Certainly some scientists of a Christian persuasion noted the affinity between the theory of evolution and the Judaeo-Christian notion of God’s progressive and providential plan of history. These drew parallels with the New Testament’s conception of an immanent evolutionary process of divine incarnation in man and nature, and even attempted to remedy some of Darwinism’s theoretical shortcomings with religious explanatory principles. Yet for a culture generally accustomed to understanding its Bible at face value, the more glaring inconsistency between the static original creation of species in Genesis and the Darwinian evidence for their transmutation over aeons of time commanded the greater attention, ultimately encouraging massive agnostic defections from the religious fold. For at bottom, the Christian belief in a God who acted through revelation and grace appeared wildly incompatible with everything common sense and science suggested about the way the world actually worked. With Luther, the monolithic structure of the medieval Christian Church had cracked. With Copernicus and Galileo, the medieval Christian cosmology itself had cracked. With Darwin, the Christian world view showed signs of collapsing altogether.
In an era so unprecedentedly illuminated by science and reason, the “good news” of Christianity became less and less convincing a metaphysical structure, less secure a foundation upon which to build one’s life, and less psychologically necessary. The sheer improbability of the whole nexus of events was becoming painfully obvious—that an infinite eternal God would have suddenly become a particular human being in a specific historical time and place only to be ignominiously executed. That a single brief life taking place two millennia earlier in an obscure primitive nation, on a planet now known to be a relatively insignificant piece of matter revolving about one star among billions in an inconceivably vast and impersonal universe—that such an undistinguished event should have any overwhelming cosmic or eternal meaning could no longer be a compelling belief for reasonable men. It was starkly implausible that the universe as a whole would have any pressing interest in this minute part of its immensity—if it had any “interests” at all. Under the spotlight of the modern demand for public, empirical, scientific corroboration of all statements of belief, the essence of Christianity withered.
What was probable, in the judgment of the critical modern intellect, was that the Judaeo-Christian God was a peculiarly durable combination of wish-fulfillment fantasy and anthropomorphic projection—made in man’s own image to assuage all the pain and right all the wrongs man found unbearable in his existence. If, by contrast, the unsentimental human reason could adhere closely to the concrete evidence, there was no necessity to posit the existence of such a God, and much that argued against it. The scientific data suggested overwhelmingly that the natural world and its history were expressions of an impersonal process. To say exactly what caused this complex phenomenon, bearing signs of both order and chaos, dramatic and yet evidently purposeless, out of control in the sense of lacking divine government—to go so far as to posit and define what was behind this empirical reality had to be regarded as intellectually unsound, a mere dreaming about the world. The ancient concern with cosmic designs and divine purposes, with ultimate metaphysical issues, with the why’s of phenomena, now ceased to engage the attention of scientists. It was patently more fruitful to focus on the how’s, the material mechanisms, the laws of nature, the concrete data that could be measured and tested.11
Not that science perversely insisted on the hard facts and on a “narrower” vision out of simple myopia. Rather, it was only the how’s, the empirical correlations and tangible causes, that could be experimentally confirmed. Teleological designs and spiritual causes could not be subjected to such testing, could not be systematically isolated, and therefore could not be known to exist at all. It was better to deal only with categories that could be empirically evidenced than to allow into the scientific discussion transcendent principles—however noble in the abstract—that in the final analysis could no more be corroborated than could a fairy tale. God was scarcely a testable entity. And in any case, the character and modus operandi of the Judaeo-Christian deity ill fitted the real world discovered by science.
With its apocalyptic prophecies and sacred rituals, its deified human hero and world savior motifs, its miracle stories, moralisms, and veneration of saints and relics, Christianity seemed best understood as a singularly successful folk myth—inspiring hope in believers, giving meaning and order to their lives, but without ontological foundation. In such a light, Christians could be seen as well-meaning but credulous. With the victory of Darwinism (and notably in the wake of the celebrated Oxford debate in 1860 between Bishop Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley), science had unequivocally achieved its independence from theology. After Darwin, there seemed little further possibility of contact of any kind between science and theology, as science focused ever more successfully on the objective world, while theology, virtually incapacitated outside ever-smaller religious intellectual circles, focused exclusively on inward spiritual concerns. Faced by the final severance of the scientifically intelligible universe from the old spiritual verities, modern theology adopted an increasingly subjective stance. The early Christian belief that the Fall and Redemption pertained not just to man but to the entire cosmos, a doctrine already fading after the Reformation, now disappeared altogether: the process of salvation, if it had any meaning at all, pertained solely to the personal relation between God and man. The inner rewards of Christian faith were now stressed, with a radical discontinuity between the experience of Christ and that of the everyday world. God was wholly other than man and this world, and therein lay the religious experience. The “leap of faith,” not the self-evidence of the created world or the objective authority of Scripture, constituted the principal basis for religious conviction.
Under such limitations, modern Christianity assumed a new and far less encompassing intellectual role. In its long-held capacity as both explanatory paradigm for the visible world and universal belief system for Western culture, the Christian revelation had lost its potency. It is true that Christian ethics were not so readily depreciated by the new secular sensibility. For many non-Christians, even outspoken agnostics and atheists, the moral ideals taught by Jesus remained as admirable as those of any other ethical system. But the Christian revelation as a whole—the infallible Word of God in the Bible, the divine plan of salvation, the miracles and so forth—could not be taken seriously. That Jesus was simply a man, albeit a compelling one, seemed increasingly self-evident. Compassion for humanity was still upheld as a social and individual ideal, but its basis was now secular and humanistic rather than religious. A humanitarian liberalism thereby sustained certain elements of the Christian ethos without the latter’s transcendent foundation. Just as the modern mind admired the loftiness of spirit and moral tone of Platonic philosophy while simultaneously negating its metaphysics and epistemology, so too Christianity continued to be tacitly respected, and indeed closely followed, for its ethical precepts, while increasingly doubted for its larger metaphysical and religious claims.
It is also true that in the eyes of not a few scientists and philosophers, science itself contained a religious meaning, or was open to a religious interpretation, or could serve as an opening to a religious appreciation of the universe. The beauty of nature’s forms, the splendor of its variety, the extraordinarily intricate functioning of the human body, the evolutionary development of the human eye or the human mind, the mathematical patterning of the cosmos, the unimaginable magnitude of the heavenly spaces—to some these seemed to require the existence of a divine intelligence and power of miraculous sophistication. But many others argued that such phenomena were the straightforward and relatively random results of the natural laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. The human psyche, longing for the security of a cosmic providence, and susceptible to personifying and projecting its own capacity for value and purpose, might wish to see more in nature’s design, but the scientific understanding was deliberately beyond
such wishful anthropomorphizing: the entire scenario of cosmic evolution seemed explicable as a direct consequence of chance and necessity, the random interplay of natural laws. In this light, any apparent religious implications had to be judged as poetic but scientifically unjustifiable extrapolations from the available evidence. God was “an unnecessary hypothesis.”12
Philosophy, Politics, Psychology
Parallel developments in philosophy during these centuries reinforced the same secular progression. During the Scientific Revolution and the early Enlightenment, religion continued to hold its own among philosophers, but was already being transformed by the character of the scientific mind. In preference to traditional biblical Christianity, Enlightenment Deists like Voltaire argued in favor of a “rational religion” or a “natural religion.” Such would be appropriate not only to the rational apprehension of nature’s order and the requirement of a universal first cause, but also to the West’s encounter with other cultures’ religions and ethical systems—an encounter suggesting to many the existence of a universal religious sensibility grounded in common human experience. In such a context, the absolute claims of Christianity could not enjoy special privilege. Newton’s cosmic architecture demanded a cosmic architect, but the attributes of such a God could be properly derived only from the empirical examination of his creation, not from the extravagant pronouncements of revelation. Earlier religious conceptions—primitive, biblical, medieval—could now be recognized as infantile steps to the more mature modern understanding of an impersonal rational deity presiding over an orderly creation.
The rationalist God, however, soon began to lose philosophical support. With Descartes, God’s existence had been affirmed not through faith but through reason; yet on that basis God’s certain existence could not be indefinitely sustained, as Hume and Kant, the culminating philosophers of the Enlightenment, noted in their different ways. Much as Ockham had warned four centuries earlier, rational philosophy could not presume to pronounce on matters that so far transcended the empirically based intellect. At the start of the Enlightenment, in the late seventeenth century, Locke had systematically pursued Bacon’s empiricist directive by rooting all knowledge of the world in sensory experience and subsequent reflection on the basis of that experience. Locke’s own inclinations were Deist, and he retained Descartes’s certainty that God’s existence was logically demonstrable from self-evident intuitions. But the empiricism he championed necessarily limited the human reason’s capacity for knowledge to that which could be tested by concrete experience. As successive philosophers drew more rigorous conclusions from the empiricist basis, it became clear that philosophy could no longer justifiably make assertions about God, the soul’s immortality and freedom, or other propositions that transcended concrete experience.
In the eighteenth century, Hume and Kant systematically refuted the traditional philosophical arguments for God’s existence, pointing out the unwarrantability of using causal reasoning to move from the sensible to the supersensible. Only the realm of possible experience, of concrete particulars registered in sensation, offered any ground for valid philosophical conclusions. For Hume, an entirely secular thinker and more unequivocal in his skepticism, the matter was simple: To argue from the problematic evidence of this world to the certain existence of the good and omnipotent God of Christianity was a philosophical absurdity. But even Kant, though highly religious himself and intent on preserving the moral imperatives of the Christian conscience, nevertheless recognized that Descartes’s laudable philosophical skepticism had ceased too abruptly with his dogmatic assertions about God’s certain existence derived from the cogito. For Kant, God was an unknowable transcendent—thinkable, not knowable, only by attending to man’s inner sense of moral duty. Neither human reason nor the empirical world could give any direct or unequivocal indication of a divine reality. Man could have faith in God, he could believe in his soul’s freedom and immortality, but he could not claim that these inner persuasions were rationally certain. For the rigorous modern philosopher, metaphysical certainties about God or the like were spurious, lacking as they did a sound basis for verification. The inevitable and proper outcome of both empiricism and critical philosophy was to eliminate any theological substrate from modern philosophy.
At the same time, the bolder thinkers of the French Enlightenment increasingly tended toward not only skepticism but also atheistic materialism as the most intellectually justifiable consequence of the scientific discoveries. Diderot, chief editor of the Encyclopédie, the Enlightenment’s great project of cultural education, illustrated in his own life the gradual transformation of a reflective man from religious belief to Deism, then to skepticism, and finally to a materialism ambiguously joined with a deistic ethics. More uncompromising was the physician La Mettrie, who portrayed man as a purely material entity, an organic machine whose illusion of possessing an independent soul or mind was produced simply by the interplay of its physical components. Hedonism was the ethical consequence of such a philosophy, which La Mettrie did not fail to advocate. The physicist Baron d’Holbach similarly affirmed the determinisms of matter as the only intelligible reality, and declared the absurdity of religious belief in the face of experience: given the ubiquity of evil in the world, any God must be deficient either in power or in justice and compassion. On the other hand, the random occurrence of good and evil accorded readily with a universe of mindless matter lacking any providential overseer. Atheism was necessary to destroy the chimeras of religious fantasy that endangered the human race. Man needed to be brought back to nature, experience, and reason.
It would be the nineteenth century that would bring the Enlightenment’s secular progression to its logical conclusion as Comte, Mill, Feuerbach, Marx, Haeckel, Spencer, Huxley, and, in a somewhat different spirit, Nietzsche all sounded the death knell of traditional religion. The Judaeo-Christian God was man’s own creation, and the need for that creation had necessarily dwindled with man’s modern maturation. Human history could be understood as progressing from a mythical and theological stage, through a metaphysical and abstract stage, to its final triumph in science, based on the positive and concrete. This world of man and matter was clearly the one demonstrable reality. Metaphysical speculations concerning “higher” spiritual entities constituted nothing more than idle intellectual fantasy, and were a disservice to humanity and its present fate. The duty of the modern age was the humanization of God, who was merely a projection of man’s own inner nature. One could perhaps speak of “an Unknowable” behind the world’s phenomena, but that was the extent of what could be said with any legitimacy. What was more immediately apparent, and more positively contributive to the modern world view, was that the world’s phenomena were being superbly comprehended, to humanity’s inestimable benefit, by science, and that the terms of that comprehension were fundamentally naturalistic. The question remained as to who, or what, initiated the whole phenomenon of the universe, but intellectual honesty precluded any certain conclusions or even progress in such an inquiry. Its answer lay epistemologically beyond man’s ken and, in the face of more immediate and attainable intellectual objectives, increasingly beyond his interest. With Descartes and Kant, the philosophical relation between Christian belief and human rationality had grown ever more attenuated. By the late nineteenth century, with few exceptions, that relation was effectively absent.
There were also many nonepistemological factors—political, social, economic, psychological—pressing toward this same end, the secularization of the modern mind and its disengagement from traditional religious belief. Even before the Industrial Revolution had demonstrated science’s superior utilitarian value, other cultural developments had recommended the scientific view over the religious. The Scientific Revolution had been born amidst the immense turmoil and destruction of the wars of religion that followed the Reformation, wars that in the name of divergent Christian absolutisms had caused over a century of crisis in Europe. In such circumstances much doubt was ca
st upon the integrity of the Christian understanding, as well as upon its ability to foster a world of relative peace and security, let alone of universal compassion. Despite the increased fervor of religiosity—whether Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, Anabaptist, Anglican, Puritan, or Catholic—experienced by the European populace in the wake of the Reformation, it was clear to many that the culture’s failure to agree on a universally valid religious truth had created the need for another type of belief system, less controversially subjective and more rationally persuasive. Thus the neutral and empirically verifiable world view of secular science soon found an ardent reception among the educated class, offering a commonly acceptable conceptual framework that peacefully cut across all political and religious boundaries. Just as the last major convulsions of post-Reformational bloodshed had been expended, the Scientific Revolution was approaching completion. The final decade of the Thirty Years’ War, 1638–48, saw the publication of both Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences and Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, as well as the birth of Newton.
Circumstances of a more specifically political nature were also to play a part in the modern shift away from religion. For centuries, there had existed a fateful association between the hierarchical Christian world view and the established social-political structures of feudal Europe, centering on the traditional authority figures of God, pope, and king. By the eighteenth century, that association had become mutually disadvantageous. The growingly apparent implausibilities of the one and injustices of the other combined to produce the image of a system whose senile oppressiveness demanded revolt for the larger good of humanity. The French philosophes—Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet—and their successors among the French revolutionaries recognized the Church itself in its wealth and power as a bastion of reactionary forces, allied inextricably to the conservative institutions of the ancien régime. To the philosophes, the power of the organized clergy posed a formidable obstacle to the progress of civilization. In addition to the issue of economic and social exploitation, the atmosphere of censorship, intolerance, and intellectual rigidity that the philosophes found so abhorrent in contemporary intellectual life was directly attributable to the dogmatic pretensions and vested interests of the ecclesiastical establishment.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 40