The writer Christopher Hitchens has provoked a great deal of public debate in recent months since publishing and discussing his book God is Not Great. It is a powerful indictment of religion.
His book opens by summing up the literature on atheism:
“There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wishful-thinking.”
He accuses religion of being, “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance, and hostile to free inquiry,” and also “hostile towards women.”
He insists that those who do good things while claiming to be religious do them despite their faith, not because of it. He argues that people don’t need religious motivations to be good because human solidarity, which inspires goodness, is an inherently rational and evolutionarily fit predisposition.
I disagree. The quasi-conscious motivations of our instinctual inheritance do not guarantee moral actions or desires. Mr. Hitchens raises many sound objections to religious people and the leaders of religious institutions, but he fails in many important respects to advance his case.
First, he is entirely too sweeping in his criticisms, effacing distinctions between belief in that which is inanely divisive, or that which justifies evil, as opposed to belief in what is true.
Subsequently, he ignores the metaphorical truths offered by theology, the most important of these is the idea that the world did not emerge ex nihlo. As Thomas Aquinas argued, it would be illogical -and we would add anti-scientific -to claim that an effect has no cause; for everything we observe in science has been shown to have a cause, even if that cause is irreducibly complex, and only approximated through probability. There is no scientific story, whether via the Big Bang, or String Theory, that has been able to account for a universe emerging from nothing. Therefore, we are left with God, however, broadly defined as the Prime Mover, in Aristotle’s language, God the Father in Catholicism, or Yahweh in Judaism. There is a reason that establishing such an initial cause (or causes if you prefer string theory) is so significant; it raises the possibility of absolute reality, absolute truth, and therefore goodness, if only one is willing to deify our Prime Progenitor and conceive of its dehiscence as the introduction of evil, the loss of primordial solidarity if you like, or even the loss of God’s active will.
Thirdly, there are observable and predictable patterns in the universe and on earth. This implies a definite logic to relationships, and undermines the notion that the universe is random, something which Einstein never believed. If we define the contemporary God (rather than the creator God) as reason or the order of the universe, then we have defined a scientifically meaningful role for a deity, albeit one without anthropomorphic properties. Such a role is compatible with a notion of active and unwavering authority, even if the complex application of that authority in a universe laced with evil, sometimes results in misery. The laws of physics and biology do not guarantee morality or happiness, but only make it possible. Similarly the US constitution did not guarantee the elimination of slavery, though it did make it possible, as Lincoln proved.
Christopher Hitchens has correctly argued that a notion of an omniscient or omnipotent God is akin to a Divine Dictator, but one can dispense with this notion of God and recognize contingency and responsibility in our affairs. While there is no mandated morality in God’s science, the processes of evolution are the laws governing life and health, and like human laws, they arguably make morality more probable, signifying a loving God at the pith of creation, leaving the development and refinement of morality as a possible existential telos.
The tension between contingency and divine law is where we find freedom. The laws of the universe limit possibilities, but they do not eliminate them. On the one hand, mechanistic determinism has been disproven by modern physics, and on the other, contingency cannot be equated with randomness, since each component of being acts in accordance with laws, and thus not in a purely random fashion. Quantum mechanics may imply that reality is a role of the dice, but dice only have six sides, which is to say that reality’s dice are loaded. Only some outcomes are possible, and very few are probable at any given moment. This organizational meaning, which is nothing more and nothing less than relational patterns based on attraction and repulsion, can be approximated by the notion of the Holy Spirit in Catholicism, and other notions of divine spirit, as physicist Fritjof Capra has argued with respect to Eastern religions. When Muslims talk about the future, they often add “God Willing,” which is an accurate metaphor alluding to the interaction between scientific predictability and contingency.
Then there’s the notion of salvation. Hitchens insists someone is not a Christian unless they believe that Jesus’s death saved them from eternal damnation. Of course this is a scientifically baseless and overtly preposterous idea, but let’s have another turn of the screw.
First with respect to sin, there is nothing incongruent between the notions of sin and revelations of human behavior from social science. Evolution prepared humans to adapt to complex social circumstances, but it left us the freedom to do so according to the context of our environment. While most animals have something of an inherent sense of morality, there is a great deal of variance in how this genetic disposition plays out. Humans must negotiate between competing interests of oneself, oneself as another, family, kin, tribe, and wholly distinct others, and they must do so with respect to history, which carries its own authority and obligations. Every human fails in perfectly negotiating these obligations in one way or another, and thus, every human sins.
How are we to be saved from this constant tension and the violence that sin brings? Said otherwise, what is the cure for damnation, an existential regime dominated by sin? To love others as we love ourselves, universally, and in the context of just institutions. This will not end sin, but it just might save the human race from self-destruction, and it will certainly bring it closer to justice, and perhaps the ultimate meaning of life.
To me Jesus’s heroic life gave us this constitution and his followers created the first institution dedicated to the idea of universal justice for all of humanity, whether Jew or Roman, Samaritan or Galilean. This fundamentally Christian idea pays off the arrears that humans have to God and to the proper order of the universe, thereby restoring the possibility of human solidarity. It is only under the authority of just institutions that humans can truly be free, for otherwise we are servants to motivations produced by ephemeral reactions, with cycles of vengeance and suspicion sure to follow. Without institutionalized hospitality and universal regard, the foreigner, or other, can not be protected from the most suspicious and tribal of abuses.
Nothing in this account is irrational, and if someone can show me that it is a historically inaccurate interpretation than I would simply ask when universal notions of justice, based on the Golden Rule, first were instituted and by who, and then I would attribute to those originators a privileged status that I know grant to Jesus, his apostles, and to some extent Hillel the Elder. In any case, I am perfectly comfortable saying that Martin Luther King, Jr. “died for our sins,” as has everyone who has died heroically in the service of universal solicitude and the just institutions required to maintain it. Such people are found in every generation in every society, though some are more prominent and heroic than others.
Does this make me religious or an atheist? Theos has been traced to its Greek notion of one who sees all. If being a theist means believing in an omniscient or omnipotent God then I am an atheist, but I am also religious. To claim this is a contradiction is to rely on an overly literal understanding of religion -a condition that afflicts many non-believers.
The word religion can
be traced to its French and Indo-European root religare,
which meant to bind, or to tie. “Leig,” as a suffix,
indicated tie or bind as in ligament, and “re”
intensifies that binding, so that the old French word religāre,
can mean to tie fast. In Middle English reline meant to rally, which conveys
the public and inspiring nature of the words meaning.
Religion, defined broadly, is a constraint consisting of a vow or commitment that can not be broken with experience or change of any kind. It is to tie oneself, tightly, to an idea, to become bound with it such that one is no longer the same person if it is broken. The command to love others as you love yourself is the fundamental bind of Christianity. The Ten Commandments and the U.S. Constitution, at its democratic core, are similar binds. There is no overturning of either for those who ascribe to these tenets, nor should there be. The golden rule is existentially proven. One could say that it is the most widely accepted idea ever. The wisdom of Republican governance is a similar magnitude of truth. One could easily compile a scientific argument for the superiority of these ideas over competing ones, but for the religious, there is no obligation to subject them to such scrutiny. They are to be accepted on faith. This is an inherently efficient intellectual position and should be defended. One can see that taking two apples and subtracting one leaves one apple. There is no reason to question things that are as apodictic as this. To do so is what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein characterized as engaging in a useless language game.
Hitchens argues that religion is hostile to free inquiry, and yet in 1965, Pope Paul V issued the encyclical Dignitatis Humanae, which proclaimed that humans are duty bound to search for truth, and once finding it, adhere to it. This implies that even a truth which is at odds with Christianity is morally obligatory, according to the tenets of Catholicism. Countless scientists have been and continue to be men and women of faith. For every Galileo, who never renounced his faith, there is a scientist suppressed by secular men or power, such as Lenin or Stalin, that was forced to pursue something false. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to argue that western notions of democracy and religious freedom stem from Christianity and that its moral constitution vis-à-vis the other has been the most significant intellectual motivation for enforcing intellectual freedom.
To be religious is to bind oneself to ideas conservatively, and to be both liberal and religious is to fasten oneself to the aforementioned ideas, while leaping forward progressively, such that the link is never severed as one pulls forward into discovery. Whether one binds oneself as an atheist or an adherent of The Book, is potentially inconsequential, as a matter of ethics. What is of great importance is that one adheres to these specific tenets, or their corollary approximations found in other forms, with the force of religious conviction. That is to say what matters for the religious liberal is denying what is false and irrational, while conserving the essence of truth, which is always rational, but immune to rational critique. That immunity is due to the fact that religious truth supersedes reason and time. It desires the full but unattainable realization of itself.
“Our Hearts our restless until they rest in thee” -
-J.T. Rothwell