant authoritarianism, than to stand for nothing at all? Well, actually, if bums on seats are the measure, the answer appears to be yes. Not that I’m convinced that the Anglicans stand for nothing, but whatever they do stand for, it doesn’t appear to be very popular. Anglican numbers are crashing in this country, whereas the Catholics are creeping rather more slowly towards extinction. Of course this has a little to do with the influx of Catholics as against Anglicans, compared to earlier days, but I’d bet too that it has much to do with the age-old appeal of militant conservatism, from Genghis Khan to little Adolf. And the Vatican has managed, over the years, to clothe its iron fist with the fetching velvet gloves of a humanism that almost seems modern. Kindness to children, to the poor, to the dispossessed and disadvantaged, that sort of thing.
So I’m not expecting anything particularly positive to come out of this change in leadership. The noises coming out of Africa, the fastest-growing Catholic region, are all about holding the line on the homosexual scourge, upholding the traditional family and the dignity of manhood, etc. If anything I see the Catholic Church moving backwards into the foreseeable future, retreating into conservative, anti-intellectual fantasy, much like the Pentecostals, only different. We shall tediously see.
a harem-scarem of heretics and heresies: Marcion
That’s Marcion on the left, with John the Apostle, apparently
Christianity’s a funny religion, custom-built for ‘heresy’, heresy which will never be resolved because of the massive and, to a non-believer, frankly hilarious conundrum at its inception, the creation of a new supernatural being, who’s the son of another supernatural being, while at the same time being the same supernatural being, and also at the same time, or for a tiny part of the time, being completely human, or natural. Thus we have a monotheism with two heads, and a supernatural and also natural object of worship at the same time, not to mention some abstruse entity called a holy spirit or ‘Paraclete’. This mess will never ever have a chance of being resolved, because of course nobody can ever prove anything where the supernatural is concerned. Precisely for this reason, the only ‘resolution’ to this conundrum, now as throughout Christian history, is one involving power and violence – which isn’t always so hilarious.
Of course, there are many theological bones of contention, and sources of heresy, within Christianity apart from the status of Jesus (an area of dispute called ‘Christology’), such as the status of Mary, the meaning of sainthood, predestination and other eschatological matters.
Theology is, IMHO, the most inane pursuit humans have ever invented for themselves, but of course when it’s the only game in town, its political implications are explosive. It’s entirely about power. It’s the power that’s of interest, historically, and the political machinations. So let’s have a little look at Christianity’s battles and brutality in trying to enforce an orthodoxy amongst all the equally valid, or invalid, interpretations of Jesus’s true identity.
Marcion and Marcionism
Marcion, an apparently wealthy bishop’s son from near the Black Sea in what is now Turkey, who landed up in Rome around 140CE, seems to have been one of the first early Christians smart enough to realize that the new religion needed a thorough rethink, and one of the first Christians prominent enough to make an impact with his thinking.
Marcion clearly had a problem with Christianity’s intimate connection with Judaism, and their sharing of the same god. His solution was a pretty radical one; noting that the essentially absent but much talked-about god of the New Testament writings bore little resemblance to the thundering, partisan dictator-type of the Old Testament, he declared that they were in fact separate beings, with the New Testament one being vastly superior. It was a mad gamble, which was never likely to come off, but it certainly stirred things up, and kept them stirred for a long time after his excommunication in 144. Marcionism as an official heresy lasted into the 5th century, and his ideas still have currency today, and why not? His criticisms of the Old Testament’s brutalities and its nasty god have a distinctly modern feel to them. He also argued, cogently enough, that the description in Genesis of the god walking through the garden and discovering Adam being naughty proved that this god was an embodied, and therefore minor, god, who couldn’t possibly possess universal knowledge.
Marcion’s views on the identity of Jesus were obviously influenced by his conception of the New Testament god. In Judaism, Yahweh or God is often spoken of as ‘the father’, or ‘our heavenly father’, because he is the creator of humans – and everything else, but humans were his ‘special creation’. So we are his ‘children’, made in his likeness. But in the New Testament, and especially in the writings of Paul, God the father is contrasted with Jesus the son, a different tweak on the father idea. Marcion, a great supporter and admirer of Pauline thought, with its more abstract and ahistorical god, took those ideas a step or two further, severing the Pauline god from the Old Testament god as a separate entity. In other words he was a kind of religious dualist. Not content with that dangerous innovation, he considered Jesus’s physical existence to be a kind of mirage, a phantom – no doubting in keeping with his view of the New Testament god as non-embodied. This view of Jesus, as essentially a being too important to have ever had something so lowly as mere physical or natural existence, came to be known as Docetism, and it was roundly rejected as heretical at the first council of Nicaea in 325. Marcion’s excommunication turned him into one of Christianity’s first heresiarchs, or founders of a heretical movement or tradition, but his writing and thinking profoundly influenced the orthodoxy. For example, he proposed the first New Testament canon. Though the canon finally agreed upon centuries later differed greatly from the one proposed by Marcion (his canon was notably short – an edited version of Luke, and the letters of Paul), it was Marcion who first saw the need for regulating on what was ‘in’ and what was ‘out’, among the enormously proliferating gospels.
Marcion considered the Old Testament god to be a ‘demiurge’ – something close to a devil. It’s a maltheistic view shared by more than a few modern secular readers (Mark Twain for example), though they would usually replace the theistic term ‘devil’ with ‘dictator’, ‘tyrant’ or ‘mass-murderer’. Interestingly, this god’s inflexibility and capriciousness led Marcion and others to be more rather than less convinced of his reality as the world’s creator. He felt the god’s activity pretty well explained the suffering and injustice of the world. With Jesus, a new god was introduced, superior to the demiurge, ethically if not in terms of power. Marcion’s emphasis on the non-Jewish text of Luke, and his suppression of genealogies linking Jesus to ‘King David’, was part of an anti-Judaic agenda which denied the idea of a Jewish messiah and emphasised the idea of a redeemer. He also highlighted Paul as the ‘one true apostle’ of Jesus, the only one who really ‘got it’ about Jesus’s universality, and the new hope he brought. However – and this is where Marcion leads us down the path into gnosticism, other-worldliness and the sort of contempt for physical reality that the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge were into – redemption could not be attained within the massively flawed world of the demiurge. This was a view in keeping with the apocalyptic eschatology that dominated the early Christian movement.
Marcion, one of Christianity’s first heretics, also seems to have been one of the most influential and enduring. He himself managed to avoid the fate of many heretics of the early Christian era, perhaps because his heresies were promulgated well before a well-attested orthodoxy was established (the Emperor Theodosius first promulgated a law declaring heresy a capital crime in 382), but also no doubt due to his wealth, prominence and popularity. He returned to Asia Minor after being ex-communicated, and apparently established a flourishing teaching and an alternative church in the area. He was a prolific writer, but almost all of his writings appear to have been destroyed by the control and power merchants of Catholic orthodoxy, along with the writings of many other heretics, probably in the fourth century. So we largely know about his thinking through the writings that have survived from that era – that’s to say the writers later accepted as orthodox, and so unsympathetic to Marcion. In fact most of what we know about Marcion derives from Tertullian’s work Adversus Marcionem.
Marcion’s ‘church’ may have survived even into the fifth century, and his teaching, still influential today, may have inspired the Cathars, a remarkably widespread and stubborn bunch of European heretics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who held similar dualist and gnostic views. The extent of the connection, if any, will never be known, as the Catholic orthodoxy destroyed Cathar writings as comprehensively as they destroyed the Cathars themselves.
Long live secularism.