Truth
Science Lectures from the Pulpit
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 08 October 2002
Clergymen and Scientists
A clever and individualistic Anglican called Charles E Raven wrote a book in 1943 called Science, Religion and the Future. He became a Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in 1932 after getting a double first in classics and divinity. His scientific qualifications were that he was interested in nature study as a boy, attended some biology lectures as an undergraduate and did some experiments. With God’s guidance and his own arrogance, he felt well equipped to write about science. Doubtless being a divine he was qualified to write about religion, and perhaps about the future too, since they all imagine that they have prophetic abilities.
The admiration of the novelist Susan Howatch resurrected him from the obscurity that he had sunken into, and the publishers Mowbray deemed him worthy of reprinting 50 years after his book had originally been written. It was scarcely worth publishing originally, and can only have passed muster because Christians like to hear certain things said even though they are not true. They will take them to have God’s imprimatur if these words are written by a divine.
Howatch tells us in an introduction that Raven did not like the “hard” sciences! He preferred life sciences because he could use them to illustrate his religious beliefs. As if to prove he is a scientific dunce, Raven begins by writing that it is silly to say:
I am a scientist. Truth is my concern. And therefore I refuse to admit the importance of anything that cannot be weighed and measured.
All of these experts on religion argue against scientists by painting a caricature that they can deal with. They long ago ceased to argue directly with scientists because they cannot. But, if the caricature that Raven begins by offering has to be accepted by the reader, then in fairness he should offer this too. It is silly to say:
I am a clergyman. Truth is my concern. And therefore I refuse to admit the importance of anything that can be weighed and measured.
This though is much closer to the position taken by the clergy than the previous caricature is close to the position of scientists. Raven hopes to show that this is a more false impression of clergymen than the impression given of scientists, because he thinks he can understand and demolish scientific arguments, and doubtless Susan Howatch agrees, explaining why she wanted the book reprinting. His whole book proves the opposite, but perhaps not to the intended readership who still believe in demons and angels—forms of goblins and fairies acceptable to the established religion of Christianity.
Having begun where he intended, Raven soon is calling scientists “gadget mongers,” whereas others in society are people of a “larger outlook”—doubtless Christians like himself whose outlook is so large that it encompasses every fantasy that primitive humanity was able to devise. It is gratifying reading such words to know that this worthy of Anglicanism considers himself to be a bit of a pit bull terrier. It suits the history of Christians and means his opponents need not feel muzzled by the insincere respect that churchmen often unjustly demand in debate about Christianity.
Nature and Grace
He does disarm us a little by claiming that Christianity is forbidden by creed or canon to “set nature and grace in contrast, to divide history into sacred and profane.” The whole of Christian doctrine is as dishonest as it is possible to be, and there is no need to doubt that Raven can cite something to back up this manifestly absurd statement. What is more to the point is what Christians believe, despite whatever canon or creed Raven feels he can cite.
Christians fundamentally believe that the world of Nature is not the real world at all. It is thoroughly profane and wicked. The real world for Christians is an imaginary world that they think they will live in when they depart the only world that they will ever know. History in the wicked world is unarguably divided by Christians into profane history and sacred history. The sacred history is, needless to say, the history in the book described as the “Word of God.” Any history that contradicts this sacred biblical history is for Christians profane, and even Satanic.
Raven is typically Christian. He lies without a blush confident that the Holy Spirit tells him what to say. From non-Christian shoes, he is lying his teeth out. Raven failed ever to be made a bishop, and the reason might have been that he was far too inclined to say what he thought Christianity ought to be and not what it was. Perhaps he hoped to reform the Anglican Church, but, if so, he failed in that too. He never became the defining fount of Anglicanism, and despite the efforts of Susan Howatch, his latter day admirer, he is now utterly forgotten. But liberal reformer or not, he uses all the dishonest ploys that Christianity has always used, and will continue to use while people let them. In that, his nonsense is instructive.
Raven wants us not to divide experience into categories labelled “scientific outlook” and “religious outlook” but instead approach all problems physical, biological or theological in the same way, collecting and studying the relevant evidence, testing and experimenting, classifying and interpreting, striving, like Lucretius, to “seek out the causes of things.” Who is this clever divine addressing here? Is he talking to scientists or to his own colleagues? The list of features he gives seems to categorize science not theology, and the best scientists are happy to do what Raven wants. There will be only one outlook, the scientific one, and it will be applied to religious matters as well as others. That, though, is surely not what he means.
The Scientific Method
There is hardly any doubt even so early in his longish essay that he does not know what the scientific method is, and, frankly, if he thinks that theology works in the way he prescribes, he does not know about theology either. He says the “principles of inductive research are the same in every field, and even the experiences of mystics and saints are amenable to their application.” The method he describes in 1943 as the “inductive method” had been shown by Whewell, half a century before, not to be essentially “inductive” at all. Raven was doubtless an intellectual and was immensely learned, but he was a scientific dunce despite his nature study and biology lessons.
The scientific method can certainly be applied to all fields of learning, but clergymen refuse to accept it. The reason is simple. What “testing and experimenting” can be used in theology and metaphysics. Tests and experiments need a real world to test. All the testing possible in metaphysics and theology is logical testing to show that the system devised is coherent or internally consistent. Christianity is neither and so would have to be rejected if it were tested seriously in this way.
In a brief aside, Raven implies that there is something contradictory about Zoroastrianism. In its theology, contradiction was at its core, because there were good and evil gods in conflict. The religion itself, however, was not contradictory in the sense that it is coherent unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Evil is perfectly well accounted for without making the good God responsible for it, as the supposed monotheistic religions do.
More important is that only by testing in reality can ideas be shown to be useful as opposed merely to being coherent or plausible. Anything that has no real equivalent or at least illustrative examples can have no practical value.
Despite expressing this wish that the scientific method should be used generally, Raven berates scientists for laying claim to the scientific method as their own “exclusive and strictly patented possession.” It is like berating your neighbours because they grow their own cabbages, while you have to buy them from the greengrocer. How can anyone lay claim to a method that is in the public domain? Like the non-cabbage grower, Raven means he cannot be bothered learning how to do it properly, or more to the point, he has tried it and found it does not work in theology because theology is empty rhetoric and emptier speculation.
The Christian prescription for the scientific method given by Raven in is three parts that correspond with observation, analysis—examining and interpreting the data—and lastly application. Most of the actual scientific method falls into the central band, including formulating and testing hypotheses, which he pays little regard to. He conludes with advice that clergymen are fond of, presumably because God has told it to them but to no one else in the human race—the sum is more than its parts. Goodness! Can we cope with the profundity of the clerical mind?
Raven wants to relieve scientists of all credit for inventing the scientific method. Well just as he likes. It does not matter who invented it. The point is that it works and science has proved it. It is an elementary method used, as Raven can see, by every baby and, one might say, any animal able to benefit from experience. Science does not claim a monopoly on its use. In fact, what annoys clergymen and Fleet Street hacks is that scientists want it extending to wider fields of experience. C H Waddington, in The Scientific Attitude, says the scientist cannot ignore any human interest because his standpoint and method honestly applied to everything will yield a satisfying world outlook. It is realised in Adelphiasophism.
Raven even goes so far as to tell us that the founder of Christianity encouraged it. If that is so, then it is yet another of the many precepts that the Christian incarnated God advocated that his Christian followers uniformly ignored throughout the bulk of Christian history. Christians, as a matter of course, claim anything as their own once they realise that it cannot be prevented by their dogmata.
Raven for all his interest in biology that serves him as a scientific qualification cannot distinguish scientific method from Christian credal faith. For him, the readiness of science not to hold on to creeds but to change hypotheses to get better explanations for natural phenomena is a fault. Yet this is what allows science to progress instead of remaining fossilized in the past of 2000 and more years ago.
Incidentally, Raven describes quantum theory as a “mere ‘interim’ formula” He was writing in the 1940s but quantum theory has stood the test of time, and that means countless experimental tests. Admittedly that does not stop it from being “interim” since that is the nature of hypotheses, but it is scarcely “merely interim!” It is more proof that Raven simply does not understand what he purports to be criticizing. That is the way of the Holy Spirit—inept!
Miserable Sophistry
Raven goes on to reveal that artificial distinctions were made in the history of science that led to its compartmentalization, and the exclusion of religion and politics from the compass of the Royal Society, for instance. The Royal Society is the prime scientific institute of the UK, and the implication is that scientists were biased against these other important professions.
It is curious that when it suits them, the church will lay claim to making all the important discoveries of science itself, through the activities of clergymen scientists, but when these clergymen concur that science is better off free of church and political interference, they suddenly revert to being scientific bogeymen. Meanwhile, the church admitted and rejected whatever of science fitted in or otherwise with its revelations or its preconceived Aristotelian “knowledge.”
Whether Origen and Aquinas insisted on the congruity of Nature and grace or not, the actual congruity of them is not arbitrary. Grace cannot be explored by experiment because it is an imagined quality of an imagined God, and cannot be examined by science, except perhaps by psychology. Raven wants to compare, if not equate, the theology of the Scholastics—“a complete and coherent philosophy in terms of the best thought and science of the time”—with the knowledge gained by modern science. For Raven, Scholasticism, the result of “one of the most rigorous investigations ever undertaken” and “by a succession of outstanding scholars” was not incompatible with the “new philosophy,” because most of the original scientists were clergymen. Milton disagreed, describing the medieval church educational system as:
The scragged and thorny lectures of monkish and miserable sophistry.
The Catholic Inquisition had obliged everyone to be Christians and the Protestant witch hunts had continued the tradition of making people believe Christianity even when they thought it was insane. By the Age of Reason, the only people literate and idle enough to have time to explore the new scientific ideas were clergymen. It ought not to be surprising that science emerged from the only soil that could have produced it—Christian soil.
The fact is that science discovered that the method did work in reality and developed it by trial and error over 300 years or so. Christianity, on the other hand, rejected everything about it during this time, preferring the feudal blatherings of supposed Jewish prophets, Greek philosophers and the empty nonsense turned out by schoolmen basing themselves on these others. Why was Raven trying to snatch it back? No clergymen can want it to use. Theology is about fantasy and that cannot be tested. Raven is jealous that the scientists can do better tricks with their yo-yo than the theologians can. It is a recognition of professional jealousy because the scientific method works in the real world whereas nothing works in theology. Or, if you like, anything does.
Infallibilities and Vitalities
Raven admits that Christians have “hankered after infallibilities” and have identified faith with credulity—points that Christians should note coming from one of their own, but will not—but claims “we are all scientists now.” It would be nice if it were true, but Raven’s whole book is to prove the opposite. Now, in a new century, we can turn to the web and find it cluttered up with utterly deranged Christian websites, mainly fundamentalist, mainly anti-science and mainly American.
Not only do they prove beyond doubt that Christians are still keen on their infallibilities, but that faith is more than ever identified with credulity, and that these credulous fantasists think nothing of bringing about Armaggedon in the belief that it is part of God’s plan. We can now see that the Fundamentalist-Zionist axis is now far more fearful than the extreme political movements of the last century. Madmen who think they are acting for God have always been dangerous. They do not fear dying because they really believe they will have a grandstand view of the ultimate victory from heaven. They will not, they will be just dead like the rest of us.
Application, Raven’s third category, means using the discoveries in life, but by “life,” Raven means a Bergsonian idea of mystical vitality. Though Bergson’s ideas are not scientific, they offer a good link between science and religion for a clergyman, and because the clergy cannot or do not want to understand science, Raven thinks he can just chose to use Bergson because it suits him, and it will be true! So, he carefully explains to us that this is what is meant by “the Word made flesh,” thus quite abandoning all science for arbitrary garbage. Before the days of computing, these clergymen had the concept of GIGO, and they used it to blind their flocks for centuries.
Raven says the “Why?” of action is an ethical question. Well, we can agree that it sometimes becomes it, but how the Why? of the mythical apple falling on to Newton’s head is is hard to see.
Raven’s intention can only be to leave behind the prospect of experimentation, which he constantly disparages as “mechanical,” “pointer readings,” “weighing” and “measuring.” He really believes that what characterizes life cannot be treated in this way, whence the need for bishops and failed bishops who merely remain professors of divinity.
Raven pretends to be forward looking and liberal thinking, but he is basically the opposite, as all clergy ultimately are. That is why they prefer the absolutism of ancient texts pronounced infallible, or fairly infallible. Raven, after all his progressive talk, says the churches must return to the attitudes of S Paul, S John, Origen and Clement of Alexandria. In these times the orthodoxy of the church was in its “greatest days.” So, progress for churchmen is actually regressing by about 1900 years. It can only be justified if he means by it that we are just getting back to the levels of the early Roman empire, after 1900 years of barbarism brought on and ruthlessly maintained by Christianity. It can only be an admission that the churches have been wrong in the intervening time.
For real human beings, such an extended period of error—and not only minor trivial error but murderous incessantly cruel error—would be a sufficient reason to reject the institution responsible, but Raven remained a clergyman until his death. In the end, the rewards overcome all doubt. Few clergy ever get so depressed by Christianity’s savagery that they decide to find something better. Ordinary folk never do, except to swap from one church to another depending on their opinion of their social standing in society. The church is not God incarnate but hypocrisy incarnate.
Nor does Raven think the “insistence” on religion—he means Christianity—is “unreasonable.” More of his professed liberality evaporates. Mankind faces a choice between “collectivism” and Christianity. Collectivism is presumably communism, but where did communism come from if not the brotherhood that the Christian communion is meant to represent? Christians were meant to be brothers in Christ and the earliest ones held their goods in common to prove it. This is just one of the habits of the immediate followers of the Christian God that modern Christians regard as an abberation.
Criticizing Christianity!
Amidst all this, Raven vaguely criticizes Christianity for rejecting Nature. His evidence is all the natural referents and parables of Jesus and the Jewish prophets, and he calls Christians back to this. The trouble with it, of course, is that the atoning death of Jesus has to be rejected because it is impossible to believe that life is so evil, if God’s creation is good, as to require any such barbaric sacrifice. Christians who try to recover Nature as God’s, and so good, are hoist on their own petard. Nor is it accidental, though Raven does not seem to notice. Before patriarchal religions came along with their absent God, everyone believed in Nature as sacred. It was central to the attack of patriarchy on natural religion that Nature should be depicted as wicked.
The Christian churches still cling to a world outlook that is “demonstrably unscientific” and to “superstitions that violate the intelligence,” but this is not how Christianity will go forward. Raven complains that Christianity obliges people, especially professional Christians, to keep “secular knowledge and religious belief in permanent estrangement.” Christianity is wedded to a “pre-scientific indeed Medieval” system of thought—“a habitation elaborately constructed for it in the thirteenth century.”
Raven, along with many like him, whether apologists for traditional Christianity or pretending to be rebels demanding a change, tells us that at first there was no conflict between science and religion. Of course, there was not! All of those who persued science were Christians. But Christianity was never a tolerant religion. The feature that distinguished it was its intolerance. It did not accept that whatever Christians did was right. Quite the opposite! It told lots of Christians they were wrong, and the fires of hell would consume them prematurely, beginning in natural life, if they did not accept what the holy church decided.
Many thought the holy church was wrong and suffered the prescribed fate of being burnt alive. Even today, Christians commentators remark that these were perverse people for choosing a horrible death rather than accepting what the Christian clergy dictated. The earliest scientists were in this same boat. They were Christians who saw nothing wrong in exploring the creation that they believed God had made. Mostly, the holy books of Christianity had no paticular views on what they discovered, although the prelates of the church were uneasy that creation should be tested. When the foundations of knowledge in the bible and Aristotelianism were found wanting, however, the church was not going to rest easy about it.
So it was that some Christians who chose to describe human anatomy, or botanical specimens, were not challenged, but those who declared that the earth moved round the sun, and that the stars were at vast distances from the earth, were condemned. Christians like Raven gloss over, or rather lump together, the indifference of the church in some instances though others were considered outrageously heretical. They maintain the church was kind and understanding. People like Bruno and Galileo were not persecuted for their ideas but because they were obnoxious to Christianity, being obnoxious people!
Early Scientists
The people who began science were indeed Christians, and they thought nature was not evil. Thus, they were defying Christian orthodoxy, and when it seemed to the Church at all serious or threatening, they were accused of heresy. Many were not aware of making important innovations, and nor did the church think they were, but when it reralised that innovations had been proposed then the innovator was persecuted.
Raven’s attempts to identify these innovators with Jesus and the prophets to keep them within the Christian circle will not wash. However tolerant the church was of botanists describing and drawing herbs, the stage would ultimately come when hypotheses and experiment would be used on the specimens, and God would be forced to recede into his secret realm. Raven for all his supposed brilliance, simply cannot or will not accept that Christianity is an unverifiable fraud. So his advocacy of the “inductive” method in all fields is itself fraudulent. Science is not particularly inductive but it certainly cannot be applied to Mickey Mouse and Harvey the Rabbit. That is all religion is concerned about—fictional entities.
Raven likes to use the expression “at best” about his religion. Christianity “at best” is whatever. It conveniently keeps the discussion on safe ground, well away from considering what Christianity was “at worst,” or even “on average.” Nazism “at best” put the German nation back to work, just as the New Deal did for Americans. It is meant to stop us from recalling that Nazism murdered millions of homosexuals, trades unionists and communists in the death camps, the majority of them Jewish. Christianity’s record is just as murderous albeit less intensively so, but stretched out over a much longer time. By talking about “at best,” the rest is excluded. It is a ploy. Christians are masters of such trickery.
Raven thinks it was because of a “moral, intellectual and religious rot” that set in after 1700 that religion and science fell apart. Perhaps so, if the awareness that science was, in fact, refuting religion had become increasingly evident. That was the “rot,” so far as the clergy were concerned. Even so, not all of the fields of science were considered “rot.” The ones that Charles Raven preferred like biology were thought harmless until Darwin.
Spiritual and Material
The eventual solution of dividing the world into domains, one for religion, spirituality and morality and the other for science, factual matters and measurement however did not suit Raven. Christian theology, through the supposed incarnation of God in human form, places its concern squarely in the natural world, even if it prefers the supernatural one. Moreover, the Christian sacraments are material rituals that supposedly have some spiritual consequences. Some Christians are happy to attend communion on sundays and practice science on weekdays, even though the two were contradictory. Hypocrisy, one might say, was typical of the Victorians but it extends in Christianity into the modern day. Some scientists still have no trouble in accepting The Origin of Species during the week and Genesis on sundays.
Raven abandons science again when he reasserts that the “world of thought” is prime and the “world of sense perception” derived from it. His basis is Plato who preceded Christianity by 400 years. Raven says that, since Descartes, a reversal of Plato’s conjecture has become popular among the “unimaginative and the technicians,” but not the “more philosophical.” Hilarious, eh? Social psychology has repeatedly shown that rejection of philosophical idealism in favour of philosophical materialism correlates positively with the eminence of scientists. The truth is that the unimaginative are the ones who believe in supernaturalism because it is a way of not having to think. The supernatural is made up, but Nature has to be worked out. That is what these arrogant twerps cannot do, and the reason why they prefer to leave all the thinking to God.
Christians are not noted for letting truth interrupt their fancies, and certainly not those who claim some feeble scientific credential—usually at the “unimaginative and technician” level, when it exists at all! It is true that the material world is apprehended by the senses and the scientist has to consider the possibility of illusion, delusion and misapprension. None of these can happen to idealists who apprehend directly with the mind the ideas supposed behind reality—or so they imagine in their cosmic scale delusion.
Raven seeks to confuse by referring to a mother’s love as no less real than a chair. As philosophers habitually say: “It all depnds what you mean by real.” It manifestly is not real in the same sense as a chair is real. But, if the material entity that is as real as a chair—the mother, whose love it was—had never existed in the material world then there would have been no abstract love, or material object of it.
Raven even tries to use the theory of relativity to deny the reality of the material world, though he freely admits that he cannot understand it. God has obviously ensured that he understands enough of it to be able to refute reality with it! Like all Christians, whose prime belief is that faith in Jesus Christ is all that is needed to make us into gods, Raven criticizes science because it does not know everything—indeed, because the more it discovers, the more complicated the world becomes. He should have been a professional comedian even having the cheek to write:
It is a mysterious universe, and dogmatism is indecent.
It is typical of these people that they tell us what we know as if they are telling us something new. He tells us that probability takes the place of certainty, omitting to say that a probability does not have to be huge to be certain in practice. It is true therefore that science does not deal in certainties, and, if it ever did, it was in its early years when it was still conditioned by theology. But Raven wants to use his probabilistic notion of knowledge to return to idealism—because the object measured and the measuring stick are inexact, the mind is more important.
Sensible Experience and Abstract Thoughts
Christians must find tha mind primary so that we can become gods when our physical bodies have decayed away, otherwise the Christian promise is an obvious fraud. All of the arguing is circular. No scientist denies the mind and its obvious necessity, if anyone is to appreciate anything at all. Descartes made it clear that thinking is the only thing people can be certain of, and beyond it is uncertainty. Theology distorted philosophy into the arbitrary upholding of whatever suited the clergy, but science tried to get away from a theological certainty, which consisted only of arbitrary statements, into the discipline of confirming assertions by checking them in reality. As professor Susan Stebbing put it:
The physicist’s assertions are always to be treated by reference to sensible experience. He begins from and returns to sensible experience.
It is this returning to sensible experience that keeps science from wandering off on long irrelevant and often dishonest tangents as arbitrary studies like theology do. Raven tries to avoid this by bracketing religion with history—more dishonesty. Religions can be treated historically—it is the only honest way of treating it—but it cannot be treated according to its own supernatural claims. Christians have a special category of history that they call “sacred history” that has to be subject to the supernatural claims of the religion. It is therfore bogus history, and a species of supposed scholars who specialize in this non-subject get outraged when their rubbish is highlighted as what it really is. Biblical history and biblical archaeology are pseudo-sciences that should be abandoned by any university worth its name.
Wheedling as only a Christian can, Raven writes:
If science is committed to quantitative investigation, it is thereby debarred from dealing with the more typically human experiences and must not cavil at other enquirers whose concern is with qualities and personalities.
To cavil a little in reply, it would be more true to say:
If clergymen insist on being utter idiots, they had better not cavil at being told to keep their mouths shut by inquirers who are intelligent.
Raven’s whole piece is a cavil at the success of science from beginning to end. It is not true to say something like:
If a clergyman wears a frock, he is therefore debarred from the more typical human endeavours of those who wear trousers.
In short, Raven is being foolish to arbitrarily divide humanity on the basis of whether they wish to measure or not. In this view, the measurer—the scientist—is debarred from expressing themself on lovemaking or poetry or fine art or warfare. Raven wants to show himself as a hyper-intellect of the Anglican Church but writes what a third former would hesitate to offer to a tyro teacher. Let us remind Christians that human abilities are not confined to Christians, and the ability of a human being as a poet or a sculpteur does not debar them from measuring light or heat or height or weight. Nor is the reverse true, and those who think it is are dolts or bigots.
Raven parrots G K Chesterton, the Catholic novelist and polemicist, in saying the scientist can analyse a pork chop but not the desire for a pork chop. This might have seemed exceptionally clever when Chesterton wrote in the first years of the twentieth century but it sounds idiotic now. Then they thought that people’s abstract thoughts and desires were beyond the scope of science. They are not, and even when these worthies wrote they should have known it because Pavlov had already used salivation as a proxy for the expectation of food half a century before. Now we can see what happens in the brain itself when certain stimuli are given, and parts of the brain can be artificially stimulated to generate desires.
Raven warns the scientist, on the basis of Chesterton’s nonsenses, that they are “arrogant enough to claim that their knowledge is of objective fact whereas that of the theologian is of subjective fancy.” Is he suggesting that theologians are the ideal men to be analysing the desire for pork chops? The priesthood always made a point of demanding and getting the best cuts from the animals sacrificed. Perhaps that is why. He seems to be saying, though, that theologians themselves observe something objective, and the scientist cannot claim this only for science. Chesterton presumes to know what a scientist can and cannot do in respect of the desire for pork chops but he does not tell us what a theologian can do in this regard that a scientist cannot. Whatever it might be, Raven was right in his suggestion that it is only subjective fancy, but he was aiming to show otherwise.
Raven thinks something new and amazing is revealed in the statement:
Reconciliation of the evanescence is revelation of the eternal, and revelation of the eternal is a higher reconciliation to the evanescent.J Oman The Natural and the Supernatural
It turns out that this gobbledegook is the basic principle of a theology in which there couldd be no antithesis between Nature and Grace or between science and religion. Both the principle and the explanation of it are the ramblings of madmen whose private rantings and rationalizations take the place of reason. Where do we find and recognize this evanescence with its strange properties? How is it defined? What is the proper way to study it? Psychiatry seems to be the answer.
Mysticism
A central confidence trick of all religious professionals is to insist that mystical experiences are glimpses of God when they are plainly quite natural experiences, albeit rare, and must be glimpses of the unity of Nature. Like the Christian clergy generally, Raven calls mystical experience religious experience as if they knew what it was. He describes it on the basis of “general testimony” as:
An overwhelming conviction of the oneness, permanence and universality of reality.
No mention of God here, unless oneness is supposed to imply it. Elsewhere, Raven describes it thus:
- the experience of fulfilment and wholeness;
- rare moments of exaltation;
- second hand experiences of communion with God and co-operation with His will.
Raven concludes:
This reality is therefore beyond the categories of space and time, is infinite and indefinable.
Since Raven is keen to appear the scientist, he ought to explain how he has made this enormous jump from his list of experiences to God. What is “beyond the categories of space and time, is infinite and indefinable” is God in Christian parlance. Raven gets here not on the evidence but because he believes that “communion with God” is the “constant goal of religion.” These experiences are therefore falsely regarded as religious so they can neatly be thought of as a “second hand” communion with God.
It is, though, an opinion based on other opinions. It is, in short, theology which is a vast assemblage of opinions, none of it capable of verification, and therefore all utterly arbitrary. It could easily have been said that a mystical experience is the Devil trying to enter your soul in the guise of God. Once he got there he would make the victims into schizophrenics. What divine can prove otherwise? Unless he is schizophrenic!
What mystics actually see is what Raven calls the “general testimony.” It is a description of the natural world seen as the unity that it actually is when we see beyond our own individuality. The oneness in particular has nothing to do with God but is the unity of Nature—its kinunity—the mutual interdependence in space and time of the individual organisms that make up the metaorganism that is life.
For Raven, mysticism is the “primitive holy,” the twofold perception of reality as “overwhelmingly other than and intimately one with the mystic.” Raven perfectly describnes an utterly natural phenomenon. How can this be other than the loss of the sense of individuality in the majesty of the whole of Nature. Raven goes on to specify characteristics—all natural:
- a clarifying of consciousness,
- a sense of detachment,
- a dispassionate vision of himself and his world,
- an assurance of ultimate union with all that is,
- being caught up in the life that permeates, sustains and gives worth to the universe.
Although Raven hopes that the last part again is God, the whole of it is a description of a vision of life and Nature, and how its immensity can be appreciated once individuality weakens. God is only there if Nature is identified with God, but no Christian can do that. Their God, in their own brand of indoctrination, is some kind of big human who made Nature, so cannot be identifed with it. All we have to do is reject this nursery idea to appreciate that Nature is self-created, and divinity is not at all like a big human. Once we take the Christians as wrong in their interpretation, then the two principles of the Christian faith are more understandable—we love God, meaning Nature, and we love our fellow humans as part of it—we must not offend Nature directly or indirectly. Rephrasing 1 John 4:20:
If a man say, I love Nature, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother, how can he love Nature?
It is impossible to hate our fellow human beings without offending Nature. If Nature is the deity, it is immediately obvious that we are united with God. We are a product of Nature. God is superfluous in practice, and is retained for infantile reasons as a supernatural father. It is the mother who is actually God! Even our terrminology becomes correct in that we speak of our “nature” not our “godness” much less “godliness.”
A mystical experience is a revelation of the process of evolution by which the whole of Nature are kin. It is a revelation of kinunity. To get God into Nature the Christian way, He has to be “incarnated” for utterly unconvincing reasons. Mysticism reveals the real deity not the ersatz one.
To try to confuse us further, Raven brackets mysticism with poetry and says they stand higher in the scale of being because they are more complex and more personal. The highest point of the scale of being must therefore be insanity—utterly personal and highly complicated states of mind! Poetry is the use of words to evoke emotions. Emotions are considered primitive evolutionary responses of the brain, not the later and higher responses like reason. Only a fool would declare that science cannot explore and work out how and why certain ways of using words evoke particular emotions.
History and Science
Raven criticizes scientists who write on the history of science for not applying their own method in history, and therefore getting historical things wrong. Perhaps, ideally we should all stick to our own knitting, but clergymen are obviously not willing to, and in the past professional historians have not been interested enough in science to want to write histories of it—perhaps because the science was too difficult for many to understand. Professional scientists have had to take it on, but they have the problem of not having been trained in the use of historical sources. This is an argument for proper co-operation between a historian and a scientist so that the sources are used with proper critical assessment while the meaning and quality of the science is not neglected.
Raven, as ever, is sniping at the scientists but historians must apply scientific method too, whatever their origin, and scientists know that scientific training does not confer some sort of immunity from error on to those who use it. Having a method reduces error, but as long as people are using it and not gods then error will never be eliminated. What happens is that other scientists, historians or those using the scientific method of whatever discipline, discover the error when they check the earlier work. Truth is attained by a process of refining the evidence and finding some that is new. Raven wants to show that scientists are prone to error but they are less prone to irretrievable error than Christian theologians who have no way of checking their results. All they have is the possibility of being challenged by some other speculator within their faith, and at times in the past that has been to take your life not too seriously.
Yet immediately Raven equates theology with history and science, claiming that theologians do test their hypotheses against the data! Needless to say, Raven does not explain how. Instead he continues to snipe at scientists by claiming that their theories are merely modern myths to which scientists “attach a more than credal inerrancy—until further research knocks the bottom out of them.” In two sentences, Raven utterly contradicts himself but none of his Christian readers will have noticed. The fact that further research allows faulty hypotheses to be corrected—or have “the bottom knocked out of them” if that is how Raven prefers to put it—demonstrates that they were never held to be credally inerrant.
Yet Raven goes on insisting that scientists are “devotees” who “imitate the behaviour of other priesthoods and claim a pontifical authority for their theories.” The Anglican likes to combine his sniping at science with sniping at Catholicism thus showing the failure of the Holy Spirit or the victory of Satan, according to your choice—there is no way of testing it. Anglicans are, naturally, free of all all error and fault—or one at least of them was.
Theology uses a technique equally severe and impartial but “more delicate and difficult to apply.” The “results are consequently less assured.” This is side splittingly hilarious, and Raven has to admit immediately that “many will raise objections.” He does not, of course, tell us what the technique is, so we must just presume that it is theology, full stop! The central objection to theology full stop, as we have noted several times, is that it has no data and so its “hypotheses” cannot be tested. Raven pretends that it actually begins with a hypothesis—he seems to be thinking of some supposed revelation—and that is what the objection is. Raven is being as slippery as a mackerel.
All science is based on hypotheses, so scientists have no objection to a hypothesis. It is the test of it that science objects to. A badly reported singular event is certainly supported by the bad report as data, but bad data have to be rejected as inadequate for testing the sort of crucial “hypotheses” that the theologians are claiming they have. The best that can be done with bad data is to note it as tentative, and set out to get something better. Christianity, in so far as we can judge from history, has done the opposite. It has tried to destroy as much data as it can, pertinent to the supposed hypotheses presented, presumably because it does not support it!
The result is that the revelations of Christianity simply do not warrant the intellectual effort put into the vast mansion theologians have built on the unsteady footings of no solid evidence, but held together by fear. The act of destroying data is evidence of dishonesty, and on that count alone, Christianity should not be believed by anyone. If scientific method were to be applied to Christianity, it would very quickly be rejected as a fraud.
Raven goes on acting like one of those clever arbitrators who take the parties to one side to establish the facts the contenders will agree upon. It then turns out that he has cleverly got them to agree a solution without realizing it. Here, though, the subtlety is absent. Truth is ultimately indivisible and that is because whatever concerns value and meaning are to be included but physical science is to be considered unimportant. The reason why science is to be excluded is that it ignores anything that is characteristically human, and therefore is insignificant! Moreover, although physical reality is unimportant in this scheme of things, worship, penitence, and religion are to be admitted as important because reality cannot be interpreted without them. It is no good protesting that the judge is biased and the jury rigged. Hanging judge Raven, the failed bishop, is in session.
Evolution
Raven gets increasingly concerned about Nature as his pamphlet progresses, but he reveals no greater understanding of science for moving more explicitly into the part of it that he supposedly knew best—biology. Like all Christians, he is accustomed to making assertions that he considers would be pleasing in some sense to his conception of God—often the basis for them is that they can be justified from scripture, however tortuously. These assertions then stand by themselves as Christian truth. There is no attempt or need to verify them by testing. So, Nature is not a vast mechanism. To assert it is sufficient for it to be true.
It turns out that Raven is beginning to lose his dove-like plumage and growing something all together more crow-like. He is quickly rejecting evolution in favour of creationism. Raven declares that he is an evolutionist but evolution is “continuous creation.” It will be admitted that a professor of divinity might well think that creation is more plausible than evolution, but he might as well think that pink elephants are more plausible than dipsomania.
This amateur naturalist is trying to tell professional biologists that they are wrong, based on a passing acquaintanceship with nature study, a fat wad from the church, and a lot of already discredited arguments. Since these clergy often have lucrative university appointments, all they need to do is to seek out a colleague in the biology department and ask them to explain evolution. Being clergy they do not do it because, like the cardinals invited to look through the telescope by Galileo, they simply refuse. They are too stupid or arrogant to do it. They might get disabused of the thumb-sucking prejudices that they refuse to let go of.
He confuses what he calls the “will to live” of an animal with the human characteristic of “purpose.” If this is not confusion, and an animal has purpose in its life such as seeking food, the importance of purpose has to be considered in all things. If something behaves in a certain way, given certain conditions, is that purpose? Does water intend to turn to ice at its freezing point? Does a virus intend to infect someone? Purpose is an interpretation put upon a sequence of causes and effects. Christians read back all such sequences to the primal designer—Paley’s Watchmaker. The usual pitiable excuses for arguments are appearing. The certain give away of the theological dimwits is that they inevitably begin to talk about “blind” chance.
Raven wants to establish teleology as inevitable. He accuses Darwin of being confused, and T H Huxley as admitting it, but, if Huxley did admit it, he was wrong. It is obvious that purpose evolved because we have it, but that cannot be extended to mean that there was purpose always, before evolution began.
A Designer?
Raven tells us that his opponents were out of date in their thinking, typically showing not the least signs of self-criticism. He cites scientists who are obviously primarily more interested in God than in science as supporting the idea of design. Design requires a designer, and the designer is the God of the Jews and Christians. They refuse to face up to the inevitable question—who designed the designer? Postulating a designer, does not explain “design” in Nature unless there is an explanation of the designer. Christians quite simply do not get this elementary principle. It is the equivalent of brushing the dirt under the carpet. The problem is not solved, just hidden.
Evolution does not need a designer, and explains “design” in Nature directly. It is a hypothesis that actually does what it is supposed to do—it explains what it purports to explain, and it is parsimonious in not requiring an additional entity to provide the explanation. It is plain then why any clergyman wants to keep science out of the reckoning. They prefer to keep the primitive sacraments of an ancient confidence trickster now called S Paul to be more important than anything that 300 years of scientific discovery has discerned.
Towards the end of his propaganda pamphlet, Raven comes close to blaming the Second World War on to Darwin. It seems that Hitler was an evolutionist and believed in the survival of the fittest. He thought Germans were the fittest, especially those who were ideologically Nazis and not communists, trades unionists or homosexuals, all of whom were sent to concentration camps to be starved to death. Jews were counted out as being German, even though Judaism is a religion not a race, and many of those who were starved to death were Jews. Regrettably, since the time of the Maccabees, Jews have presented themselves to the world as a race, and Hitler believed them. Both were therefore foolish, but Hitler proved to be more foolish with his socio-biological idea of racial supremacy. A coalition of untermenchen—Slavs and cross-bred Americans—defeated him, bringing the normally sensible Germans back to their senses, but apparently infecting some Americans with the “Master Race” virus.
These same Churchmen that criticize biologists for the way God’s world works are the same as those who for centuries kept up an international trade in pitch for incinerating human beings, and occasionally pigs, that they took a dislike towards. Evolutionary biologists are wicked demons for showing that organic life is a struggle for survival, but the medieval clergy were only misguided, or were sometimes misguided, in burning people. Christian clergymen are the propounders of a self-serving deceit as any frank and unfettered examination of their mendacious double-talk will reveal.
Love
So, inevitably, Raven sets evolution against the “Christian” principle of loving our fellow man. It is not, of course, a principle invented by Christians, although they turned it from practical advice into a lie and an absurdity which showed all Christians as being utter hypocrites. Evolution concerns struggle for existence, often between species. There has been scarcely a hint until recent years that human beings have the least concern for other lifeforms on earth, and they have wiped them out savagely.
Species will rarely harm others except for food, and will rarely seriously harm another of their own kind. Mankind is the peculiar beast that needs to be told to love others, and normally ignores all such advice. Humans are as ready to murder other human beings as they are ready to murder other animals, and even more so when they can hire or force someone else to do it for them. The scale of mutual destruction within humanity has shown no signs of attenuating in the two millennia of Christianity. The opposite is true. Each successive war leads to more death and more destruction of the planet.
The principle of loving others was meant as a principle for people living together in societies that were relatively small. The “Christian” principle applied originally to the bands of brothers and sisters called Essenes, of which, we are led to believe, there were only 4000 in Palestine (admittedly probably only adult males). These brothers were invited to love each other and no one else. They seem to have hated Romans and most Jews who were not themselves Essenes.
To imagine that Nature is immoral and humanity is moral is a Christian delusion. Raven speaks of Huxley’s bewilderment that evolution had no apparent room for love, but, if he was bewildered, it was because he believed what the Christians had told him. Fighting for limited resources is natural in evolution, but, once the animal has evolved a brain, it has also to be rational. Christians refuse to be rational, and refuse to use their brains.
It is quite sensible and not at all contrary to evolution for bands of thinking and speaking apes to urge each other to reserve their evolutionary blood lust, if that is what it is, for others outside their immediate group. Having brains allows us to exercise altruism according to the circumstances, and, whereas a solitary animal will instinctively fight, a social animal can use its head to decide when to support its neighbours and when to cut and run.
Despite their command to love their brothers, even the Nazarenes of the bible had their disagreements, and legal procedures for settling disputes were prescribed by Jesus. Small groups have a better chance of surviving through such co-operation. In big populations and extended societies, it is obvious that the command to love all others is unreasonable. Its aim is to allow the people within the community to feel safe, but the communities have got too big and anonymous, and no one does. To love people you do not like and have nothing in common with, except that you live in the same vast metropolis, is impossible.
Mankind, forced into one neighbourhood by the annihilation of geographical barriers has not found the common outlook and ideals which are essential to neighbourliness.Charles Raven
Let us agree, then, that our neighbours are human, part of Nature, and deserve respect, if not love, and so we should aim not to harm them and risk causing lawlessness that benefits no one. Conscious altruism is selfish unselfishness.
Common sense will not do for Christians. Presumably because God told him, as he gives no other substantiation, professor Raven warns us:
A satisfying philosophy will not by itself make men good.
The “by itself” is added because the divine does not know it to be true, and by leaving a gap for God, it can be made true for a Christian. Christianity demands that no one was ever good before the saviour arrived on the scene. That is self-evidently false and only deluded Christians can believe it. Indeed, the Jewish scriptures, which tell the historical developmenent of the Jewish God’s plan to save humanity, shows that He was Himself a genocidal monster—proving, if anything, that some men could be good even when they had no good God as an example to follow.
In terms of religion, Raven is typically Christian in seeing a great error in the sin of idolatry. People must not worship images of wood or stone. They should remove the image and worship the empty space which remains. Better still, forget all that about idolatry and put an altar and a cross there and you will suddenly be a Christian.
Conclusion
Why is a Christian so interested in finding Christian love in Nature? A vast network of competing species, red in tooth and claw, is hardly the sort of world the good God, designer and creator of all, would have made, and the founders of the monotheistic religions considered the world as evil, or at least in the temporary control of an evil god. For Christians, life is just an ordeal to find out whether they are genuinely Christians and merit “real” life—the eternal life they get when they die. Raven does not convince anyone that he is being other than opportunistic in trying to retrieve Nature for God.
His book is now old and it even began in ignorance, and much of it does not hold water now even if it once did. Besides that, science concedes that theories are interim because they are subject to refinement. In this, evolution as a theory is no different. The fact remains that the basic blueprint of life in the double helix explains why evolution works. Copying is never exact and each time the helix divides and replicates itself, the possibility of mutation occurs. Raven was not to know this because he wrote a decade before Watson and Crick, but the editor and the publishers should have realised that Raven’s book was outdated and did not merit reprinting. He was outdated when he wrote but ten years later was consigned to the compost heap.
