The Case for God
Page 31
The declaration of the Second Republic in France in 1848 led to widespread hopes that something similar could be achieved in Germany, and there were calls for constitutional rule. Hoping that this agitation would spread to the rest of Europe, Karl Marx (1818–83) published his Communist Manifesto, but a year later it was clear that the revolutionary movement had failed. Marx took it for granted that God did not exist, so he did not bother to justify his atheism philosophically; his sole aim was to alleviate human misery. Born into a middle-class Jewish family at Trier, Marx had studied with Hegel in Berlin, where he had met some of the most controversial theologians of the day. Failing to get an academic post in Germany, he worked as a journalist in Paris until he was expelled for his political activities and settled in London, where he began work on Das Kapital, his monumental analysis of capitalism.
While Feuerbach’s analysis was quite sound, Marx conceded, it did not go far enough. The time for theory was past. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world,” he insisted emphatically; “the point, however, is to change it.”22 Instead of meditating on Hegel’s dialectic, a committed revolutionary must make it happen; he must bring the underlying contradictions of capitalist society into the open, thus accelerating the emergence of the forces that would negate them. Of course God was a projection of human needs—that went without saying—but these needs were created by material and social factors that conditioned the way people thought and lived. The injustice of capitalism had produced a God that was simply a consoling illusion:
Religious distress is at the same time an expression of real distress and a protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.23
When men and women were no longer reduced by an oppressive system to a “debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence,” the idea of God would simply wither away.24 Atheism was not an abstract theory but a project. It was a program that was essential to the well-being of humanity: “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”25
Others were beginning to argue that it was science, which for so long had been its willing handmaid, that would eliminate religion. In his six-volume Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) presented the intellectual history of humanity in three stages. In its primitive theological phase, people had seen gods as the ultimate causes of events; then these supernatural beings had been transformed into metaphysical abstractions; and in the final and most advanced “positivist” or scientific phase, the mind no longer dwelled on the inner essences of things, which could not be tested empirically, but focused only on facts. Western culture was now about to enter this third, positivist phase. There was no way back. We could not regress into the theological or metaphysical consolations of the past but were compelled by the inexorable laws of history to move forward into the age of science.
Science was becoming more rigorous and in the process had started to undermine popular religious certainties. In 1830, Charles Lyell (1797–1875) had published the first volume of his Principles of Geology, which argued that the earth’s crust was far older than the six thousand years suggested in the Bible; moreover, it had not been shaped directly by God but was formed by the slow, incremental effects of wind and water.26 Lyell, a liberal-minded Christian, refused to discuss the theological implications of his findings, because science “ought to be conducted as if the scriptures were not in existence.”27 He was intensely irritated by the unprofessional work of some of his colleagues, who attached “transcendent importance” to “every point of supposed discrepancy or coincidence between the phenomena of nature and the generally-received interpretations of the Hebrew text.”28 He thus enunciated his own version of the ancient distinction between mythos and logos. Science and theology were different disciplines, and it was dangerous to mix the two.
Scientists no longer considered their discipline a branch of “philosophy,” which had always been interested in metaphysics, and they no longer saw themselves as gentlemen scholars but as professionals. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was not only physicists but geologists, botanists, and biologists who formulated their insights in the exact language of mathematics. As part of their new professional ethos, they were beginning to insist on a “positivist” assessment of truth that excluded anything that was not quantifiable.29 The Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) defined science as “the consideration of all subjects, whether of a pure or mixed nature, capable of being reduced to measurement and calculation.”30 Clearly this could not include God. Because of the marvelous advances in technology, scientists were held in higher esteem than ever before. Science seemed the avatar of progress. It was definite, precise, and accurate; it accumulated truth in a methodical, purposeful manner, proved its theories, corrected earlier mistakes, and moved fearlessly into the future. Impressed by this new professional rigor and eager to share science’s prestige, people in other disciplines were increasingly influenced by its positivist standard of truth.
But Lyell’s revelations gave many believers, who were used to thinking that science was on their side, a salutary jolt. In America, after a brief but intense panic, Evangelical churchmen started to pull back from their strict biblical literalism. But they still relied on the argument from design, and few were aware of the disturbing new evidence that life itself—not merely the earth’s crust—had evolved from “lower” to “higher” forms. The fossil record showed that innumerable species had failed to survive; instead of a neat design, the geologists were uncovering a natural history of pain, death, and racial extinction. In 1844, the popular Scottish writer Robert Chambers (1802–71) published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, arguing that scientists would soon prove that there was a purely natural explanation for the development of life. But others tried to “baptize” these new discoveries. For the Swiss American Harvard professor Louis Agassiz (1807–73) this struggle had been part of God’s grand design;31 God had simply been preparing the earth for its human inhabitants. Agassiz saw evidence of the divine Mind in the symmetry of nature, in which patterns were repeated in every vertebrate. This could not have been accidental: an “intelligent and intelligible connection between the facts of nature must be looked upon as a direct proof of the existence of a thinking God.”32
But a seed of doubt had been sown. The English poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–92) gave moving expression to the buried anxiety that was eroding the faith of his contemporaries. The instant popular success of In Memoriam (1850) showed that he had voiced the unspoken fears of many. For two hundred years, Western Christians had been encouraged to believe that the scientific investigation of the natural world endorsed their faith. But now, it appeared, if there had been a divine plan, it had been cruel, callously prodigal, and wasteful. As Tennyson memorably put it, Nature was “red in tooth and claw.” Because the scientific proof on which people had been taught to depend had been radically called into question, we could only “faintly trust the larger hope”:33
That nothing walks with aimless feet
That not one life shall be destroy’d
Or cast as rubbish to the void
When God hath made the pile complete.34
But “trust” seemed vague and insubstantial beside the confident, precise, and certain knowledge of science. Incapable of verification, religious truth now appeared “futile” and “frail”:35
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.36
The Victorians had been encouraged to see themselves as invincible; they ha
d believed that science would conduct them into a world of spiritual and moral progress. But, it seemed, stripped of the faith that made it possible to endure the sorrow of life, instead of coming of age, humanity was still afflicted by the terror and bewilderment of its infancy.
Some theologians had persistently stood out against the canonization of a scientifically based natural theology. Horace Bushnell (1802–76), the notorious Congregationalist pastor of Hartford, Connecticut, was denounced as a heretic for pointing out that theology had more in common with poetry than with science.37 Religious language had to be vague and imprecise, because what we called “God” lay beyond the scope of the rational intellect. Statements about God “always affirm something which is false, or contrary to the truth intended,” because “they impute form to that which is really out of form.”38 “Fixed forms of dogma” invariably distorted truth, because such “definitions are, in fact, only changes of symbol, and if we take them to be more, they will infallibly lead us to error.”39 Remarks that would once have been commonplace were now greeted with fury. Western Christians had become addicted to scientific proof and were convinced that if God was not an empirically demonstrable fact, there was no sense in which religion could be true.
On December 27, 1831, Charles Darwin, naturalist on board the HMS Beagle, had embarked on a five-year scientific survey of South American waters to study the flora, fauna, and geology of Tenerife, the Cape Verde Islands, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, the Galapagos, Tahiti, New Zealand, Tasmania, and finally the Keeling (Cocos) Islands. The evidence he gathered forced him to deny Paley’s argument from design. God had certainly not created the world exactly as we knew it. Instead, it seemed clear that the species had evolved slowly over time, as they adapted to their immediate environment. During this process of natural selection innumerable species had indeed perished. In November 1859, Darwin published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Later, in The Descent of Man (1871), he suggested even more controversially that Homo sapiens had developed from the progenitor of the orangutan, gorilla, and chimpanzee. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they had evolved by trial and error, and God had had no direct hand in their making.
The evolutionary hypothesis shattered so many fundamental preconceptions that initially few could absorb it in its entirety. Even Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), who had made a significant contribution to Darwin’s work, could not accept the lack of a controlling Intelligence.40 The American botanist Asa Gray (1810–88), a convinced evolutionist as well as a dedicated Christian, used the evolutionary hypothesis in his study of plant life but could not accept the absence of an overall divine plan.41 Darwinian theory not only undermined the design-based theology that had become the mainstay of Western Christian belief, but repudiated central principles of the Enlightenment.
Darwin, however, had no desire to destroy religion. His faith ebbed and flowed over the years, especially after the tragic death of his daughter Annie, but his chief problem with Christianity was not natural selection; rather, it was the doctrine of eternal damnation— a reaction, doubtless, to hellfire sermons. He told Asa Gray that it was absurd to doubt that “a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist,” adding, “I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older) but not always, that agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.”42 But as a result of his researches, God was no longer the only scientific explanation of the universe. Not only was there no scientific proof for God; natural selection had shown that such proof was impossible. If Christians wanted to believe that the evolutionary process was somehow supervised by God—and many did—this would henceforth be a matter of personal choice. Darwin’s discoveries accelerated the already growing tendency to exclude theology from scientific discussion. By the end of the 1860s, most scientists were still Christians, but qua scientists they had stopped talking about God. As the American physicist Joseph Henry (1797–1878) said, scientific truth demanded stringent, physical evidence; it must enable us to “explain, to predict, and in some cases to control the phenomena of nature.”43 Wholly dependent on concrete, measurable fact, science now rejected any hypothesis that was not based on the human experience of the natural world and could not, therefore, be tested.
One of the first people to understand how this would impact natural theology was Charles Hodge, Princeton professor of theology, who wrote the first sustained religious attack on Darwinism in 1874. He noted that scientists had become so immersed in the study of nature that they believed only in natural causes and did not appreciate that religious truth was also factual and must be respected as such.44 Hodge could see what would happen to Christian faith once scientists no longer accepted God as the ultimate explanation. He was correct to announce that religion, as he knew it, “has to fight for its life against a large class of scientific men.”45 But this would not have been the case had not Christians allowed themselves to become so dependent upon a scientific method that was entirely alien to it. Hodge himself took issue with Darwin on supposedly scientific grounds. Stuck in the early modern model of scientific procedure, he still saw science as the systematic collection of facts and did not understand the value of hypothetical thinking. He concluded that because Darwin had not proved his theory, it was unscientific. For Hodge it was impossible “to any ordinarily constituted mind” to believe that the intricate structure of the eye, for example, was not the result of design.46
But in opposing Darwin on religious grounds, Hodge was a lone voice. Most Christians, unable to appreciate the full implications of natural selection, were still willing to accommodate evolution. Darwin was not yet the bogeyman that he would later become. During the late nineteenth century, conservative Christians were far more troubled by an entirely different issue.
In 1860, the year after the publication of Origin, seven Anglican clergymen published Essays and Reviews, a series of articles that made the German Higher Criticism of the Bible available to the unsuspecting general public, who now learned to their astonishment that Moses had not written the first five books of the Bible, King David was not the author of the Psalms, and biblical miracles were little more than a literary trope. At this time, German clerics were far better educated than their counterparts in Britain and America, who were ill-equipped either to follow German scholarship themselves or to explain it to their flocks.47 But by the 1850s, British nonconformists, who were not allowed to study at either Oxford or Cambridge, had started to attend German universities, and they brought the Higher Criticism back home with them. There had already been clashes between these “Germanized” scholars and their colleagues in colleges and seminaries.
Essays and Reviews caused a sensation. It sold twenty-two thousand copies in two years (more than Origin in the first twenty years of its publication), went through thirteen editions in five years, and inspired some four hundred books and articles in response.48 Three of the authors belonged to a circle of progressive clergymen and scientists at Oxford and Cambridge who kept one another abreast of developments in their fields:49 Baden Powell, Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford; Benjamin Jowett, classicist and later master of Balliol College; and Mark Pattison, rector of Lincoln College. The essays were of variable quality: they discussed the nature of predictive prophecy, the interpretation of miracle stories, and the authorship of Genesis. But by the far the most important article was Jowett’s essay “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” which argued that the Bible should be subjected to the same rigorous scholarship as any other ancient text. Evangelical Protestants, who had been taught to look for the plain sense of scripture and had in the process lost any understanding of the nature of mythology, found these ideas deeply disturbing. In 1888, the English novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward published Robert Elsmere, which told the story of a clergyman whose faith was destroyed by the Higher Criticism. At one point his wife complains: “If the Gospels are not true
in fact, as history, I cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.”50 The novel became a best seller, indicating that many readers shared her dilemma.
The hierarchy was equally disturbed by these new theories. Immediately after the publication of Essays and Reviews, a letter to The Times, cosigned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and twenty-five other bishops, threatened to bring the authors to the ecclesiastical courts. Two were indeed tried for heresy, convicted (though the ruling was later overturned), and lost their posts, and Jowett was temporarily suspended from clerical duties. Bishops, theologians, and professors collaborated on major symposia to counter Essays and Reviews, and, in an unlikely alliance, Anglo-Catholics joined forces with Evangelicals in a statement that affirmed the divine inspiration of the Bible. Seven hundred seventeen scientists (of minor status) also signed a strongly worded protest, and some of the signatories established the Victoria Institute to defend the literal truth of scripture.51