I’ve heard mutterings in the dark corners of the Internet that I spend too much time posting critiques of religion and theology. Well, to those who beef about that, I say, “I hear you, but I’m gonna keep doing it anyway.” For there must be constant pushback against religion, which is always sticking its nose in our tent, until superstition retreats to only a tiny place in the psyche of humanity.
Today’s beef is about an article from The Spectator (click on screenshot below), which is so bad that, to use Wolfgang Pauli’s phrase, it’s “not even wrong.”
The author, Greg Sheridan, is of course a believer; he’s described as “the foreign editor of The Australian and author of God Is Good for You. He has been a visiting fellow at King’s College London this year.” The subtitle of his book is “A Defense of Christianity in Troubled Times.” And that’s what he promulgates in this cringeworthy article:
Here are Sheridan’s theses. (Quotes from the article are indented; my own comments are flush left.)
a.) Christians and Christianity are much maligned. And, sadly, Christianity is disappearing—displaced by other faiths, ideologies, and forms of nationalism.
There is no faster way to get yourself classed as dim than by admitting that you hold religious belief, especially Christian belief. Anti-Catholicism used to be the anti-Semitism of intellectuals; now Catholics get no special attention. All believing Christians are regarded as stupid, eccentric or malevolent.
. . . Dawkins et al assume that faith is irrational. Most British people seem to take it on faith (ironically) that to have faith is stupid.
. . . The prestige of the West has declined as its belief in Christianity has declined. The world is full of vigorous societies and movements — Chinese and Russian nationalism, Islamism in all its forms, east Asian economic dynamism — which no longer think the West has anything much to say.
The first statement is hyperbole. There are many venues in which religion is given special treatment: not criticized and even coddled. I, for one, don’t think all believing Christians are “stupid, eccentric, or malevolent”. I think many are brainwashed, all are deluded, and only a very few are “malevolent.” We see more hyperbole in the idea that much of the world doesn’t think “the West has anything much to say.” Does he really believe that? Or is he really saying “much of the world isn’t Christian”?
As for “taking it on faith”, see the next point:
b.) Christian faith is, in fact, rational. And it’s rational because we feel it’s true.
But the way I see it, faith is not the enemy of reason but the basis of reason. First, to be reasonable, I have to have faith in my ability to distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary. Then, for almost everything I know, I need faith in other human beings. I believe I am the son of my late parents. I can’t prove it. It’s a rational belief but not proven. Much of the atheist assault on belief deliberately confuses what it is rational to believe with the much narrower category of what is rationally proven.
This is gobbledy-gook, conflating faith construed as “belief in religious tenets that lack evidence” with “faith as confidence in what you’ve seen confirmed repeatedly”. He uses “proven” as a red herring: nothing empirically is ever proven beyond refutation. But there are things on which you’d bet considerable amounts of money, like the sun coming up tomorrow. It’s possible that it might not, but would you say that that belief is identical to the “faith” that Jesus rose from the dead? If you want to read about conflations of the word “faith” like this one, I refer you to my Slate piece (which I much like, because it’s mine), “No faith in science.”
And look at the criteria Sheridan uses to show that religion is true!:
Religious belief, of course, is not just the absence of atheism. That belief in God conforms to our intuition, and to the overwhelming history of human experience, is the most powerful evidence for its being true. God is a God of experience. The long human experience of God, and the vast testimony of this, is persuasive.
Persuasive, perhaps, to those prepared to drink the Kool-Aid! For most of human experience, diseases were seen as signs of a god’s or the spirits’ displeasure. Does that mean that that belief is also true? Further, which religion is true? For most of human history, believers weren’t Christians, and even now the number of Muslims plus Hindus exceeds the number of Christians. So what is true? Was Jesus resurrected, or did Brahma create the Earth, or did Muhammed receive the tenets of the Final Faith from the angel Gabriel? Please tell us what’s true, Mr. Sheridan!
Further, he implies that religion must also be true because most people, living or dead, adhered to religion.
It is a very eccentric position for the West to adopt. The vast majority of human beings who have ever lived, and the vast majority alive today, believe in God. Christianity is on fire in Asia — it’s the only social force the Chinese Communist party cannot control — and Africa and many parts of the world. It is also the most persecuted religion. From Pakistan to the Middle East, Christians believe so seriously that they accept death rather than disavowal.
Need we inform the sweating author that just because a lot of people believe something, especially something with no evidence, that has no bearing on its truth? Enough said.
c.) All good things in Western culture ultimately derive from Christianity.
In reality everything we like about western liberalism grew directly and organically from Christianity. Tertullian in 3rd–century Carthage declared: ‘Everyone should be free to worship according to their own convictions.’ Benedict in the 6th century established the first democratic, egalitarian communities — the Benedictine monasteries — which combined hard work, social welfare, profound scholarship and a life of prayer. The church wrestled the concept of sin away from that of crime. Both St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas argued that prostitution should not be illegal, because while morally wrong it was inevitable, and the law should not try to enforce every moral teaching.
Across 2,000 years lots of Christians have done lots of bad things. Formal adherence to Christianity does not absolve anyone of the human condition with all its frailties. But Christianity always calls its followers back to the gospels’ first principles. You can read the gospels, or St Augustine in the 4th century, or Thomas Aquinas in the 13th, or John Wesley or William Wilberforce in the 18th, or Nicky Gumbel today, and recognise that you and they all inhabit the same moral universe, the same culture. That is astonishing.
This is a bizarre argument, which rests on Sheridan’s notion that Christianity calls its followers back to “the gospels’ first principles” as adumbrated by thinkers like Aquinas and Augustine the Hippo. I’m not going to belabor the point that the good things about liberal democracy come not from religion but from rational consideration, and in fact are opposed to Christian teachings. As Andrew Seidel argues persuasively in his new book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American, the basis of American constitutional democracy requires explicitly rejecting the tenets of Christianity. And seriously, is it good for us to accept Aquinas’s and Augstine’s literal belief in Hell? Or Jesus’s teaching that we must forsake our families to follow Christ?
I won’t belabor Sheridan’s insistence that Christianity improved the treatment of women and girls. Perhaps it did in the Roman Empire (this is above my pay grade), but it certainly does not now, for Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, is deeply patriarchal. So, of course, are most other religions.
Further, we can observe societies throughout the world, and see that the most atheist societies seem to be the most moral, not the least moral. Here I refer you to Scandinavia and other European countries with a strong and empathic social network, yet few inhabitants believe in God. Well, Sheridan would claim that the goodness of the nonbelieving West is simply derived from Christian principles. I reject that, too, for you can find those principles adumbrated in societies existing well before the advent of Christianity.
d.) The basis for our accepting Christianity must depend on accepting its truth statements. Here we see something that I’ve long argued: a morality derived from religion is intimately connected with believing in the empirical truths of its tenets: the Resurrection of Jesus, the receiving of the Qur’an by Muhammad, and so on. For without these bases, there is no reason to accept moral dicta. This was a major point of my book Faith Versus Fact, and I’m glad to see that Sheridan admits it explicitly:
I have come to a disconcerting conclusion. The West cannot really survive as the West without a re-energised belief in Christianity. The idea that we can live off Christianity’s moral capital, its ethics and traditions, without believing in it, appeals naturally to conservatives of a certain age. But you cannot inspire the young with a vision which you happily admit arises from beliefs that are fictional and nothing more than long-standing superstition. Christianity is either true, or it’s not much use at all.
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and comrades: Christianity is either true, or it’s not much use at all. I’m sure he’s not referring to the “truth” of its moral statements, but rather to the truth of its dogma: Jesus was divine, the son of God, was resurrected, and will return to judge us all. If you don’t buy this argument, Sheridan repeats it in his last paragraph:
There is, however, only one reason that counts for believing in Christianity: it’s true. Come on in, the water’s fine.
Yeah, like the Love Canal was fine.
d.) We need to preserve Christianity because, without it, the West would fall apart. He asserts this in the first paragraph quoted in section (d), but then adds this palpable nonsense (my emphasis):
Liberalism today, in rejecting its Christian roots, is cut off from all limits, all common sense, from a living tradition. It is careening down ever more febrile paths of identity politics, rejecting the Christian universalism from which it sprang. It is harming people in the process. Sociologists have established beyond reasonable doubt that religious belief and practice lead to the greatest human happiness.
Really? Which sociologists are those? Surely not Norris and Inglehart, or many like them, who have repeatedly shown that there is a negative correlation between the religiosity of a country and its well being. The same holds true among the fifty states of the U.S. And, as I reported before, the countries that are most religious also have the lowest values of the United Nations’ “Global Happiness Index.” To wit (graph made by reader Michael Coon):
Now this is a correlation and doesn’t prove that religion causes unhappiness—in fact, my own view, supported by other data, is that religion tends to be more tenacious in those countries where people have lower well-being, for they turn to God when they can’t turn to their society or government. But that aside, there is simply no evidence that, at least across states and nations, more religious people are happier. And even if they were, are we supposed to believe in something that we reject, simply because it’s supposed to be good for us? You can’t believe in something you don’t believe, unless you’re Winston Smith.
If you want to find out more, simply plow through Steve Pinker’s last two big books, in which he argues, with data, that it is secular values alone that have lead to the greater well being of the West over the last two centuries. Religion has, and remains, an impediment to happiness and social progress. The West will survive just fine—in fact, better—without superstition (i.e., Christianity and other faiths).
Sheridan is not even wrong.
h/t: Harry
Don’t back off, mate! You’re a voice of reason who I and many others respect.
+1
“You know how dumb the average person is? Well, half of them are dumber than that.” – George Carlin
I’ve learned from a lot of mistakes in life, but at least I have learned (I think).
A lot of people in this world are just not capable of climbing very high on Maslow’s pyramid. Religious institutions fill a serious need.
People believe that secular knowledge, especially that from social sciences, can do a better job of channeling human impulses. One day that may be true, but they have yet to prove it. Keep in mind that it was not that long ago that “Blank Slate” theories dominated. We still have a long way to go before we have a consensus theory of “human nature.”
Meanwhile, I don’t think we should be so eager to throw out our pails of dirty water until we have a proven pail of clean (proven to channel human behavior, to serve the function, not proven to be correct).
In anticipation of the comments, sure to come, about how poor a job of “channeling” behavior the religious institutions do, I will recount the anecdote about Harry Truman’s proclivity for “earthy” language.
Quote:
Once, the story goes, Harry Truman was talking about farming and explaining the role of manure on soil.
“You should tell the president to say fertilizer,” a friend told Mrs. Truman.
And Mrs. Truman replied: “You don’t know how long it took me to get him to say manure.”
Sheridan writes: “The prestige of the West has declined as its belief in Christianity has declined.” This is a classic example of the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” logical fallacy, which means “after this, because of this.” Sheridan’s statement assumes two things, both debatable at best: the prestige of the West has declined and that the decline of Christianity is the cause of it. This is the same logical fallacy that argues for the efficacy of prayer. As one website describes it: “One example of the post hoc flaw is the evidence often given for the efficacy of prayer. When someone reasons that as they prayed for something and it then happened, it therefore must have happened because they prayed for it, they commit the post hoc fallacy. The correlation between the prayer and the event could result from coincidence, rather than cause, so does not prove that prayer works.”
As Professor Coyne has pointed out, the article is riddled with unproven assumptions. To the extent that Sheridan’s arguments are typical of the defense of Christianity then in my view they indicate that the intellectual defense of that religion is moribund.
https://www.logicalfallacies.info/presumption/post-hoc/
“God is a God of experience. The long human experience of God, and the vast testimony of this, is persuasive.”
Which God? The Christian (2000 years old), Allah (1400 years old), Jahwe (3500 years (?))? Vishnu, Quetzalcoatl, Zeus, Ra? Pelor or Lathander?
All Gods are fictional, an invention of our mind. Mr. Sheridan should Pascal Boyer’s great book “Religion Explained” and get a better understanding.
“God is a God of experience. The long human experience of God, and the vast testimony of this, is persuasive.”
Unless, of course, you were one of the survivors of the Black Death which killed around a third to half the population of Europe. People of the time couldn’t understand what they had done wrong to merit such a punishment from God, nor why prayer had no effect.
Add on all the horrid individual deaths, mass deaths from eruptions, tsunami, floods or other weather events, poor harvests, wars and other conflicts, and you have to question whether the ‘experience of God’ is persuasive.
My View?
No, the ‘experience of God’ is NOT persuasive. Not the slightest
Point b.) is the typical strawman argument based on a false dilemma between “faith” and solipsism.
Sheridan writes: “Liberalism today, in rejecting its Christian roots, is cut off from all limits, all common sense, from a living tradition. It is careening down ever more febrile paths of identity politics, rejecting the Christian universalism from which it sprang. It is harming people in the process.”
That is wrong on many levels. Ignoring the “roots” nonsense for the moment, conflating “identity politics” with “liberalism”, and then blathering about “Christian universalism” is contrary to the facts. Liberalism is based on equality, whereas both “identity politics” and Christianity (as well as other religions and some non-religious ideologies) are based on in-group vs. outsider xenophobia and jingoism[*]. That is why “identity politics” (present at the extremes of both the political left and political right) should be referred to as “regressive” to distinguish it from progressive ideologies such as true liberalism. If the “It” at the beginning of the last two sentences quoted (minus the “universalism” BS) refers back to “Christian roots”, Sheridan is correct. If not, then not.
* One need look no farther than sectarian violence e.g. in Northern Ireland (Catholic and Protestant variants of Christianity) or between Sunni and Shia Islamist sects.
I think there is some prejudice associated with Christianity in the US, especially those that are largely rural and white (if you disagree, ask yourself how you would respond to putting your child in a home daycare at a site where the family described themselves as: 1. A proud Christian family dedicated to Christian values vs. 2. A proud Jewish family dedicated to Jewish values. I consider myself something of a Christian and I would still, regrettably, be biased towards the Jewish daycare. Must work on my biases through mindfulness. Anyways.) That said, I don’t know if those biases are actually any worse. I think Sheridan is influenced by one of the easiest biases of all – seeing the past through rose colored glasses. It wasn’t too long ago that different Christian groups – Protestant, Catholic, Southern Baptists, etc. – had fairly deep prejudices against each other. So I think one could also say that biases against Christianity are residual but decreasing, not new and increasing.
Regarding whether or not Christianity provided a needed philosophical framework for society – again, I don’t rule it out, but I think it’s easy to see see that framing through rose colored glasses now. I would agree that post modernism and arbitrarily created worldviews (identity politics and so on) are something of a problem today, and a world that was strongly majority Christian may have solved this problem. That said, I think it’s important to remember the realities of that world as well. From the abuse going on in the Catholic Church and orphanages, to early times where people were literally burned at the stake. If global warming or nuclear war creates some sort of apocalypse or severe regression in standards of living, yes, maybe we’ll find ourselves back at that level of conformity and tribalism. For the time being, however, I don’t think the dynamics of the past, cohesion building though they may have been, are going to work in 2019. Our lifestyles and mindsets are so different these days.
“Tertullian in 3rd–century Carthage declared: ‘Everyone should be free to worship according to their own convictions.’”
Mr. T may have ‘declared’ this, but ‘everyone’ in the Roman Empire (3rd-4th centuries CE) was hardly free to ‘worship according to their own convictions.’ With the Roman establishment of Christianity, there was far less tolerance, Empire-wide, than in the previous centuries under polytheism.
Christians massacred ‘infidels;’ then they massacred one another for heresies that we now find laughable (the sectarian quarrel over the nature of the Trinity being an important one that took uncounted lives–yet is entirely opaque to us).
Perhaps Mr. S should read Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall.’
Nice of Tertullian to put it in such gender-neutral terms (right down to the non-agreeing pronouns), given that he was writing in classical Latin. 🙂
If he finds Gibbon too recondite, perhaps he (and others) might look at Catherine Nixey’s recent ‘The Darkening Age’, which sets out in graphic detail just how much damage and destruction Christianity caused to classical culture and knowledge once it had the power to do so.
Or maybe the physicist Carlo Ravelli’s ‘Reality is not what it seems’, in which he says, among other things, ‘the loss of the works of Democritus in their entirety is the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of the old classical civilisation’. Guess who had the biggest hand in that collapse.
Tertullian was part of that problem. The ascent from the darkness is largely down to the Enlightenment, as Pinker has eloquently described. Almost all the social and political advances of the past 250 years have been hard-won in the teeth of opposition from the churches. Sheridan is either pig-ignorant or a fibber.
The destruction of the Library of Alexandria didn’t help none, neither. Though we can’t lay that at Christianity’s feet, since it happened circa 48 BCE.
Greg Sheridan’s missus is Jasbir Kaur “Jessie” Sheridan – she is a practising Sikh & so are their three boys! He’s on a loser & he knows it – his arguments & justifications are very weak sauce indeed.
He is only in his 60s, but he could be an Aussie version of that irrational old fart Malcolm Muggeridge brought forward in time from 1979 & still whining about Life Of Brian, the evils of the digital world & that great standby ‘kids today’. He is irrelevant, uninteresting, dated & thankfully he’s powerless outside his newspaper.
How on earth does he reconcile his Christian faith with her Sikh faith?
The abysmal argument that “it’s the same god” and “it doesn’t matter which faith you practice” is one of the great weaknesses of religion – it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you believe something!
Presuming that they get along, their secular marriage makes a great example of the benefit of secular society: finding common cause in our shared humanity, without depending on particular belief systems.
“How on earth does he reconcile his Christian faith with her Sikh faith? ”
Same way I get on with my Xtian wife, probably. I don’t rubbish Xtianity, or her car, in her hearing, and she knows that telling me about Jesus is going to be politely ignored.
cr
According to Wiki [lol] He mentions their marriage in his book “Asian Values, Western Dreams”, but I found a fully searchable copy & looked for more on the Sikh conflict of outlook with no luck. A mystery.
He is that variety of Catholic who doesn’t view the irreconcilable moral & factual bits of his religion as metaphor – he’s a literalist for whom Jesus is the real godly deal. With blinkers that large I suppose marrying a Sikh isn’t a stretch for him.
I can’t figure him out – by chance he mixed with a lot of people in his youth who got big in the media & Australian politics, but he has a streak of loose thinking & also a tendency to lay down paragraphs of verbiage on his way to making whatever his point was [the reader has forgotten] this is visible in his newspaper columns & the bits of the book I looked at.
I don’t think he’s that bright, but he’s travelled around a lot, listened to a lot of important people from many cultures & knits his writing into nice patterns that don’t fully hang together when examined closely.
Not a good writer & possibly promoted above his abilities because he works hard & was in the right places. I imagine he finds talented, skilled wordsmith atheists, such as Dawkins & Hitchens* very annoying!
* Hitchens didn’t like to call himself atheist, but I will.
Perhaps Muggeridge should have died young, so as to be a young fart. (Or do young farts not exist?) And how much time must pass for something or someone to be “dated” (not “relevant,” I gather), like a “popcorn” ceiling in ones house, or poetry that rhymes?
No, it’s always “old fart” & how much time must pass before a belief, fashion or lifestyle is “dated” is highly variable. Any more questions Filippo?
No more questions at the moment, Mr. Fisher. But rest assured I’ll ask them as it strikes my fancy.
Good boy, now go away & play outside while the weather is fine. 🙂
🙂 I saw him at the zoo one time. He was reading a copy of The Confessions.
I always have to write “Augustine the Hippo” instead of “Augustine of Hippo.”
There was a rhinoceros in the zoo in London that John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor were fond of visiting together. I’m now wondering whether it had a name. “Augustine” would, indeed, be an excellent name for a hippo.
Dawkins of course did not “assume” that faith is irrational, rather he argued that it is. Aquinas and Augustine agree, but argued it need not necessarily be so.
Sheridan seems to be arguing (unwittingly) that Dawkins was right, but that it doesn’t matter because Dawkins is not a nice person; and if you don’t agree Western civilisation will be destroyed.
I guess it’s a moral advancement on “believe or burn for ever in hell” (which he doesn’t mention at all).
As for Aquinas and women — his family were angry with him for joining the Domincans and to tried to tempt him out of the priesthood by locking him in a room with a woman. He managed to keep her at bay brandishing a burning log from the fireplace in her direction.
Historian deals with the first part of this above. I think the second undercuts Sheridan’s argument. If the West is wanting in vigor, the rest of the world shows that we can have that without Christianity, or even without religion.
Sheridan almost got his title right – drop the out from without and he would be on to something. It’s also telling that he says belief in Christianity, which likely means his brand of Christianity that bears little resemblance to the message of Matthew 25.
Keep going, Jerry.
The idea that all good things come from Christianity is most ridiculous.
Whether it is is directly to blame for misery and poverty of intellect is in dispute. The fall of empires, and invasions led to the great migration period and perhaps people had other worries than to care for ancient knowledge. However, this period at least coincides with the beginning of the Christian ages.
The end of antiquity is marked by the death of Hypathia, a polymath and woman, murdered by a Christian mob. I find it symbolic of Christianity. The other bookend is the resurgence of antiquity, the Renaissance. It’s at least interesting that the Christian period in between seems to be most sinister. Christianity at it finest was a well-documented phobocracy.
What is not controversial: Christians were not interested in maintaining the knowledge of antiquity. Once in charge, the new belief led to a wave of iconoclasm, and always showed itself as utmost intolerant. Other faiths were forbidden, then hidden (the occult).
The cultivation of the mind was imprisoned behind monastery walls, put to use on most silly ideas that now seem quaint and bizarre. Ancient greek authors are still relevant, and so is Roman (moral) philosophy. Christian thinkers produced only mythological drivel for a long time, and then argued against reason and rationality. The great thinkers of the Christian age were Muslims.
Generally, Christianity core tenet is anti-intellectualism which flared up many times, in iconoclasms and neglect, when Hypathia was murdered, and when Christianity’s most influential thinkers urge for a “Sacrifice of the Intellect” or argued that reason was the “devil’s whore”, “God’s Enemy” or a beast that must be slain, according to Martin Luther (see e.g. Gelaterbrief).
The omnipresent oppressive intimidation should be the best evidence. The occasional pyre or prison are merely a reminder that few dared to cross the line and felt the consequences.
Christianity had a long time to show its merits and failed miserably. People who sincerely review the copious documentation and argue otherwise are indeed not right in the mind. Christianity could not halt the momentum of culture that sparked in antiquity; could not snuff out every bright mind. It brought little, but stole its achievements from its predecessors or occasional bright individuals in propaganda fiction. Yet more embarrassing: Christianity itself is a fiction. Christians waged the longest wars and even today different denominations and faiths have very little in common but an umbrella term.
I concur, this author is not even wrong.
The obvious flaw in my take are the works that were kept and translated: few, ideologically convenient, and my main point, kept away from the public. Evidently, Christians did not value knowledge, reason and rationality.
Too right. I fully support your original post. I refer again (sorry) to Catherine Nixey’s ‘The Darkening Age ‘ Not only did the Christian zealots murder Hypatia of Alexandria, they closed the ancient philosophy schools of Athens and torched the great library of Alexandria. Hell, they even abolished the Olympic Games.
They were the Taliban of their time.
Thank you for your postings on critiques of religion and theology. They contribute greatly to my sanity in a world in which I am surrounded by religious ‘idiots’! Keep it up.
I lost another Facebook friend the other day for criticizing prayer. She was a first cousin of mine and I’m saddened that her faith demanded that she sever ties. Such is the nature of faith, though.
💛
She probably tried praying for you, it didn’t work, so she had to cut ties to save face (half joking). I’ve found the single trait shared by every Xtian I know is very thin skin. No surprise, since a severe lack of evidence is hard to argue against when your only argument is: “I feel it to be true” or “the bible says”.
Either way, sorry about your loss.
I think it comes down to “face.” Humans seem to have an evolved strong negative reaction to being perceived as holding beliefs that others think are ridiculous. I think that many believers know that their religious beliefs are ridiculous. As long as they are among other believers, or at least among people who extend respect to religious belief, they can be warm and comfy in their beliefs. Their feelings and their beliefs are thereby reinforced and they are not provoked to remember that their beliefs are ridiculous. But when a rude atheist or other-believer challenges their beliefs in some way this brings the knowledge of the ridiculousness of their beliefs to the fore and that provokes a feeling of shame. These are no doubt not the only thoughts and feelings they experience in such situations, but I think for many believers they are a significant factor. And a natural human reaction to shame is to deny that shame is warranted and to lash out at those who instigated the shame reaction.
Everything posters like Aneris assert about Christianity is accurate, but there is one mystery that remains to be explained. The scientific revolution occurred within Christendom and not elsewhere—not in the Islamic world, nor in China, nor in India. Although Ibn al-Haytham expounded what is essentially the scientific method in the 11th century, the Islamic world abandoned such thinking; while Europe, following the medieval friars Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, finally embraced it from the late 16th century on–leading to what we now call modernity.
Some argue that the outlook of Latin Christianity had something to do with this development. ??? Others that it came from the return of ancient Greek naturalism, or from the growth of capitalism, or from the climate and geography of western Europe, or from the qualities of north Italian wine. Maybe the real story is that in Latin Christian Europe, the spirit of theocracy was weaker for some reason, and so was unable to block the growth of rational thinking as effectively as it did everywhere else.
Unrestrained/unfettered rational thought is one of the necessary precondition for “scientific revolution”, but it’s NOT sufficient alone. It simply isn’t true that rational thought inevitably leads to science being done.
There has to be a complex society wealthy enough to support a class of thinkers & experimentalists with a naturalistic bent & for this situation to bear fruit there must be a desire for technology. Technology is essentially using animal muscle force, water force, wind force or heat chemistry engines to drive simple levers or more complex machines that can do useful work e.g. raising water, milling grain, working leather or iron etc.
There were probably many non-Christian societies where rational thought flourished in some small way [say calendars, astronomy & record keeping harnessed in the interest of more productive agriculture], but there was no need for engines beyond the grain mill level – the ruling class found the status quo of muscle labour quite satisfactory thank you. Thus no science revolution sparked most of the time – it’s not inevitable even with the freedom to think, the correct mindset & the material resources.
Perhaps most of the time rational thought freedom produces static societies supporting a handful of geezers arguing about the nature of zero & that’s all. I’m not a fan of J. Diamond, but perhaps there needs to be a touch of chaos in the system [war, draught, disease] to drive tech.
What about the idea that the scientific revolution grew out of European medieval technology itself? Medieval weight clocks are pretty ingenious, as I found out once when I built a model of one (or tried to). Venice had the best glass production and lense-grinding in the world, when Galileo ground his own lenses for his improved telescope. And so on….
The things you mention are part of the scientific revolution not precursors leading to it.
Even though great knowledge was lost to time, knowledge grows and defies entropy. It outlasts every organism as long it is maintained, which is possible with a relative little effort.
I think nearly everything credited to Christianity should really be seen as Roman contribution, which itself took much from previous epochs. We say the Roman empire fell, but perhaps most of the information was preserved. Customs and ideas — “soft” technology stored in the way people do things did not perish entirely.
Christian crusades brought the “West” into contact again with lots of art and ideas, “science” and technology that was lost on the Christian side, and even developed further by e.g. Muslim scholars.
Christianity’s society was based on warlords and warfare, of aristocratic struggles for more power. Europe’s geography and diversity led to a unique arms race. You could say that Christian teachings and the way they spread, more of a failure, led to competition and inventions, despite sinister attempts by the Church to keep people in their place (see e.g. God’s Plan, the Three Estate system etc). Enough cracks developed that people could, in some small way, improve their lot, which was often uniquely terrible — again thanks to Christian teachings, which are of a dreadfulness that is rarely appreciated today.
The European political landscape was completely fractured, especially in the central Holy Roman Empire, with countless states and free cities. Neither the Emperor was all that powerful, nor the Pope. China, for example, was highly centralised, for instance. But it’s worth noting that Europe’s anti-fragility was NOT a feature of Christianity.
I guess that was the backdrop why the invention of the printing press was that much of a success. With information flying around, literally, people had to “smarten up”, and reading made them realise their bad eyes, which jumpstarted the manufacturing of lenses. That, in turn, fired up the scientific revolution.
Interesting tyvm
A small technical correction: eyeglasses in Europe pre-date the moveable type printing press by at least 150 years: Wiki informs us that “By 1301, there were guild regulations in Venice governing the sale of eyeglasses.”
I like Michael Fisher’s point that things like lense-grinding and gear trains were part of, rather than precursors to, the scientific revolution, defined broadly.
However, I take your point about the fracture of secular and religious power in Europe, illustrated so nicely by the Avignon Papacy, and also by the 1370s war of Florence and its allied city-states against the Papacy. On this view, the absurdities of the late medieval Church inadvertently created space for anti-Church thinking—while also giving rise to the Reformation as a reaction. Maybe what happened is that theocracy dug its own grave in Europe. And then, to increase the need for technology, Europe was blessed with the Black Plague.
Good points. Even though lens making existed before, their use and spread was limited.
Some other addendums: The (re) invention of the movable type had this success, unlike earlier versions in China and Korea, due to the alphabet, which allowed reproduction with relative ease — especially copying was quite easy. Consider that Chinese and Korean has thousands (even ten thousands) of letters.
Also, I gave too much the impression as if nothing happened in Christian Europe during the Medieval and Early Modern period. Quite the opposite: there was a lot of progress, for example the Three-Field System and other such invention that made the “high” Middle Ages (this was cut short by the plague in from the mid 14th century onwards).
Those developments did spread from monasteries. But that can’t be credited to Christianity. It was the byproduct of monks being the “intellectual elite” with enough time and resources to dedicate to such improvements. Arguably, Christian anti-intellectualism, superstition and the lack of a “wash your hands” commandment have something to do with the plague.
The Black Plague in Europe was without question God’s punishment for the Church’s persecution of cats. As for the high middle ages, I’ve long thought that referred to something they smoked—an impression powerfully underlined by the dance music.
Good stuff. “That, in turn,…”, reminds me of James Burke’s Connections series.
I’m not a native speaker, and often don’t know how usual, or unusual certain phrases are, and sometimes not even if they are totally correct. 😉
You sound pretty native to me.
I’m sure there were a multitude of factors involved, but I find Bertrand Russell’s ideas – that there was always a secular / religious power struggle within Western religion, and from it grew academic traditions – interesting:
The yoke of orthodoxy was not so severe as is sometimes supposed; a man could always write his book, and then, if necessary, withdraw its heretical portions after full public discussion. Most of the philosophers of the time were French, and France was important to the Church as a make-weight against the Empire. Whatever theological heresies might occur among them, learned clerics were almost all politically orthodox; this made the peculiar wickedness of Arnold of Brescia, who was an exception to the rule. The whole of early scholasticism may be viewed, politically, as an offshoot of the Church’s struggle for power.
As this tradition is established, he notes that:
Philosophy was concerned to defend the faith, and invoked reason to enable it to argue with those who, like the Mohammedans, did not accept the validity of the Christian revelation. By this invocation of reason the philosophers challenged criticism, not merely as theologians, but as inventors of systems designed to appeal to men of no matter what creed. In the long run, the appeal to reason was perhaps a mistake, but in the thirteenth century it seemed highly successful.
And then later, of course, there was the Protestant Reformation, which I think most people would agree was a huge precursor to the Enlightenment.
Why exactly the Christian West generally ended up with some division between the church / ruling elites / wealthy merchants in the first place is another question though. I’m not sure if it was an ideological (render unto Caesar) or cultural / geographical outcome (the tzar’s in Russia were also Christian and read the same Bible, after all.) Italy was situated nearby several very different countries / cultures and perhaps had to take a more flexible attitude – but then, the result when many cultures come together in other areas is often simply bloody sectarianism (Italy had its share of this as well, but seemed to have a thread of populist appeal running alongside its various sectarian wars.) Similarly there were the Italian empires, who may have had an incentive to bend a little to appease those they conquered and avoid revolt, but other cultures also had large empires without becoming more ideologically flexible. It seems to be one of those situations with so many complicated variables that we may never know for sure.
>> The world is full of vigorous societies and movements — Chinese and Russian nationalism
Most Russian nationalists are Orthodox Christian fascists. Russian nationalism is not that much different from the ideology Sheridan promotes.
I think Sheridan’s argument is essentially to say he wants to keep everything the same. Life is good under a Christian heritage, so why rock the boat by taking up with infidels? But this argument could also have been used when scholars and witches were being burned. He doesn’t seem to much of an argument that loss of religion will lead to anything but more freedom to think.
The awe the rest of the world holds the ‘West’ in, is almost entirely based on the ‘West’s supremacy in science and technology.
I cannot prove that, but I think it is pretty obvious.
And we all know that Christianity had very little to do with this progress.
Stronger, were it not for the Christians destroying Alexandria, the scientific and industrial revolutions might have happened more than a millennium earlier.
[Some great feats of the Hellenistic scientists: Erathostenes accurately calculated the circumference of the Earth, Hepathia (allegedly) realised the Earth orbits the sun and Hero designed a steam machine, just to name a few of their great achievements].
Please keep up the good work, Jerry. One has to ask oneself, does The Spectator not have editors? This so-called “reasoning” should be embarrassing.
BTW, there is an error: you have two of Sheridan’s theses labeled “d”.
It is no coincidence that journalists from Uncle Rupert’s Australian are bleating about the death of religion right now. Our recently elected prime minister is a fervent Pentecostal and there are several in his cabinet who have been pushing for more ‘religious freedom’. By ‘religious freedom’ they certainly do not mean freedom from religion, they want more freedom to shove religion down everyone’s throat.
Thank you for that background, I probably should have known that but didn’t. It also makes a bit more sense why Sheridan’s view of Christianity is so rosy, then. I volunteered on and off at a megachurch (which it sounds like is what Morrison attends.) While people have a lot of negative stereotypes about such places (I once listed this volunteer work under ‘spiritual life’ at a meditation retreat, and had a meditation teacher lecture me, apropos of nothing, about the damage Christian churches do to one’s psych,) I do think they are often very uplifting, with a lot good qualities encouraged. (Their views on homosexuality being a notable outlier on that front.)
I think the problem is that people then see this as “Christianity”, and not a very specific version of Christianity that occurs within largely secularized societies with all sorts of modern ideas about gender equality and respect for other ideologies, not to mention great technology for fun musical performances and whatnot. Whatever one’s views about what ‘true’ Christianity should look like, I think it’s important to remember what historical Christianity actually looked like, when extolling its virtues in shaping the West. The positive, life affirming experience of a megachurch is something I have positive feelings about, but in a way I think this is as much a part of modernity as all the things Sheridan bemoans.
“There is no faster way to get yourself classed as dim than by admitting that you hold religious belief, especially Christian belief.”
Well, he’s right about one thing, anyway.
😎
cr
“c.) All good things in Western culture ultimately derive from Christianity.”
Ha ha bloody ha. Cherry-picking ahoy. I don’t need to be a historian to *know* his subsequent examples are a few jewels picked from a heap of dung. And (from reading other comments above) some of those jewels turn out to be glass.
But just as one contra example of a good thing that was most certainly NOT Christian – our counting system. 1,2,3,4,5… ‘Arabic’ (probably Hindu, actually) numerals. Arguably one of the foundations of all modern Western technology and mathematics.
Without which we’d still be struggling with I,II,III,IV,V… still the decimal system but with an impossibly convoluted notation that makes arithmetical operations a struggle.
cr
I’m a bit suspicious about that ‘Global Happiness’ scale. Cyprus, way up the top? With its history? Saudi Arabia on a level with France and Spain?
I suspect ‘happiness’ is very hard to measure, and probably doesn’t correlate very well with social justice. One could have a nation of happy fascists and deluded slaves, I suppose.
Or a nation that gives reasonable equality to all but people are reluctant to say they’re ‘happy’ because they are aware of the problems of the human condition.
cr
Very well observed infinite! There’s a problem or two with that graph plot showing Cyprus in the leading pack with Finland, Norway, Denmark & Switzerland. Also Iceland should be in the leading pack, but isn’t.
I looked up the UN report Happiness Index for Cyprus & here are all the recent figures which are actually more than a whole digit lower than on the graph:
2019 49th place 6.046
2018 61st place 5.762
2017 65th place 5.621
2016 69th place 5.546
2015 67th place 5.689
2013 34th place 6.466
I can’t find Iceland anywhere on the graph – I suppose some of the red dots are tagged with the wrong country & “Cyprus” has been awarded Iceland’s “Happiness”, but Cyprus levels of “Importance Of Religion”
OK thanks. That would explain it.
Those figures would put Cyprus nearer to, and just above, the plotted line. Still happier than I would expect for a country with a UN-controlled border cutting it in half, but I guess since the situation arose in 1974, both sides have had time to adjust to it.
cr
If this is what dying looks like then let me die along with it.
-Ryan
I am sure that social traits like democracy has a complicated, contingent history (as I will likely find out when I read Pinker). But the inspiration for democracy was not likely another late autocratic – abbott run [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Saint_Benedict ] – community.
Better inspiration comes from the first formally constituted democracy of Pericles over a millennium before Sheridan’s reference:
“Our polity does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. It is called a democracy, because not the few but the many govern. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. ”
— Thucydides, Pericles’ Funeral Oration[5]”
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pericles ]
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
–Seneca
“Faith in god, country and manhood might be seen as regressive by modern lights. But insofar as they were holding back male anomie, we perhaps neglected to consider what damage would be done if we discredited those ideas before finding replacements.”
–a recent Quillette article
I’m an atheist, and I try to be kind to others. But perhaps the ‘little people’ argument is not without merit when it comes to ensuring an orderly society. Most of me is revolted by the concept of imposing an untruth on others for their own good, but a small portion is tempted by the utility of this. The truth is though, it’s too late. Religion as we have known it is not going to come back into the West, except by immigration. A fiery, proselytizing, end of days cult could take hold as society becomes less purposeful.
I was raised in the CofE in a small rural village. If I still lived there I would probably still go to church, not out of belief, but simply as being part of the village, an affirmation of my place in the social fabric. It has taken me fifty years of atheism to admit that to myself. I still have a soft spot for the unobtrusive Anglican vicars, almost embarrassed to bring God into anything. Their teeth were drawn long ago. Just as they have been tempered by time, so have I. My unbelief remains as firm as ever, but find myself more tolerant of others’ beliefs as time goes by, as long as they don’t attempt to impose them on the rest of us. And here I am, tempted by the thought of imposing a false belief in a non-existent deity on the little people. What a piece of work is a man!
The salient phrase. My intolerance of religion boils down 99% to this.
Yep, no doubt about it. That’s the problem right there.
Religion is the folk cure of death. Fear is it symptom.
People in richer countries tend to be happier.
https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/04/GDP-vs-Happiness-and-gradient-within-countries.png