Being Reasonable About Religion

William Charlton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780815387718
• eBook ISBN: 9781351162746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

When we start to discuss religion we run into controversial questions about history and anthropology, about the scope of scientific explanation, and about free will, good and evil. This book explains how to find our way through these disputes and shows how we can be freed from assumptions and prejudices which make progress impossible by deeper philosophical insight into the concepts involved. Books about religion usually concentrate on a few central Judaeo-Christian doctrines and either attack them or defend them with tenacious conservatism, yielding nothing. This book has a broader scope, and instead of trying to prove that religion, or any particular religion, is reasonable or unreasonable, it seeks to persuade people to be reasonable about religion.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Plan of the Book

There is nothing more divisive than religion. It divides believers from non-believers and adherents to one religion from adherents to another. Division breeds animosity, animosity violence and early in this dismal process reason is twisted or cast aside. Is it possible to be reasonable about religion?

In 1793, the revolutionaries of Paris turned Notre Dame into a Temple of Reason and presented Mme Momoro, the wife of one of them, as its Goddess. That was mixing reason and religion with a vengeance. More orthodox believers might say: ‘Don’t reason about religion; just get on with it.’ But they assume that religious beliefs and practices, or some of them, are in fact reasonable. Should we not question that assumption? We might start by asking if there is any reason to believe that God exists or that there is a life after death.

We might, and both believers and sceptics often have. But this is an area in which we ought to tread warily. I have just mentioned religion, reason and God. We think we know what these things are, but if we try to define them we are at a loss. They arouse strong emotions in us, and we approach them burdened with a tangled mass of beliefs about what is and is not reasonable and about what has happened in the past and in other societies. As soon as we get into discussion about religion these beliefs come into play, and we find ourselves talking about pagan gods, magic, superstition, science and intolerance. We are like people groping their way through a dark underground cellar; the cellar is supported by randomly placed columns and scattered with pieces of old machinery; and thanks to our background and education we have strapped to our limbs extensions like the wings of the first aeroplanes, and drag behind us trains of netting that catch on unseen obstacles. To think we can start with a clear-eyed, impartial investigation of the basic claims of religion is quite unrealistic. We cannot be reasonable about religion unless we have first been reasonable about many other things.

Who, in this context, are we? Not hunter-gatherers in the Amazonian forests, not Chinese peasants, but English-speakers who read books. Some of us have been brought up in faith that (to quote Kai Lung) is like an elephant tethered to a rock; others are inclined to apply the word ‘religious’ to any rationally indefensible belief or practice used to keep people submissive to the powerful. In the century before the birth of Christ the Roman poet Lucretius said of primitive societies: ‘Human life lay grovelling in foulness on the ground, crushed by the weight of religion, the horrible face of which pressed down on mortals from the skies.’¹ Humanity cringed in fear of punishments after death and religion inspired revolting crimes like human sacrifice – tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.² As Salomon Reinach put it, ‘the history of humanity is that of a progressive secularization which is by no means complete as yet’.³ Enlightenment first dawned with the philosophers of Greece, many of whom paid the penalty for their scepticism by being prosecuted for impiety. The Roman Republic, with its dignified senators and respect for law provided a political model for a rational society. Rome, at least before the Julio-Claudians made themselves emperors, must have been rather like England in the eighteenth century. But then for a thousand years the march of progress was halted. Christianity became the religion of the empire and within a dozen years, to quote Robin Lane Fox, ‘Constantine had damned the free use of reason and had banished poetic imagination’.⁴ Most of classical Greek poetry was committed to the flames. The schools of Greek philosophy were dissolved. Education was restricted to the clergy and subjected to the jealous scrutiny of the Holy Inquisition. Scientists were burnt as heretics, witchcraft and sorcery crept over society like weeds across neglected fields and gardens. But at last in the sixteenth century the tide turned. Luther proclaimed freedom of conscience. Galileo defied the Church by declaring that the Earth is not, as the Bible implies, the centre of the universe, but goes round the Sun. Progress started up again. Science gave us industrial machinery and transformed the means of transportation, and today the remotest parts of Asia and South America enjoy the blessings of civilization.

A reader of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon might be excused for thinking that Butler shared this view. In Erewhon Revisited he puts the record straight. ‘I have never ceased’, he tells us in the Preface, ‘to profess myself a member of the more advanced wing of the English Broad Church’. He is speaking in his own voice later in the book when he says:

Our religion sets before us an ideal which we all cordially accept, but it also tells us of marvels like your chariot and horses which we most of us reject. Our best teachers insist on the ideal, and keep the marvels in the background. If they could say outright that our age has outgrown them, they would say so, but this they may not do.

Religion at its best, Butler says, bears witness to the fact that

beyond the kingdoms of this world there is another, within which the writs of this world’s kingdoms do not run. This is the great service which our church does for us in England, and hence many of us uphold it, though we have no sympathy with the party now dominant within it. ‘Better,’ we think, ‘a corrupt church than none at all.’

And he contrasts the types represented by his two characters, the benign Dr Downie and the fiendish Dr Hanky: ‘In England Dr Downie would be a Broad Churchman … Hanky is everything that we in England rightly or wrongly believe a typical Jesuit to be.’⁵ This is indeed a gallant effort at being reasonable about religion. But Butler did not, it seems, make the journey to Farm Street that might have enabled him to verify his beliefs about typical Jesuits. Still less did he realize how precarious were the historical and anthropological assumptions he and his generation had uncritically imbibed.

What assumptions do we imbibe today? First, that the more backward a society is, the greater part religion plays in its life, and the greater part the supernatural is believed to play in the world. Anthropology is supposed to have shown this; but if one eminent anthropologist is to be believed, it was also supposed to show it. E.E. Evans-Pritchard towards the end of his life wrote of his predecessors:

If one is to understand the interpretations of primitive mentality they put forward, one has to know their own mentality, broadly where they stood; to enter into their way of looking at things, a way of their class, sex and period. As far as religion goes they had all, as far as I know, a religious background in one form or another. To mention some names which are most likely to be familiar to you: Tylor had been brought up as a Quaker, Frazer a Presbyterian, Marett in the Church of England, Malinowski a Catholic, while Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl and Freud had a Jewish background; but with one or two exceptions, whatever the background may have been, the persons whose writings have been most influential have been at the time they wrote agnostics or atheists … We should, I think, realize what was the intention of many of these scholars if we are to understand their theoretical constructions. They sought and found, in primitive religions, a weapon which could, they thought, be used with deadly effect against Christianity.⁶

That may be true of anthropologists, but people generally are unwilling to question the picture of primordial ignorance and superstition because they have mistaken or confused ideas about what religion is, what a god is, what magic and superstition are. They think religion and sorcery are objective social phenomena which any observant person can recognize when they crop up and study in a detached way. That is an initial error which, though it forms the basis of our thriving religious studies industry, makes it almost impossible to be reasonable about religion. Classical antiquity had no conception of religion, and we should have none now but for Judaism and Christianity. They are objective phenomena, and we use them as paradigms. To think rationally about religion we must recognize that, if there had never been Jews or Christians, though there might be people doing what Hindus or Buddhists do today, we should not think they had a religion. The position over magic and superstition is rather different. These are pejorative terms and we apply them to practices we think inferior to ours in one or more ways: unscientific, malignant, silly or disgusting. These theses, which I take to be not uncontroversial, are defended in Chapters 2 to 5.

Primitive societies are the stamping ground of anthropology, but the idea that history is a progress away from religion is cherished by some historians, who have then to contend with the fact that Christianity from small beginnings has come to spread over most of the earth and is now the world’s most influential ‘religion’. How could the inexorable advance of reason and social amelioration be held up by so weird an aberration? Lane Fox quotes with approval the phrase of Norman Baynes for the Emperor Constantine’s religious policy: ‘An erratic block which has diverted the stream of human history.’⁷ From Gibbon onwards historians have tried to uncover motives of self-interest which people had for adopting Christianity whether they thought it true or not. Many people have perhaps been persuaded that this is the only kind of explanation we can accept as genuine. But the plain fact is that Europe would not have become Christian unless a lot of people had actually thought it true. In Chapter 6, I ask the questions historians dodge: what grounds, in the first millennium after Christ, had people for thinking Christian teaching true, and how rational were they?

The next assumption I examine is that reason has a special connection with science. People think that physical science is the highest achievement of reason, and that to be answerable to reason religion would have to be answerable to at least some of the tests and procedures of science. In Chapters 7 and 8 I trace the history of this idea. Reason starts by being connected with practical experience and knowing what one ought to do. Greek philosophers called attention to intellectual activities like measuring, comparing, evaluating, explaining and using inductive and deductive arguments, and reason came to be associated with them. The most primitive kind of explanation is that of human behaviour, giving people’s reasons and purposes, but the Greeks introduced explaining the facts of mathematics by giving proofs and explaining natural phenomena by identifying causes. In time mathematical and causal explanation became fused or confused, and explaining by reasons and purposes, which is what religion offers, was marginalized. Finally science, having been mathematicized, became identified with viewing the world as a closed mechanical system. The result of this historical process is that people think that if God exists he would have to be a supernatural cause interfering with such a system. Some even think that, if consciousness and acting of one’s own free will are to be more than an illusion, we ourselves, or our souls, must be like that too. Religious believers, it is generally supposed, believe in supernatural causal agents, whereas religious sceptics do not. To free ourselves from these ideas we must go back to the distinction between the three basic types of explanation – explaining behaviour, explaining in mathematics, and explaining causally – and also distinguish several varieties of cause. I do this in Chapters 11–14, and show what is really at issue over creation by God and over human consciousness and free will.

The reader may notice that, whereas I start by talking about religion generally, Chapters 5 and 6 concentrate on Christianity, and although we expect all religious beliefs and practices to be open to rational discussion, from Chapter 9 onwards I limit myself to Judaeo-Christianity. That is not because I think the beliefs and practices of those who are neither Jews nor Christians are inferior or unworthy of study. But Islam is presented in the Koran (for instance in ‘The Table’, 5.44 and ff.,) as a reformed or purified version of Judaeo-Christianity, and if the argument of Chapters 2–4 is correct, the beliefs and practices of people who do not accept the God of Abraham are called ‘religious’ only because they resemble those of people who do. Moreover, writers who make out that religion is irredeemably unreasonable have their sights set primarily on the Bible. They do not write books to show that Taoism was imposed on the Chinese from motives of self-interest or that Hindu beliefs are unscientific. It is they, not I, who think these other religions are not worth powder or shot, and if we are to deal realistically with their arguments we must keep Christianity and Judaism in the front of our minds.

Christianity is sometimes described as the offspring of Athens and Jerusalem, a mixture of Greek philosophy and Jewish religion. It certainly embraced Greek philosophy and used it to justify its religious teachings, but in Chapters 9 and 10 I show that this was not an unmixed gain in rationality. From Plato it took over the doctrine that the soul is naturally immortal, which is in tension with its original message that death was conquered by Christ; and from the Stoics it derived the conception of natural law, something that led to rule-worship and irrational adherence to what are called ‘moral absolutes’. Besides having these unfortunate influences on Christianity from the inside, philosophy later brought it into conflict with science by proposing a conception of truth that is tailored to fit science but cannot apply to religious beliefs. If Christian teachings appear unreasonable, part of the blame lies with philosophy: first for giving Christianity a Platonic conception of the soul and Stoic ethics, and then for making us conceive truth on the model of accurate mirroring.

Down to the end of Chapter 14 the book deals with obstacles to rational discussion which arise from confusion about the notions of religion, reason and science. I then pass to difficulties which are, so to speak, native to Jewish and Christian theology. The Old Testament offers us two conceptions of Jehovah, as the universal creator and as the partisan of the Jewish nation, defending it against its numerous enemies, cultivating it as a gardener cultivates a vine, loving it as a husband loves a bride. In Chapters 15–16 I consider how far it is possible to have a coherent concept of Jehovah, and how far the Christian doctrine of the Trinity can overcome the tension between the two Old Testament conceptions.

The central doctrine of Christianity is that we are, or can be, saved by Christ. As I point out in earlier chapters, there is an embarrassing obscurity about what he saves us from: is it sin, Hell or death? He cannot save us from death if, as Plato held, we are naturally immortal: we shall then have a life after death anyhow. Hence (as Hobbes observed in Leviathan) the emphasis on sin and Hell. Christians have also held, however, that life after death is a free gift which human beings can receive by sharing through Christ in the life of God, and that the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, play a integral role in this scheme. In Chapters 17–20 I show how this idea could be developed on the supposition that, in the ordinary course of nature, death is the end. This is not standard theological practice, but I think the difficulties of the traditional teaching on Hell and the Eucharist force anyone today who wants to defend the doctrines of salvation through Christ and communion with him in the Eucharist to look for something new.

The last two chapters concern the unwillingness of religious teachers to admit they might be wrong, and their claim to speak with special authority about morals. The first reaches its extreme in the Catholic doctrine of Infallibility; the second seems particul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Plan of the Book
• 2 Religion
• 3 Gods
• 4 Magic
• 5 Christian Superstition
• 6 The Spread of Christianity
• 7 Reason
• 8 Science and Understanding
• 9 Accommodation with Philosophy
• 10 War with Science
• 11 Explaining the Physical Order
• 12 Explaining Mind
• 13 The Last Exorcism
• 14 Creation
• 15 Conceiving Jehovah
• 16 The Trinity
• 17 Salvation
• 18 From Natural to Supernatural
• 19 Baptism
• 20 The Eucharist
• 21 'The Whole Truth'
• 22 Religion and Morality
• Bibliography
• Index