Truth
After God, Does Don Cupitt Understand Science? 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
Monday, 09 February 2004
God and Order
Cupitt blames some of it on to Plato who wanted the Greek cities to run lawfully and in an orderly way. He thus posited that arder was the way Nature was. If that is how Nature is, then that is how we are ourselves, as natural beings. Cupitt thinks this is risible. Now, it is a matter of fact that the Persian religion had its concept of cosmic order or “arta” at least 200 years before Plato, and the Greek philosopher is more likely to have become acquainted with the idea originally from the Persians whom the Greeks did not much like, but could not ignore, especially those in Anatolia who were ruled by them. If Nature has certain qualities, then it does not seem in the least illogical to suppose that we have something of the same, or naturally like what we see of it in Nature.
We prefer to bathe in pure water rather than raw sewage, but the E. Coli bacterium prefers to live in shit. The reason is simple. We have evolved in a particular environment over millions of years, and so we are suited to it. So too did the E. Coli bacterium. The order we see in Nature is what conditions how we live, and it is not so surprising that we prefer our own environment, and the laws of Nature that mitigate any inclination of them to change, thereby upholding the status quo that suits us. Plato was being entirely reasonable in his deduction that we prefer order in our lives, but it is our order not E. Coli’s order. It is a real order not an imaginary one, but it is also being revealed, as we learn more about it, to be a subtle order. If we let it become E. Coli’s order, and it is heading that way, then we shall all die. The God of the Jews and Christians gave us humans to be stewards over Nature, and Jews and Christians have interpreted it as meaning we can do just as we like to Nature. But the subtler reality is that we cannot! We have to respect Nature, and her order, and all the component parts that constitute it, and try to maintain it in as original a form as we can. There is nothing risible or circular about this argument, and a Cupitt who had chosen science instead of theology would have understood it.
Cupitt notes that, in Timaeus, Plato describes a divine intelligence that orders the world. This is the idea he had from the Persians who had both “arta” as universal order, and Ahuramazda the universal God of good works. Plato combines the two, so that now a universal intelligence as Ahuramazda, or Yehouah, consciously forms the world and puts order into it. Cupitt thinks order means the laws of Nature, but, for the Persians, order was “truth”. Arta therefore included the truth of the laws of Nature but included also the truth of moral law and justice.
Modern Westerners are perpetual taxonomists and declare as absolute that classifying something in the wrong taxon is a category error, but others did not see things ordered in the same taxons as we do. No doubt we are cleverer than the Persians were 2500 years ago, but it is somewhat arrogant for Christians to laugh at them because they had not achieved our immense intellectual capabilities, or, at least, had not then discovered what we now know. Despite the recommendations of their incarnated God, Christians are rarely humble, and we must conclude that if the words of their God meant anything at all, then most of them will end up frying forever in the boiling sulphur bath, rather than basking in a temperate breeze.
Anyway, Persians saw laws as different reflexions of a natural order whether they were natural laws or laws of society. When justice is considered to be part of the natural order then civil law is part of natural law. What are utterly different for us were not utterly different to Persians or Greeks in 500 BC. So, although Cupitt seems to want to prove that Greek philosophy was not a big break with what went before, he is tilting at windmills. Who said it was? Human thought evolves, it is not revealed small but perfectly formed as Christians might think. The Greeks had their ideas from what was around them. Their originality was to try any number of permutations and combinations of ideas largely taken from Zoroastrianism—even though it was the culture of their enemies—because they seemed advanced compared with the whimsicality of the Greek gods of Homer and Hesiod. They could not deny their own culture, but used Zoroastrian cosmogony as the basis of their speculations in which their main innovation was reason.
Cupitt goes on to recognize that language is most often adapted rather than invented new, when inventions first appear, at anyrate. Theory is a religious word at origin—a spectacle or a view, and this latter word is still used in the same metaphorical sense. Whereas once a view could only be looked upon, now it can be held—in the mind. The view over Eleusis in the Telesterion must have been wonderful and life-changing. The holy place was suddenly illuminated by night creating an unforgettable magical effect. It was an awakening or a rebirth or a flash of gestalt yielding a new confidence or understanding—a theory. Cupitt concludes that philosophy was a child of religion, something again that hardly needed arguing.
The proper contribution made by the Greeks was that empty speculation could be endless. There had to be criteria of truth. Since truth was again the Persian “arta”, if things existed that were true then they ought to be observable in Nature. Arta is truth and order, and harmony too, and sure enough one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Pythagoras, sought harmony in Nature, through the music of the spheres and mathematics. Philosophers found there was indeed harmony and order in Nature, and their speculations could explain it. When it did, the speculation could be considered as true. It worked!
So, for Plato and his kind, the establishment of truth was evidence of the cosmos—the ordered or even divine world. What was impossible to show was whether the order was just there—a property that even the gods must obey, as the Persians seemed to think, or whether it was created along with the world. It seems a puzzle today even to ordinary people who care to think about it, how a god could create order. A pre-existing god must mean order pre-exists as, or within, the god, if nowhere else, and so is not created by him. To our way of thinking, order must be a property that preceded even an absolute God. Many of the Greek philosophers and later the stoics considered this universal order was God. God did not think and plan, or interfere. He was the framework of divine law upon which Nature was built.
If God stands for order, truth and justice in the world, it seems clear enough that when people have to cope with the apparent absence of these, then they will question the god responsible for them. It can only happen when people have a sense of themselves as individuals, and a sense of some universal power that is meant to supply the missing ingredients. Therefore God, in a sense, did make us human. Yet, unless this God is identified with the universal order, and is therefore a fundamental property of Nature, it does not exist.
This is Cupitt’s point. An imaginary God cannot in any sense create the person imagining it. That is the Christian error. People created the thought of God, and exchanged it between themselves until they all had it, like an infectious disease. This God is an idea—a meme—and ideas can influence us profoundly. The idea of God has done. But it is the failure of Christian and other believers to realize that their ideas are not reflexions of reality that leads us to such misery and distress when deluded believers tell us they know the will of an absolute God. To be a prophet is to be God. All Christians hope they are one of God’s prophets. They want to be God. None of them is. They merely prophesy what they personally are thinking.
Supernatural but Real
Cupitt leads us into an appreciation of the supernatural. It is not natural, and so its main characteristic is its impossibility. It is here but it is not here. It is transcendent and panexistent. All its best stories happened long ago and far away, just like myths, but apply morally here and now, even so. It is invisible and incorporeal but contrives to influence every deed we do, and despite its intangibility, there are always people who have special antennae for it, and can tell us what is happening in this supernatural world around us. Cupitt points out, quite rightly that children, unlike Christian adults, have no trouble in accepting fairy tales without letting them impinge on their lives too much. They love to hear about magic, miracles and giants, but are unfazed that they do not experience them in reality.
What is it that children understand so well that we have forgotten?Don Cupitt, After God
The answer is that they instinctively understand it to be all mythical. Fairy tales are cautionary tales that teach them graphically, and warn them of certain dangers that life throws up. Children know that a wolf cannot talk and say: “All the better to eat you with, my dear.” Yet, they get the message to take care that things are precisely as they seem. Religious believers have forgotten that their religious foundation stories are myths meant to be tutelary not real! Children are not so stupid as to fight wars over whether Goldilocks or Sleeping Beauty is true. Adults do!
Cupitt returns to language—the Word! Religion is all about language—scriptures, myths, creeds, liturgy, psalms, blasphemy. God speaks to people and they hear Him. He creates everything through His Word. He breathes both words and life. Words themselves are magical or supernatural, and simply having the name of something gives power over it.
As for the world itself, once Christianity had taken over with its God regarded now as infinite, it was negligible by comparison, indeed nothing, and to involve yourself in it was sinful.
After Augustine, culture is destroyed, the only rational way of life is the monk’s, and the Dark Ages are inevitable.Don Cupitt
No further comment! Only the questions, “How did we escape it?” and, “How can we stop it happening again?” As long as people keep finding ways of perpetuating religious insanity, we shall not stop it. But, “it is too simple a view,” says Cupitt, to imagine the doctrine of the infinite God is “incoherent, destructive, and a cultural catastrophe”. Apparently, it is because we are just as incoherent, etc, as God, and the very same Christian “thinkers” who asserted the doctrine of the absolute God simultaneously subverted it. So, there you are!
S Augustine, who was the greatest of these Christian thinkers, had a plain public purpose for his real universal God, and a different one for those a little more enlightened, the upper class cognoscenti who were wealthier and marginally better educated. God’s objective existence had to be taught to hoi polloi so that they could be intimidated into doing as the ruling class of people like Augustine told them, for fear of God’s frightful sanctions. The real God was an implement of social control of the ignorant masses, but the ruling caste themselves nevertheless wanted to be saved. Reality was all right for hoi polloi but the nobility wanted something better. The real concept of God alienated the nobility from Him, and trust was re-established in S Augustine’s scheme by mysticism which re-united the ordinary self with God in a spiritual—read, mental—way. This is the mystical “union with God” and the “spiritual marriage”. The religious authorities had their real and vengeful God for the discipline of the masses, and an imaginary mental God for those who were cleverer. If this is Cupitt’s hypothesis, why then were those who took to the mystical route of “spiritual marriage” so often punished for it?
The spiritual marriage, in the form of the hierogamous, went back to the worship of Dumuzi, the earliest stage of religion Cupitt described. It remained a central ceremony of eastern religions for millennia, and the sensible interpretation of the peculiar marriage at Cana in John’s gospel is that it still existed in Judaea at the time of Christ, and, indeed, he participated in it. It continued beyond then into the gnostic religions that sprung up at the same time as embryonic Christianity, but the Church rejected it, prefering pistis to gnosis.
The Church allied itself with the Roman state, and perpetuated the idea of the truly existent big-fella upstairs waggling His finger in our lives, whether through His obligation to answer prayers, His concern to preserve the magical sacraments of the Church, or just to create mayhem occasionally for amusement. Thus, He would help uphold the status quo of the Roman imperium. Meanwhile the original gnostic Christians—who believed God had nothing at all to do with this sinful world but lived in a supernatural heaven as a pure and good spirit with no possibility of pollution by contact with the impure world—were ignored by the establishment as puny and inconsequential, but lived on to inspire multiple rejections of the Augustinian world of the literal existence of God and His absurd sacraments in favour of a proper apostolic life modelled on Christ, a pure and holy angel. This did not happen until the supposedly real Christ of the supposedly real God failed to return on cue in 1000 or 1033 AD. Many people had given the imperial and political Church the benefit of the doubt until then, believing the myth of the Millennium, devised to put off the Parousia for what seemed once a sufficiently long time. Thereafter disbelief in Catholic mumbo-jumbo spread like a brush fire.
In short, Christian mysticism was never a way within Catholicism. It was a distinct and more original Christian tradition cut off by it. To be in one of these traditions was to despise the other. Ultimately, the politicial Church set the forces of the secular states it controlled against the rebels. This time Christ was not tortured. He was the torturer. The Church would not make the same mistake as Pilate, allowing the corpses of any dissenters to disappear and make gods of them. The heretics were burnt so that no Cathar Christ could become what the original had been—a symbol of revolution against the Powwrs that Be. They were not mystical “post-realists”, they were mystical “pre-realists”.
Modernity Rules
What is mystical for Cupitt?—whatever is subjective and not hide-bound by any supposed objective reality of God or experience. Cupitt seeks to promote a new consciousness, free of the domination of the actuality of God and the present political sacred vision. The objective view is the conventional God’s eye view, still clung on to by religious conservatives. It has to respect old formulas and so lacks originality. Modern history, Cupitt thinks, has been freed by being more subjective, and so too should religion.
He is hanging about the postmodern school which is accused of having no values, of rejecting all objectivity as invalid or imposed, and of teaching that everything is subjective, by which it seems to mean, or is interpretated by many as meaning, arbitrary. Yet, what is true above is not true below. Above, the supernatural world of God and His hosts pretending to be real, true and absolute, is purely subjective and arbitary. Cupitt is right about this. Below is an objective reality which we can discover about by objective tests. Admittedly any test itself, performed by a human being, can only be subjective, but the outcome is objectified by aspects of the method. Testers must consciously try to eschew their own prejudices, or at least confess them, but, more important, the result must be published such that others can repeat it and confirm or falsify it. Openness is central to truth. This is science, the method that Cupitt rejected as a young man in favour of time-wasting theology—the “study” of arbitrary statements—the original postmodernism!
Modernity, Cupitt says, began when people actually began to look at the world through their own imperfect eyes, and subjectively see what was there. Before then, everything had been prescribed by God in His perfection, and those who could not see it like that were heretical or insane. Nothing was new under the sun. Novelty could only be, so the modist, Mademoiselle Bertin, said, what has been forgotten, and Christian scholars prove it constantly by digging the same muddy hole. Absurdly, Cupitt claims, the image of Jesus suffering on the cross was the beginning of subjective thinking in that Cistercian monks imagined what his suffering could be like. So, this disgusting religion destroyed civilisation in the name of the suffering God, subjected the world to the darkest of primitiveness for 800 years without once thinking of any purpose in the God’s suffering, then for no apparent reason started modernism by, at last, thinking about it.
It is a typical Christian excuse. Nothing evil in the world is the result of their monstrous beliefs, but everything good is! Cupitt ought to meditate on the myriads of people whose bodies were slowly burnt away from their feet upwards while they were tied to a stake and could not escape their Christian tormentors, those meditative Medieval monks beginning to think in the modern way. It was the challenge from heresy that broke the Catholic stranglehold.
Nor can modern Islam be cited as proof of the importance of the image of the man suffering being the origin of subjective thought, Cupitt attempting to deny that the Moslems have even got that far still. When Christianity was at its blackest, Islamic culture was a beacon of light and reason in Cordoba. If anything, the imperialism at the center of Christianity has forced Islam into its present rigidity as a reaction to persistent Christian oppression.
But who can expect anything other than special pleading from Christians, even when they think they are being critical. They have always to trowel on the self-deception in the hope that the Christian punter might accept some of the critical points. Why doesn’t Cupitt be frank and announce—Christianity is baloney! That is what he is saying.
Cupitt points out that supernatural beliefs are not the kind to be relied on like scientific beliefs. No one sues a church or a minister when prayers for a sick child do not lead to recovery, but, if they had not wanted a child, they would have sued the pharmaceutical company when its contraceptive pill failed and they had had an unwanted child. When the church bus crashes taking choirboys to choir practice, it is unheard of for parents to sue God or the church, but they will sue the vehicle manufacturer or the service station if they can argue some sort of negligence. No one truly believes in supernatural justice, they turn to the secular courts, and sue over practical matters.
Even the people who profess the most loudly that they hold their supernatural beliefs in a literal or realistic sense do not in practice behave as if they take their own beliefs literally.Don Cupitt
The truth is that belief is at best a comfort rag—at worst, it is cowardice. It is the fear of the unknown. They cannot convince themselves that the tales of the wrathful God are not true, and there might be a slim chance, if they doubted—questioned their faith—they might fry forever in hell. They simply do not have the courage to question God in the way Cupitt thinks is the core of modernism, because they cannot let go of the reality of God, even if His effect on everyday life is minimal. The indoctrination is too deep, the expected punishment too severe.
Not even the strictest of fundamentalists will allow their beliefs to be subjected to tests and checks as rigorous as those of pharmceutical pills or food supplements. Their religious conviction just does not hold up, but they still believe. They have the utmost difficulty in accepting what they have been taught is absolutely true is absolutely false, though their whole experience proves it is. For many it is just mental idleness. Christian belief is so utterly lazy and undemanding, it needs no comprehension at all. Christianity actually demands that believers do not even try to understand, because it is so incoherent. All it needs is the gullibility to accept the excuses necessary to explain the incoherence, but these excuses are not based on any deep theology, they are just piecemeal excuses accepted on faith. Believing them simply becomes another test of faith. The clergy pretend it is a measure of its profundity, and their lies are accepted gratefully.
Science
Science can, on the other hand, seem immensely complicated and daunting, and requires dedication to learning and intelligence to understand properly. People are put off it despite its huge success at explaining the world to us, and enabling us to use machines as our slaves lightening the burden of work that Christianity could not do despite the prayers of millions over centuries, except for the clergy. Yet explain these things to children and they find nothing hard about it. Children, comically, in recent years have had to teach their parents how to use computers. Popularizations of science take out all the difficulties and leave an understandable framework that is sufficient for most people in everyday use, yet prepare their children for a deeper understanding should they want to pursue a scientific career. Let us teach our children something useful when they are young rather than a lot of ancient myths the point of which is always having to be re-invented.
But, as we have seen, Cupitt does not like objectivity, even natural objectivity. To be rid of it in some specialist sense of seeing everything from a supposed God’s eye, one can agree with him, but not as the basis of scientific investigation, approachable through social endeavour and a personal determination not to be prejudiced. Science accepts no God, but does accept “the notion that there is a stable, mind-independent world order out there”. Moreover, science would be impossible if this basic working assumption were not true. The success of science verifies this assumption, so it is no longer an assumption but a fact established by the method. This is where all Christians and irrationalists try to make a last stand in the hope that the Dark Age cavalry will dash to save Christianity from the victory of reason. It is Cupitt’s last stand too.
The last stand is Cupitt’s dependence on the linguistic argument. Every word has a history, he says, meaning that all words evolve, but evolution is not a concept that Christians like. It dispenses with God in real life, and in etymology too. Cupitt, though, convinces himself that our vocabulary cannot prove realism, as if it had to. The death of God is not the death of humanity. It will be the birth of humanity—the birth of a humanity free of the bonds of superstition, and free to realise what actions are essential in the world we must live in. Cupitt, underhandedly, is trying to promote disbelief in science because disbelief in God is spreading. He wants to replace the failed God of actuality with a literary God—the only God there has ever really been.
Part of Cupitt’s desired revolution, besides the abandonment of realism, is the abandonment of the idea that the world is “ready-made to be our home”. What then is it, if it is not this? Have we all been transplanted to an alien place from some other world which is our natural home? Is Cupitt von Daniken? This is the best of all possible worlds for us because we are as much a part of it as a shark is part of the ocean. It is as much a part of us as a flower is part of a bee. It can be nothing else because we have evolved to fit the world, and the world has changed to fit us. That is something that Christians refuse to understand. “Every word has a history,” says Cupitt, and the result is “meltdown”, nihilism and postmodernism, seemingly because words do not have a permanent meaning. But history is evolution, not revolution—not catastrophe. The argument is a bit like Zeno’s paradox that the flying arrow can never reach its moving target. Theologians never did like motion. They prefer stasis. What is static is perfect. God is static. He is not allowed to change. The perfect creation of the Persian religion is static. The sun is motionless above, and time has stopped. Nothing moves. That is the eternity that God provides the faithful. It sounds like death without the unconsciousness.
Evolution says everything is in flux, changing slowly over time. That motion or development stops nothing from existing, but also does not mean that it is so impermanent it does not matter. Words similarly evolve, changing their meaning, but they still have meaning! It makes it harder for a scholar to understand what people centuries ago intended by their written words, but the scholar cannot conclude that the words meant nothing. They originally meant something and it is up to the scholars in their collective objectivity to decide what was meant. To do so they draw upon all extant evidence that is relevant. It requires a lot of hard work, but unlike theology, it has an objective. Cupitt is feebly trying to excuse his mistake in picking theology rather than science half a century ago. He hides behind language. Nothing in the real world can be expressed without language, and so, for Cupitt, language is primary and has always been the meaning of religious supernaturalism. Perhaps that is so, but it also has real meaning recognizable in the real world.
Curiously, the cause of the loss of faith in supernaturalism is the product of science and technology. It has made traditional customs and values unimportant. These customs and values are the ones Christianity imposed with the threat of incineration to purify our wicked souls. And all this technology and freedom of thought and movement we now have, making sure we are fed and clothed, able to deny God if we choose, and leave the village we were born in—“This is it?” “Is that all there is?” They disappoint Christians who want to be some sort of Zombies—members of the living dead, forever and ever. Meanwhile, they prefer people in ignorance and poverty, if not tied to a post over blazing furze. It is these Christian customs and values that are pathological, as Nietzsche said. Cupitt, in Christian denial, immediately denies 1500 years of history.
Religion has been a powerful tool of self-development, by enlarging the scope of consciousness, intensifying and purifying it.Don Cupitt
If this was ever true, it was true in a very few cases of privileged people in privileged positions like S Augustine himself. The great majority of people ever compelled to live in that odious world called Christendom, lived in a frightful and frightened state. No one today can conceive of their bondage and suffering, it was so complate. Against the sheer misery of millions, Cupitt will offer the fanciful ravings of a few privileged friars. Against this abject misery, Cupitt will counterpoise papal palaces and gothic cathedrals, as if, without Christianity, no art or architecture could ever have been produced. Had society been more humane, there would not have been eight centuries of darkness when all that was built were rude churches, and art and literature virtually disappeared. Christian special pleading long ago degenerated into sins of omission and commission, but Christians are so conditioned to it, they cannot comprehend that they lie habitually either. Nietzsche spoke truly.
What do Christians mean by truth? They think that truth, or God’s Truth, is an opinion held by Christians. Truth is whatever “correct doctrine” is agreed to be. Truth is therefore arbitrary, and when it is not that, it is politcal. Either way it is offered to the sheep as the Holy Word, and they praise the Lord. Cupitt accepts that the true doctrine of ages past is more and more forgotten, even by professed believers. Which of them understand the theology of the atoning death of Christ, or of the Trinity, or understand why they are a Mehodist and not a Southern Baptist or a Zulu Zionist? Truth in Christian doctrine is anything that denies its denial. The belief in the soul is true belief compared with its denial in Buddhism. Monotheism is true in its denial of polytheistic idolatry. So, truth is that which the Christian wants to believe, and since there are allegedly 35,000 Christian denominations, there is something for everybody in it. “There is no One Great Truth anymore”, but a “repertoire of different truths”. Christian truth is that there is no truth. Hail the postmodern God.
At least there is no need to believe the postmodern God to be saved, but it is helpful, it seems. The point of the postmodern God is that He is as thick as two short planks as far as PM worshippers are concerned. As Cupitt puts it, like the Jews, the PM worshipper has to be “smarter than their God”. And, God is now optional. That at least is progress. When you feel like it you can pray to the “non-real” God, even though you know He is not real! Is that progress? Cupitt says people talk to their dead relatives knowing they cannot hear what they are saying, and the non-real God is the same. No one listens but it is still a comfort. So, it is the comfort blanket God, the kiddies’ invisible little friend re-designed for grown-ups. Like the memory of a dead lover or friend, it resides in the brain, and, though it is imaginary, it is still useful. God reduces to a form of self-hypnosis or Couéism. Prayer is simply an appeal to self, a wake-up call to do better. Quite why this postmodern way of thinking does not lead to its advocates living in an opium den, drowning out the sights and sounds of the real world is a mystery. Ignorance is bliss, God the Opium pipe!
What Cupitt considers the very ancient dualism of the sacred and natural is coming to an end. Needless to say, Nature is the winner. Everything we do presupposes naturalism, and nothing we do that is not pointless presupposes supernaturalism. No one prays when their car breaks down on the highway, they call a mechanic. In the past, people understood themselves and their society by their mythology, and still do, but the supernatural framework of culture has disintegrated in favour of a naturalistic, scientific and technological one. This is the culture of the world civilization. Nothing in it stops us from preserving thatched cottages, old churches, fairy tales and ghost stories. We have them and they characterize our origins, but clocks do not go backwards. Religious fundamentalism can still lead us into a dark age but it will be on into it, not back into it. Alternatively, we can drop all belief in religion as supernaturalism, and have a naturalistic culture, in which we will immediately realise we are letting irresponsible people make money out of technology while sawing off the branch of Nature we happen to live on. The horror is that Christianity and its patriarchal brothers do not care. They cannot wait to die and finish up in a better place. This is the insanity that must be stopped, and, if Cupitt can help to stop it, three cheers to him. The trouble is his method is to point out a new mirage for believers to labour towards, even if it is optional.
Christianity always was self-delusion, but it was unconscious self-delusion. Cupitt wants self-delusion to become a “toolkit”. He wants it to be conscious self-delusion. The present institutions of Christianity and Islam expect the worshippers to accept they are sinners and submit to God, the penitentiary warden. The world is a pentitentiary, and God will ensure we all suffer for being sinners. And what is sin? It is disobedience! Not doing as God ordained. Many Christians have a psychological need to submit to authority, and love the dominating ministers who put themselves at the head of their sects, mainly Protestant, knowing they will be treated with a respect they do not merit. The worshippers are masochists who love to submit to domination without having to feel guilt about it. Quite the opposite. Spiritual power in its Christian form always manifests itself as illiberal, repressive and cruel.
The best way to conquer Satan is to stop believing in Satan.Don Cupitt
So too, the belief in any god that has Satanic consequences in reality.
Why should there not be religion that is free of illusion, untruth and power worship?Don Cupitt
Why, indeed? That great fascist theologian, S Augustine, had set out his blueprint for the totalitarian City of God, and suppressed freedom for a millennium. How did free thought find its way back? It was through a clever use of classical Paganism. The artists, writers and thinkers of the Renaissance used classical myths as a vehicle for modern messages forbidden in the Christian City. The Pagan gods were merely demons, and to depict them in art with human feelings could not have been blasphemous in any way. Popes and cardinals could not object, and actually commissioned artists to paint wonderful paintings of these themes. Only extreme puritans like Savonarola objected, burning cartloads of marvellous art before being burnt himself for being too devout to be a Catholic. His accusers concluded he must therefore have been a heretic. Here was a loophole in the fabric of Christian thought control. Alongside this was the heretical tradition of of mocking Catholicism which continued at the old Pagan festivals, in particular ones such as the new year, as well as underground in heretical covens. Even clergymen took part in these, as the witch trials show. Free thought wriggled through the loophole and lit a candle in the dark age night.
The result of it was the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. What did the Enlightenment lighten? It was the thousand year reich of Christendom, a heavy oppressive pall that settled over Europe choking people on the pollution of Christian “truth” and the absence of schooling. The light was eventually lit, and, if we are sensible, we shall not allow it to be dimmed by lunatic abstractions again. Science and reason are the guards against it, if fairly taught. Theologians do not want to be fair.
Cupitt has said he is personally bored by the debate between science and religion, but it will not go away, and he seems not to understand science too well. Christians typically do not have a clue what science means. When he says elsewhere, “we must abandon the myth of ready made immutable truths out there”—in the context of the previous sentence which mentions “science and God”—it sounds as though the scientists as well as the religious are seeking immutable truths. But the only scientists who believe in immutable truths are those who still manage to square the circle and believe in God at the same time. Any scientist, with a smattering of scientific history, knows that scientists thought all the main questions of nature had been answered by the beginning of last century, but the whole neat package was about to come apart at the seams.
Today scientists are wiser people. They know that science is only exploring the surface of an ever expanding sphere of knowledge. Or, to use a different metaphor, they are peeling away the layers of a cosmic onion. Every time the present surface looks to be well understood the next one starts to show. Scientists know there are no immutable truths. We are seeking approximations to the truth and we hope that through observation and experiment we can refine our approximations or create a more complete hypothesis.
This is all a world away from the creed, which—though Cupitt might reject it—the believer has traditionally accepted as immutable. Cupitt is not fond of creeds but his embarrassment over truth leads him to say that “science and theology must both outgrow their old love affair with truth”. Is he really saying that people should not place the highest value on truth? He must mean that theology has to outgrow its love affair with “God’s Truth”—that is to say, lies, for few people could deny that almost everything that the churches have tried to tell us is true for two millennia is either false, unprovable or of no consequence to anyone except the priests.
Cupitt has the odd idea that science is a “new sort of religious dogma”, yet the scientific method could not work if it were dogmatic. Each scientific truth is established by scientific bruisers slugging it out in the ring until one emerges victorious. We cannot deny that individual scientists can be dogmatic about their pet theories, but that is possibly advantageous. It would not do for theories to be abandoned too easily in the face of new ones since otherwise science would degenerate into faddishness. Science has conservatives and radicals, just as does politics and theology, but science cannot be dogmatic and survive. While giants of theology like Don Cupitt seek to knock science off its pedestal, we need not worry that it is dying.
Claiming that “scientists are in danger of assuming theology’s discredited mantle of authority” sounds like a despairing hope of tarring with the same brush. Scientists might be distressed that common people, having abandoned religion, seek solace in mysteries, mountebanks and magicians rather than the one practice that has taught us how to do magical and mysterious things. Science has authority, the authority that comes out of its undeniable successes, but this authority does not seem to percolate to the masses—the media, staffed mainly with classics and humanities graduates with less inclination to try to understand anything hard than their readers, viewers and listeners, see to that.
