Truth
A Critique of “Runaway World” by Michael Green 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 23, 2001
Dead Sea Scrolls
Green now turns to the Dead Sea Scrolls, accepting them as independent documents telling us about the Judaism of the time of Jesus, but nothing specifically about Jesus or early Christianity. He cites the opinion of Professor H H Rowley, as if it would settle the question: “To suppose that the Scrolls can give us any evidence of the nature of early Christianity is fantastic.” What is fantastic is that a scholar can write such nonsense and still claim to be scholarly, but he explains: “They do not confirm or overthrow a single Christian doctrine.” Well, they suggest that Jesus was an Essene or influenced by them and that is sufficient to blow apart the idea that Jesus was a unique revelation. Thus the antagonism between Jesus and the temple authorities was already central to the world view of the Essenes. There are so many other points of similarity between Jesus and the Essenes and the early Christians that only blinkered nitwits could ignore them. Christianity has plenty of them, though. Green picks on John Allegro for claiming that Jesus was the Essene Righteous teacher, crucified by Alexander Jannaeus.
Green compares the evidence for believing that Jesus was Christ with the evidence that cigarettes cause cancer. Smokers would not believe the evidence produced about cigarettes so “evidence does not compel belief.” Green tells us that evidence “can only offer reasonable ground for belief.” This is astonishing. The smoker can reject the evidence that smoking causes cancer but not on the grounds of reason. Yet the evidence that Jesus was God is unreasonable. It is all hearsay and allegation with nothing in the least as scientific or convincing as that suggesting that smoking causes cancer. In other words, Green is using outrageous dishonesty here, as Christians often do to keep the contributions coming in, depending on the ignorance and credulity of their readers.
Green even points out that many of the people closest to the Christian evidence—he mentions Pontius Pilate and the Pharisees—did not accept it. This is not, he tells us, because the evidence is insufficient to warrant belief, but because it was not fully examined, or because the life of a Christian is too hard for some who have fully understood the evidence to commit themselves to. So, again, God has undertaken this bizarre prospect of appearing as an obscure teacher but he does not make sure that the evidence for his amazing act is not compelling, even to some of the closest people to it. Now any universal God that can create universes, could make His evidence utterly compelling, if saving souls was really important to Him. Considering this, the Christian evidence looks more like what it is—a pig in a poke.
Green pathetically has to accuse such a giant intellect as Bertrand Russell of not adequately considering the Christian evidence because having actually done so, he rejected it and never ever found a reason to change his mind. Aldous Huxley, another giant intellect, apparently did understand the evidence but refused to be committed by it because the Christian life was too demanding. Green is telling us that Huxley understood that God appeared as a man and suffered for humanity, but still would not accept the supposedly difficult Christian life for an eternity of pleasure. This sounds strangely perverse for such an intelligent man. He understands God’s message fully but decides to ignore it so that he can have a good time for a few years. Perhaps it was because he realised, with George Bernard Shaw, that “a place where you have nothing to do but enjoy yourself is hell not heaven.”
Having concluded this farrago, Green tells us that the evidence for Christianity was strong enough to warrant belief in it, and the early Christians, who were monotheistic Jews, believed “to a man.” It is self-evidently true that Jews did not believe it “to a man,” but it is also clear that the first Jewish Christians did not think Jesus was God. Some Jews identified God with “the Angel of the Lord” who was the archangel Michael, and they thought the earthly messiah would return as the archangel Michael to cleanse the world as Jesus had cleansed the temple, the bridge between heaven and the earth, thus inaugurating the kingdom of God. This came to be called the Parousia, a word that stands for a theophany in Greek. Thus the logical reason for the belief is evident, but the arguments apply to the earthly messiah, and were transferred to Jesus by those who believed he was Christ. Most Jews rejected Jesus as the messiah but the gentile Christians did not, and they built what we now call Christianity, not Jews. The message of the gospels is that Jesus was not God, so why should anyone believe the opposite.
Christianity and Science
Green now seeks to persuade us that Christianity is responsible for science, because the civilisation that produced it was Christian. That is true, but it was when the rigid enforcement of Christian mythology on the way people thought was crumbling. The absolute authority of the Church in the Dark and Middle Ages was weakening, but before then for a thousand years, the Christian professionals had suppressed all learning except devotional knowledge and some practical skills. Christian indoctrination remained even though the older mindlock had been loosened, so it is hardly surprising that scientific discoveries were made by people who had been indoctrinated with Christianity. It is not even surprising that some of them were clergy, since the clergy, like priests in general from the most ancient times, were a leisured class with some education and the time to pursue arcane interests.
So, what Green tells us is a virtue of Christianity is almost the opposite. Green calls the world of the Dark and Middle Ages “authoritarianism,” as if it were some unfortunate but entirely natural situation to be in. Christians pioneered the escape from “authoritarianism” via the Reformation and the Renaissance. He does not tell us that “authoritarianism” is the domination forced on people by Christianity at this time. Ask yourself why he does not admit that the authoritarianism was Christian authoritarianism and that it was so authoritarian that people had no choice but to be Christian. Who else then could have pioneered the escape from it except Christians? Furthermore, if these men were to keep their heads attached to their necks or their bodies uncooked, they had no choice but to present their discoveries as approved by God. Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle and Newton presented science as the revelation of God’s will.
So, Green persuades himself that it is possible to be a good scientist and a good Christian. If this is possible, it is only by being a split personality and keeping each half ignorant of the other. No scientist could believe that a man can be resurrected from death, once tha body has started the physiological changes that accompany death. No Christian can accept that God is an unnecessary hypothesis, though that is what the scientist has to believe in practice. If you are a Coulson or a Polkingthorne, the Christian half of your personality can be suspended while the scientific half ignores the other’s supernatural tenets. Green, following Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, tells us that the Christian believes God is the God of nature, and whatever the scientist discovers is God disclosing himself to us.
That is all well and good, except that science has found no need for the supernatural and considers it inimical to scientific discovery. Has God therefore disclosed to us that all those miracles Christians and Jews are so fond of are the bogus inventions of charlatans? And how does this disclosure theory explain the Judaea-Christian doctrine that the world is a Vale of Woe to be negotiated sinlessly by those who aspire to immortality? Only at death do we achieve real life, these believers tell us. The world formally had no value in itself, yet the disclosure theory tells us it has, and we must find out about it to learn more about God. It is a popular modern liberal Christian idea, but utterly contracts the idea that the world is a sinful proving ground to test the worth of souls. If the world has value, why cannot it have value in its own right, especially when Green can admit that in it lies the only hope? Pre-patriarchal religions saw the world as valuable and worthy of worship itself, without the need for a trranscendent God. We can see and experience the world about us, but Christians still will rank it as inferior to some imaginery father. It is insanity.
Green’s next tack is to explain that expressions such as that “heaven is up,” is merely the bible using everyday language to describe more complex concepts. He does not admit that “heaven is up” because the main gods of old were sky, sun and moon gods. There is a plain continuity of language from primitive times into Christianity. Green wants to persuade us that we are not adopting anything primitive when we adopt Christianity, but simply an old fashioned, “everyday language.” Christianity is indeed primitive.
Green admits that the bible says that “God meant man to be dominant over nature.” How this is compatible with valuing Nature is anybody’s guess. No one in the whole of history has valued anything they have dominated. Christians have traditionally taken it as given that we should dominate Nature in a sort of war against it. The idea is entirely in line with the belief that the natural world is a wicked Vale of Tears that we are placed in to try our suitability for eternal life. Let us conquer it lest it conquers us. There can be no hope for a world while Christianity is the dominant outlook. Green even criticises Russell for suggesting that a proper use of science can replace strife with harmony. He cites the two world wars of the twentieth century as proof he was wrong, yet these horrific wars were fought mainly between countries Christian for millennia whose respective priests and padres prayed to the same God for victory! Green berates science for failing to tame human nature in 200 years. Christianity has had 2000, but we should still abandon science for Christianity, it seems.
God of the Gaps
Green now notes a fearful mistake Christians have made in the past by reserving divine explanations for whatever science has been unable to explain. This is the “God of the Gaps,” and plainly sets religious ideas against scientific ones. Science, as Newton found, can explain the motions of the planets according to the law of gravity, but there must have been a “Prime Mover” to set them in motion in the first place. As C A Coulson pointed out, once an explanation of the source of the original energy is found, God is evicted from his “Prime Mover” gap, and has to occupy some lesser gap. Science thus shows itself plainly the superior outlook, a “fearful mistake” for Christian professionals hoping to retain their flocks. Green and Christians like him know that science will be the ultimate victor, and they try to promote the idea that science and religion are complementary, not antagonsitic. Christians must not find gaps for God.
Immediately, Green appeals to the ultimate gap for God—as the Creator—trying to explain that there is no need for there to be any evidence for a Creator in His creation, just as an artist’s picture need not contain any evidence of the artist. This analogy invites the unwary reader to accept the huge assumption that there is a need to assume a Creator. The universe has to be God’s picture in the Christian view, but the universe might be God, and whether it is or not, it might exist in its own right. To assume the need of a Creator is not scientific. It is an assumption of Christianity and other religions from the same root. The creation gap is filled by the Creation God. Yet spontaneous events are well known in science, and a better scientific analogy would be that the universe erupted into existence spontaneously in a similar way.
Green cites somebody called McKay that “God is the One who holds the whole universe in being.” Since McKay is supposed to be a scientist, one wonders how he has established this hypothesis. He has not, but he is a Christian and so is not averse to using any credibility he has as a scientist to give false authority to Christian claims. What he does is establish a new gap for God—that of having to hold the whole of the universe in being. What then of the evidence that science is finding that the universe is not being held in being but is flying apart? Bang goes another gap! Green finds scientific dodos who seem to think that quoting the bible is providing objective proof, and then because these scientists have often spoken a load of Christian garbage, assuming that the garbage therefore has the perfume and authority of science.
Green now cites somebody called Boyd to claim that science is concerned with description but religion with encounter, or rather response to an encounter. From this Boyd deduces that Christianity is concerned with an encounter with the Mind behind the universe and its response. Whoever this Boyd is, his theory is not scientific, even if it tries to look it, nor philosophical and even the crudest philosopher would blench. It is typically Christian deception. Boyd has to assume a Mind behind the universe that religions like Christianity are supposed to keep us in touch with. The Mind is simply God, and the theory simply crude lies. Green uses the pseudo-scientific presentations of these so-called scientists, but they are no less fraudulent than his own straightforward Christian tricks.
Green immediately sees that he is begging the question by speaking of a “Mind” behind the universe. He says that the question divides people not on scientific or theological grounds but on those who believed in a Creator and those who believed that creation was a giant fluke. Plainly those who believe in a Creator believe in a “Mind” behind the universe, but it is Green who tells us that the others who deny a Creator believe in a “giant fluke.” The reason he is so sure is that these are apparently the only choices we have. If there were no God we must have been made by a “great deal of time and a great deal of luck.”
Well, even Christians, nothwithstanding the six days of Genesis, will today concede that the earth is several thousand million years old. That is a “great deal of time.” What about the luck? Most evolutionists will deny that evolution is merely a matter of luck although Christians refuse to recognise this. Pour water on to a gentle slope and watch it descend. Predicting its precise path is difficult, if not impossible. The puddle will split into streams that will meander down the slope. That is like evolution. The water takes particular paths that will minimise its potential energy at each stage, so its course is not merely chance. Nor is the course of evolution merely chance, though chance has a role in it. Christians like Green typically want to know nothing of this and call it all “blind chance.”
Blind Chance?
Belief in the Creator and in “blind chance” are held by intelligent people, Green assures us, and neither is conclusively demonstrable. Note how Green wheedles in words like “conclusively,” a word that no scientist would accept except in carefully prescribed circumstances. Christians want to know things conclusively—absolutely—yet will accept their “conclusive” belief on the flimsiest of evidence. A scientist knows that all knowledge has its bounds and is only true within them.
Evolution is backed up by a vast body of laboratory and observational knowledge—it does not work by “blind chance.” Unpredictable circumstances will allow or deny certain genes to thrive. Random changes will occur irregularly changing the nature of the genes that exist. These are chance events, but the genes themselves give their parent organism certain characteristics, so that the organisms with the characteristics most favourable in the circumstances survive and with them their genes, while the others might not survive and neither will their genes. When organisms survive long enough to reproduce, their genes are passed on to their offspring, and so long as the genes give the organisms characteristics that are favourable in the environment they are in, they will continue to survive.
When the environment changes, different genes might offer characteristics that are better for the changed circumstances and the organism will evolve. If not, it might go extinct. Repetition of this process for millions of generations keeps organisms matched to their environment through the evolution that we observe by the changes in the creature’s characteristics. No one who reads this can imagine that the main feature of evolution is the chance parts of it. The main feature is that the best characteristics are fitted to the environment by elimination of the less suitable ones. This is plainly not a random process but a highly directed one. It is a natural process of fitting organisms optimally to their environments. Those which are best suited in given circumstances to being able to reproduce are the most successful of the organisms. Even Christians, blind and bigotted as they, are must be able to see that this is not “blind chance” at all. The combinations of genes and therefore characteristics emerge by chance mutation or mixing, but the resulting organism is selected by its environment, and can only survive by being suited to it!
Human Values
Green prefers to move on to human values, and quickly passes over “wars waged in the past in the name of Christianity, the tortures of the Inquisition” and many other injustices “winked at by the Church.” Green wants to make some token apology for these obvious facts of Christian history, akin to those that people consider so unforgiveably disgusting when attached to the Nazis or Communists that, if they were properly addressed in the Christian context, no one could ever be a Christian.
Green’s excuse is, of course, standard—those responsible for them were not Christians. They called themselves Christians, had supreme positions of authority in the Christian Church and their crimes were carried out in the name of Christ but they were not Christians. Green assures us that when Francis Williams writes that Christian history is “sodden with blood, torture and warfare” he is not being fair! No doubt Nazis will eventually tell us that Hitler and Mussolini were not proper fascists, because proper fascists are kind to old people and animals, and do not murder people willy-nilly. Some people will believe them in spite of history.
Instead of the real history of Christianity, Green offers us the imaginery one. Christianity was responsible for the emancipation of women! The women of Rome were on the way to emancipation when Christianity began. Women were then cruelly oppressed by Christian society for the best part of two millennia and they are still not properly emancipated, especially in the Catholic Church.
Christianity freed the slaves! In an empire that had millions of slaves when Christianity began, it did not raise its collective voice against the standards of society at the time, even though the Essenes, whence Christianity sprang, did not condone slavery. The change in policy was precisely in the transfer of the Essene outlook from the Jewish ambience to that of the Romans, as gentile Christianity. It was an expedience. Yet many slaves were among the first to join the Christian religion on the basis of the promise that they would enjoy eternal bliss—after death. Pie in the sky!
The slave trade in the eighteenth century was no less conducted by Christians. Certainly other Christians were among those who campaigned to have the filthy business ended, but society was still predominantly Christian even though its values were becoming more secular, so Christians were learning to oppose misery and uphold justice despite the Christian record. Most Christians, bishops included, did not oppose slavery, they defended it, just as they defended child labour. Cynical Christians for whom lies are justified for God cannot accept these clear historical truths. For millennia, Christians had no concern for human life. The supposed latter day concern for it is pure hypocrisy. Christianity has survived by being brutal and exclusive to the detriment of humanity, for whom it supposedly exists—but not in this world, of course.
Green really is outrageous. He claims for Christianity nearly every social benefit and every useful scientific discovery. Yet, it took 1800 years before any of these advantages of the Christian faith emerged from the Christian magma, despite the wonderful work of the Christian Church for all those centuries. And, curiously these benefits of Christianity only arose when Christianity no longer had a strangle hold on the world, and free-thinkers, humanists and scientists were questioning “Christian truths” that had kept people perpetually in disease and poverty—what Green calls “the gospel of peace, integration and forgiveness to people who would otherwise have known only fear, superstition and immorality.” This is breathtaking contempt for truth. It was the Church in all this time that was responsible for keeping people in fear and superstition, and any effects it had on morality were achieved by making everyone fearful of the most natural and pleasurable act in nature.
And let us ask again, especially as Green wants to add education to the list of Christian benefits, why it took the best part of two millennia for this wonderful “gospel of peace” and so on to begin to work? Christian universities, Green wants to inform us, were the basis of our education, but it took over 500 years after they were founded for any good to come of them. Universities they were not! They taught Christian superstitions and suppressed all other thought as heretical. After God’s own institution had kept its deadly authoritarian hand on society for over a millennium, the gradual process of prizing open its grasp was a Christian triumph, Green tells us.
He also has the gall to credit to Christianity the founding of trades unions and the liberating of Africa. The hand of Christianity in trades-unionism is that of the Nonconformists, notably the Methodists, who did lead reforms for the industrial working class, but take note of their name—they were Nonconformists. They had sought to break free from the mailed fist of Christian conformity. As for Africa, it remains in a total mess, so what have the Christian missionaries to be proud of there? Nelson Mandela was freed and upturned Apartheid, the racialist system invented and supported by the Christians of the Dutch Reform Church.
Green divorces himself from such oppression by labelling them the forces of conservatism and self-interest. In this he is, of course, correct, but he fails to notice that these are the causes espoused by the churches, and still are by the immensely wealthy “Christian Right” in the USA. Green braggs that Christians will go as missionaries to live among the Dyaks of Borneo. Doubtless that is how the Britisjh authorities were eventually able to take these headhunters to Malaya as allies and set them against the local communists who were their enemies. Another triumph for Christianity.
Humanist Values
Green has another kick against the humanists whom he cannot see being as dedicated as Christians, but if a true history of the reformation and transformation of the world since the collapse of totalitarian church power were to be written, it would show that humanists had the main role, despite all this Christian empty boasting. Green was quite opposed to the communist regimes of the east of Europe, as they were when he wrote, but can see no parallel in the centuries of Christian totalitarianism called the Dark ages. He even says: “Christianity has always been implacably opposed to totalitarianism.” Bearing in mind his own confession of the Church’s sins, merely “winked at” but horrors that are too hard to imagine, it has to be the most profound cynicism that can attempt to justify such a dishonest position. If God wants Christians to lie and lie then it is easy to accept that he wants them to fry and fry their opponents. They have done both without a blush.
Now contrast this disdain that the church had for humanity for most of its history with what Green now says. Christians value man so highly because he is made in the image of God. All human virtues stem from God, including, you might note because Green mentions it specifically, truth! So, the fatherhood of God is the basis of human value, and Green illustrates it with a few throwaway quotations from God Himself, if we are to believe He was Jesus too.
Presumably the explanation stands as before, that all the millions of crimes of the Christian churches against the person happened because the people perpetrating them were not real Christians. Green never explains how you know a “real” Christian when you see one, but he is happy to accept anyone as a Christian at his word—until he commits some awful crime, then he knows they were not “real” Christians. The bible tells us to recognize a prophet in the same useless way, because we can only know when the prophecy fails or is fulfilled. That is why it is more profitable to judge Christians as a whole on their record, but Green says nothing at all about those who condone Christian crimes while they are going on. Christians continue to lie unashamedly, and Green is one of them.
Green jeers that atheists have no basis at all for respecting human life because, for the atheist, humans are merely random appearances in the world. Christians invented the technique of the “Big Lie” which repeated often enough will be believed. Can a man who has several degrees, even if they are in fiction like divinity, not appreciate that human beings are not random. If he sincerely thinks we are, then he is a dunce, and if not, he is a liar. We are here because we are not random but are suited perfectly to our environment, just as Nature’s other creatures are.
That is a sufficient reason to value us all, but there is another simple humanistic and sociological reason for valuing each other, and that is that by so doing we safeguard ourselves from the whims of others. These are better and more practical reasons than “the heavenly father” fairy tale, which might be suitable to growing children but should not be for those who are adults themselves.
The Christian popes and bishops that tied people to stakes and lit a bed of faggots at their feet did not care that these victims were created in the image of “the Father ”in heaven, so why should anyone think it has any deterrent effect on other murderers. They justified it by saying they were starting “the Father’s” work for him. He would burn them forever in hell, so the church authorities thought it a good idea to start it here on earth.
Green has nothing to say about such delusions, commonplace as they are, that God is acting through people that he created, even when they are manifestly inhuman and insane. Those who take the view that Nature should be treasured as sacred could not possibly see anything other than insanity in killing other humans. The sheer brutal inhumanity of Christianity has put killers in charge of the world, and offered them suitable justifications. That is why Christianity was able to wipe out Paganism then heterodoxy, inaugurating a reign of fear and misery for a thousand years.
Green, brazen as ever, concludes by again turning truth on its head, saying “atheistic humanism is utterly ruthless in torturing and eliminating unwanted people.” This man is so bent it is unbelievable, though he is typically Christian. Christians might recall a saying about motes and beams.
God of the Gaps Again
Green returns to his quarrel with science, even though it was supposed to be compatible with religion. Given that atoms will form more complex structures spontaneously in nature, Green still wants to know: “How came they to be there at all?” he has warned his readers to beware of the “God of the Gaps,” but has forgotten his own advice already, and is desperately trying to find a gap for God. He tells us that many famous scientists he knew also postulated a “Mind” behind the universe. Since these are friends of Green, it seems reasonable to assume that they are likely to be Christians, so his claim is not surprising. Other scientists hold no such view and are more scientific because science is not based on belief but on observation and testing.
His next task is essentially to claim that “random” assemblies of atoms cannot be conscious and so cannot have ethical or aesthetic thoughts. Just in case you missed his point, Green calls it “an unfeeling concourse of atoms.” It is doubtless hard to get “ethical or aesthetic thoughts” from an unfeeling anything, even an unfeeling Christian. He adds other puzzles such as how to get the personal from the impersonal and how to get freedom, or even the illusion of freedom, from a deterministic world. Green is determined to prove that he is a scientific dunce, even though he is a master of divinity. They choose divinity because they are hopeless at anything useful, so there is no point in wasting your time on their pathetic attempts to explain away science.
We can see that human beings are conscious and have these feelings. It is a fact for science as it is for a Christian. The Christian, however, thinks that, by postulating a god, the characteristics of human beings are explained. They are not. The problem is just disposed of by dropping it into the gap called “Explained by God.” The man who warned about invoking a “God of the Gaps” thinks we have forgotten about it—or perhaps it is simply that he has. Nevertheless, Christians will accept it as an explanation, and believe that there is no scientific explanation. The scientific explanation is that the selection of the sets of characteristics that best suit an organism to its environment is what eventually gave rise to consciousness, and the many abilities like aesthetics and ethics that go with it.
Green cites a biologist called Edward Conklin, who must have been a particularly hopeless biologist, as saying:
The probability of life originating by accident is comparable to the probability of a dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing works.
Clever, eh? Green seemed to think so and added that Conklin was not “unfair” in saying this. Green thought this was unfair:
The properties of the ultimate particles which constitute the material universe… spontaneously interact in certain ways and organize themselves (without apparent outside intervention) into units of increasing complexity. Eventually, after a sufficient number of stages of organization, these attributes include those associated with life, thought and consciousness. The process appears to be self-acuating, self-perpetuating and reproducible. At no stage therefore is it necessary to postulate a divine intelligence.Dr Alan Isaacs, The Survival of God in the Scientific Age.
Green calls this “absurd.” So much for the divine Logos.
