Truth
Secular Christianity: the Way for Christians and a Religion for Darwinians
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 27 December 2009
Why is Darwin a Threat to Belief?
H Allen Orr, a professor of biology at the university of Rochester has written an informative review (A Religion for Darwinians?) of a book, Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith by Philip Kitcher, a leading philosopher of science and professor of philosophy at Columbia University. In it, Kitcher, who has written an earlier and excellent book refuting Christian creationism (Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism, 1982) updates the older work to cover Intelligent Design, but also analyses Christian beliefs too, arriving at a taxonomy of Christianity in which the one he calls “spiritual” Christianity is the only one suited to the modern world, and seems closely similar to Secular Christianity.
Kitcher surveys the arguments against several of the forms of creationism that have succeeded each other—all mutually incompatible, not that fundamentalist Christians seem able to tell.
Kitcher’s survey of creationist thought is superb and his conclusion unequivocal. All three creationist positions are hopelessly flawed. They are dead science.H Allen Orr, A Religion for Darwinians?
He then epitomises Darwinism, before turning to the question of why some Christians find the notion and theory of evolution so threatening to their faith. Kitcher concedes that there is a real conflict between Darwinism and religion, but not necessarily between Darwinism and every religion, even every type of Christianity. He distinguishes three varieties of Christianity, which respond differently faced with the reality of Enlightenment criticism:
- Providential Christianity—the Creator of the universe is particularly concerned for humanity, and believers pray to Him. Its Achilles heel is theodicy—there is no answer to the problem of evil when God is so nice, and the trouble with Darwin for believers in this God is that evolution is not kind! All of Creation is in a constant unwitting competition to survive to the next generation. Suffering is therefore built in to the mechanism of evolution, and apparently so that humanity can emerge on some twig of the tree of life to be favoured by God.
- Supernatural Christianity—the most popular type, has a transcendent God who is choosy about who he likes among the human race—prefering the good ones—who, however, depend upon “oral traditions or canons of scripture” to tell them what He is like. Belief in the supernatural God depends, therefore, on the faithful accepting as literally true the ancient lore and writings that describe Him. Biblical scholarship and evolutionary research show that the ancient descriptions cannot be taken literally, and so Enlightenment criticism destroys the old basis for belief.
- Spiritual Christianity—abandons both the supernatural and literalism and instead offers “ethical models of right action and moving portraits of nobly lived lives”. Spiritual Christians need no faith in impossible stories like the resurrection or the false promise of eternal life, but live by the moral teachings of Christ in the gospels. It is a sophisticated faith of pure morality. This type of Christianity does not make its own unfounded claims about the state of the world, nor holds up any sacred texts as literally and forever true. It cannot be contradicted by science or scriptural scholarship, because it accepts them, and works them into its modern moral outlook.
Allen Orr finds that Kitcher has missed a trick in supposing that his two rejected categories cover all forms of Christian belief, for Deism accepts a transcendental God but rejects the literalists’ descriptions of Him. Perhaps Kitcher thought Deism is little different from agnosticism, and indeed, inasmuch as the Deist God does not mess about with what He has made, the burden of morality of the Deist is exactly that of the Spiritual Christian.
Allen Orr adds that the boundary is blurry between Kitcher’s “spiritual religion”—he uses this more general phrase but it seems to be Christianity, rather than religion generally—and secular humanism, and might not exist at all. Kitcher argues that the Enlightenment case against religion goes only so far, and whatever lies beyond it is spiritual religion, and so it blends into secular humanism, or is essentially the same thing—what he describes as “secular humanism viewed through stained glass”. Moreover, he thinks it is unstable and will separate into simple secular humanism or to supernaturalism.
Spiritual or Secular Christianity?
Kitcher wants to distinguish spiritual religion from secularism by showing just what its professors embrace that secular humanists cannot also embrace. Kitcher is concerned that secularists adopt a hectoring tone—as if traditional Christians do not—and that they are without charity and hope. It is a frequent accusation from Christians, mainly for the reasons that Kitcher reviews so well, that the Enlightenment criticisms of Christian belief hurt them because they are true. His own answer could resolve the problem, but he seems unable to accept it himself!
The fact is that this spiritual Christianity amounts to secular Christianity, the acceptance of much of the teaching of Christ as sound teaching of moral principles which promote human sociality—that being what morality is for. Christ is either a great man or a great myth invented as a vehicle for the principles he expounds. It does not matter which, because it is the moral principles that are correct, and myths were always meant to propagate moral principles and warnings, but they have to be read correctly.
The problem of interpretation of Christ's life and teachings has arisen today, with the rival morality of capitalism. Christ’s secular teachings are mostly self evident. They were meant to be understood by the lowest classes of Roman society, the illiterate and neglected ones, like slaves and servants. They need no interpretation by crooked pastors, and interfering priests, and mostly they have been accepted as they were intended by many conventional Christians throughout history.
Secular Christianity says that it is the secular teachings of Christ that are important, and which should be accepted by all, not the mystification of it by Paul, who turned a moral system into an imitation of a mystery religion. Christ was himself a religious man and accepted the supernatural God he called his father, but his morality does not require belief in God. Christ obviously thought believing in God would help to stiffen resolve, but faith in God was not meant to replace his practical moral teachings. And He denied openly that he was God himself, as the Pauline Christians made him.
The trouble in the past was that many Christians, even those who were meant to be role models, the clergy, were corrupt, certainly in the terms of Christ’s secular teaching, and ordinary people had no respect for them for whole swaths of Christian history. We know now that people come in two broad varieties, the kind and generous ones, and the selfish greedy ones, in a ratio of roughly 80:20. The selfish greedy ones, being in a minority, have generally been shamed by the rest into following the majority practice, only the ruling elite being able to escape from the censure of the mass.
Nowadays, especially in the most powerful country on earth, the counter Christianity of capitalism holds sway, and priests and pastors teach it, with no pretence of being, or merely a nod of the head to, Christ’s own teaching. It is destroying society and ravaging the world. It just cannot go on. Never has Christ’s poverty principle been so clear. The world is finite, so frugality is essential, but greed dominates, and the world decays. Kitcher writes we have to…
…make secular humanism responsive to our deepest impulses and needs, or to find, if you like, a cosmopolitan version of spiritual religion that will not collapse back into parochial supernaturalism.
And Allen Orr concludes:
There can be little doubt that Kitcher’s own book represents a significant step in this direction. In a time of strident pronouncements on the intersection of science and religion, Kitcher has introduced a calm and humane voice. We Darwinians could do much worse than to listen to it.
Quite so, for darwinians, atheists and humanists are not immoral. They are more moral than most Christians. More important therefore, than Darwinians and their like following the new Christianity, the old Christians ought to follow it, and these Adelphiasophism and Secular Christianity pages are one place, hopefully a good one, to start learning about it, for they combine the old respect for Nature with the human absolute need of lovingkindness for each other as propounded in the practical moral teaching of the symbolic founder, Christ, of the most extensive religion in the world.
In a sentence, Christ taught that we help ourselves by helping others in society when they are in need—the Golden Rule, or the Principle of Reciprocity. As God symbolises society, the Christian can only love God in practice by loving others. Christ was unequivocal about it. Traditional Pauline Christians reading this article ought to check out their gospels—God is the least among us. If you cannot love the least among us, then you are no Christian.
Further Reading
- More on religious origins
- More on the death of God and secular Christianity
- More on primitive revelation
