Truth
Atoms and Icons 5
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 12 November 2002
History
In addressing the problem of uncovering truth in history, Fuller uses that open-faced innocence that guilty children use to fool their parents and teachers. “History has usually been written by the victors”, and the victors “have a habit of destroying documents putting forward the points of view of the losers”. Who, by chance, are the worst offenders? Christians! The Christians had absolute power in Europe for over a thousand years, and did not hesitate to destroy whatever displeased them. It is a wonder that anything remains at all of classical times, but fortunately clues have survived and allow truth to be reconstructed. Christians unfortunately regard truth as whatever Christians do.
Fuller’s apologetic purpose is clear. He wants to absolve the saints of Christianity from the accusation of destroying the evidence. “Registers get lost, damaged or destroyed”. If we try to trace our families back, we do not usually get too far, he argues, but we are not talking about the unimportant records of urban workers and country peasants. We are talking about a religion now followed by over a billion people, a religion which claims to be a uniquely historical religion and which took over the archives of ancient Rome, a race obsessed with order and legality, and with keeping the central government informed of the least infringements of the Pax Romana.
Yet, as soon as these Christians took, over nothing was left of the Roman records or of Christian origins except what had been forged. It is a religion which assiduously preserved bits of the bodies of the saints, pieces of the holy cross—never mind that there are enough to build HMS Victory—and even the holy foreskin of their incarnated God, several of them! In the fourth century, when the Christians took over, they quickly found all the main sites of the gospel events, labelled them as what they supposed they were and began the tourist industry.
Obviously, even then, Christians were interested in history. Yet what do we hear over and over again from Christian apologists—they were simply very very careless! They lost important historical things relevant to their own religion amazingly easily, and with utter completeness. All of the relevant Roman records have been lost, all of the relevant histories of the time have been lost or altered, and documents are still extant that have been blatantly censored.
No one should believe the Christian tommy rot about them being regrettably careless. They destroyed what was damning to their beliefs, they destroyed rival beliefs, first Pagan then other Christian beliefs, they destroyed or refused to manufacture books they did not like, and they finished up destroying the living bodies of people they did not like. This is the religion of the loving God in action, the religion Fuller wants scientists to co-operate with.
Fuller suddenly notices that modern knowledge is better than older knowledge. A modern day experiment is carried out with more precise instrumentation and more complete understanding than in the past, so will give more accurate and hence “better” results. Why then did he, a few chapters back, pick on 200 years old scientific ideas to criticize instead of the “better” modern ones? Why pick on Laplace rather than Steven Weinberg? Fuller actually states:
Historical events in the sciences are only important insofar as they have led to present day understanding and to the theories that obtain in the present.
He openly declares himself to be a rogue or a fool for criticizing the scientific views of the past, and even doing it by using the modern scientific views he accepts are better. He expects his readers to have forgotten, or not noticed his cheap ploy. Christian crook!
Theology and History
Turning to theology and history, Fuller tells us the activities of theology are rooted in history, “in the events and characters encountered in the bible!” This theologian completely ignores the findings of historians and archaeologists that the bible is so unhistorical that it cannot be used as a reliable historical source. Where has Fuller been? He accepts that history has to be interpreted, but modern scholars go beyond that. They say the bible has repeatedly shown it is unreliable in major sections. It has been possible to verify it in only a few instances. The safest course is therefore to look elsewhere for reliable information, and use them to chack the bible, not the other way round. If theologians insist on the veracity of the bible in the face of the evidence, then they are tricking ordinary Christians. Scientists do not indulge in trickery, and they abhor the few who have been found doing it.
Anyway, Fuller decides to eschew the Old Testament and just follow the gospels—doubtless a safer course—the “quest of the historical Jesus”. He begins by noting four criticisms of the gospels:
- They are sometimes contradictory.
- They were not written by Jesus and were later edited by others, so views expressed as Jesus’s are not necessarily his, and he must have had other views to give himself a world view and they have been omitted, so we simply do not have a balanced picture of what Jesus thought.
- They were written four or more decades after the events and so can include errors caused by amnesia or false memory, and copying errors can have been introduced by later copyists deliberately or by accident.
- Authors then were less critical about what constitued historical fact than modern historians.
In reply, Fuller ignores the contradictions as exaggerated. He argues that just because some crucial facts are wrong, it does not mean it all is! This is utterly contrary to anything that a historian or even a lawyer would accept. They will say that, whether it is a testimony before a court, or a historical document, when crucial facts are known to be wrong no confidence can be placed in any of it. Admittedly some lawyers and historians who are Christians will except the bible from this because they are dishonest enough to break their rules when it comes to religion, but the bible should be judged like any other ancient book. Christians worship at the altar of self-deception. They insist on deceiving themselves.
Poetic or Biased?
Fuller attributes the discrepancy over the date of the crucifixion in the Synoptic gospels and in John to John’s determination “poetically” to make Jesus the human equivalent of the Jewish sacrificial Pascal lamb. The lamb of God is to take away the sins of the world. It seems the author of John can be forgiven for changing an important historical and religious fact to suit his own “poetic” interpretation of it. Christians now believe that “poetic” interpretation is God’s message and intention.
Christians will argue that the wonderfully inept holy ghost was at work here. It was God’s intention that Jesus should be seen as the Pascal lamb—a human sacrificial atonement for sin—but the holy ghost forgot to ensure that Jesus was crucified on the right day—when the sacrificial lambs for the temple were themselves being slaughtered. So, John has to alter the fact—or John recorded it correctly and the holy ghost forgot to remind the three Synoptic authors when they got the date wrong. Needless to say, if it was God’s intention that Jesus should be seen as the atoning human lamb, then this was not a circumstantial detail in God’s message, but it is the central fact in it. Three out of four gospels therefore get the central fact wrong.
Fuller concedes that any historical documents written as biographical will contain the natural biases of the authors. Redaction criticism is the attempt by scholars to see what the biases of the four evangelical authors were, by comparing the emphases in the texts. Thus it suggests that the author of Matthew was Jewish because of his fondness for citations of the Jewish scriptures that would have been incomprehensible to gentiles.
The innocent skeptic looking on can only wonder again at the excessive respect given by Christians to this hopeless ghost they rely on. If it were any use at all, it should not have allowed the biases of the authors through, since doing so just confuses the message to those who can read them all, as we can today. Surely God will have forseen this. After all, even though these human authors wrote down the words, these words were the Word of God, supposedly being inspired and supervised by one of God’s ridings.
Criteria of Authenticity?
Fuller mentions criteria such as “multiple attestation” which takes it as more certain an event happened when it is attested to in more than one source. This is plainly a bogus criterion because the only source is the New Testament. There is no contemporary external evidence for Jesus because the church got careless and “lost” it all. In the New Testament three of the gospels are often cited as multiple attestations of Jesus that are remarkably close. They are, in fact, so close in many passages that they are copies of the same thing. A single source quoted three times is not triple attestation, if this is what Fuller was alluding to.
He mentions too the criterion of dissimilarity which requires Jesus’s sayings to be unique. A good many of his popular ones are not. They are known from Jewish sayings to have been popular sayings at the time. Jesus might have used them in his speeches, but they are not then original and cannot be considered revelation. Alternatively, the gospel authors might have used them in their efforsts to reconstruct what Jesus said, knowing they would be novel to gentile readers—their main target. Mark, the core of the Synoptic tradition seems to have been written for gentiles.
Another criterion of dissimilarity is more important but ignored by Christians. It is the criterion of dissimilarity of Jesus’s sayings from what the church later taught. The inference is that any such sayings must be genuine because:
- they must have had authority for the church not to have erased them,
- the church can have had no motive for adding them.
Jesus repeatedly taught that poverty was spiritually essential to salvation. Few Christians can deny that is what he did teach. They just ignore it. Jesus also did not abrogate the Mosaic law, saying that not a jot or tittle of it could pass away before the end of the world. The church taught the law had passed away. Christians, even Protestants, are of course certain that the church was right and Jesus was wrong in this. They never consider thay might be making an error with grave consequences post mortem. They tell each other it is not so, and so it is not.
It was added by Judaizers, they say. So when did these Judaizers have control of the bible? If the only Judaizers who could have written it, the original Jerusalem church members before 66 AD, actually wrote the original story then how does the gentile Church in Rome 1500 miles away know what should have been written? To have been included in the first gospels contrary to the wishes of the Roman church, these must have been genuine recollections that could not have been omitted without damning the church as liars and tricksters from the outset.
A 40 Year Delay
On the delay before the first account was written, Fuller cannot deny it, but introduces the separate problem of copying errors to dilute the seriousness of the main issue. When he comes to the issue of the delay eventually, he gets typically apologetic and dishonest.
There is a gap between the writing of our gospels and the events which they describe, but it is by no means a big one compared with other ancient histories.
He contrasts the “mere” 40 years before the first gospel was set down in writing with the date of the oldest manuscript of Caesar’s Gallic War, which is from a millennium after the event. It seems that Caeser had been dead for a thousand years before he wrote his book, according to Fuller. He is terrible at distinguishing his apples and pears, and, even if he is not, like all Christian apologists, he relies on his readers being indiscriminating.
There is no doubt that Caesar wrote his Gallic War at the time, based on his own experience as the general in charge, and as he was dead ten years later, it could not have been more than ten years out of date at the extreme. It was not. The book was written in 50 BC within eight years of the start of the campaign, and as it is called Diaries it is probably composed from his own notes and his officers’ military logs. Historians regard them as excellent contemporary sources, and have only to take account of Caesar’s political aims in writing them.
The age of the oldest extant manuscript is another story. The oldest identifiable fragments of gospels are from the first half of the second century, and that is less than 100 years after the earliest gospel was written. Caesar’s Gallic War is a thousand years older almost. Perhaps Fuller wants to imply that the Gallic War could have been endlessly altered in the thousand years between the time of writing and the earliest version we have today. Two things—there is no sign of it. And there is no motivation for anyone to want to do it. Nor is it because scholars cannot tell. They know from the style the last book is not written by Ceasar, but there are no obvious signs of tampering with the main text and why should there have been?
That is not the case with the supposedly holy records in the gospels. They have been extensively altered, sometimes in only minor ways, sometimes in important ways, but they have been carefully preserved physically from early on. That is not unusual. Jews would not throw away any sacred book but kept them locked up in special cupboards called Geniza, and it is likely that early Christians were equally careful. Sacred books were kept carefully. Christians had little interest in keeping any other books carefully. They wanted to destroy most of them as evil, and those they did not destroy were kept for teaching the monks Latin and Greek, so that they could read their bibles.
Fuller urges us to “be consistent in our judgments of the historical value of ancient sources like these”. That is just what a historian tries to be in respect of ancient sources, but not in the way that Fuller means. By “consistent”, he means they should be treated as equally reliable. Good historians are consistent about them but they mean by being consistent that they treat them as all equally unreliable until their reliability has been proven. The church made the error of keeping four gospels instead of chosing one or using a harmony. The four prove each other to be unreliable, and discredit the whole story to anyone who thinks. Christians do not.
On the question of copying errors, in the many and various manuscripts that remain today, a large number have copyists’ errors. Mainly they are simply that. The sort of errors that a tired slave or monk might have made after a day of boring copying. Most are minor and do not particularly impinge on meaning. Some, though, like the addition of verses 9 to 20 of Mark are important alterations and there are manuscripts that do not have them, or have something else. Fuller reassures the sheep that the passages were added not much later than the original publication but it means over a century later, as scholars judge by the style and word usgae. Chapter 21 of John also looks added, but no manuscripts exist without it.
Gullibility
Fuller now is interested in seeking to refute the idea that people 2000 years ago were not gullible. It might be easier to say, were no more gullible than they are today, because there are plenty today who are. He writes:
The suggestion that all the people of this period were gullible simpletons… does not stand up well to scrutiny.
By now, it ought to be clear enough that there is little indeed that Fuller says that stands up to scrutiny, and this is no different, except that he makes it absurd by stating “all” of them. People like Lucian are hated by modern Christians for exposing the scams of some of the early Christian crooks. That he did so, and had a readership proves that not “all” of the Romans and Greeks were gullible.
A difficulty for Greeks and Romans in the Christian religion, but one that scarcely exists at all now that it just a type of spiritualism, is that they would not accept the resurrection of dead bodies. They will have found it hard to get away from the gruesome impression conveyed by W W Jacobs in his classic one act play, The Monkey’s Paw. Dead bodies rotted, and to return them to life was to animate corruption.
Yet the situation then is what it is today. Intelligent people mainly think Christianity is superstition, and hope that people are gradually growing out of it with better education, but even scientists have been taken in by mediums, stage magicians and orientals doing operations with their bare hands. Much of the population still have an insatiable appetite for anything apparently supernatural, and will not be persuaded it is otherwise, even when no one comes forward to claim large sums offered for supernatural acts to be done under scrutiny. The host that a child sicks up still looks like a biscuit even though once imbibed it is the body of Christ, according to some Christians. Like Christian evangelicals, magicians can get extremely rich and lauded in society even though they are frauds because they claim it is not trickery.
Then, most people believed miracles and miracle workers. Lucian was hoping to expose them, but magicians were careful to guard their trade secrets unlike modern ones who have TV shows showing how they are done. Fuller somehow thinks that modern gullibility negates ancient gullibility. That modern people still are sustains the idea that ancient people were more so. The claim that people were more gullible then is based on the fact that a lot more people were illiterate and uneducated, and that observers like Lucian show to us how gullible people were.
Clever tricksters were ready to gull the little that people had from them, and the story of Peregrinus shows just how it happened. Christians were far from the only crooked priests at the time. Alexander of Abonotichus was another, supposedly of the religion of the healing god, Asklepios, but there were tens of thousands of magicians, remnants of the Magi, who travelled around like circus mountebanks. Some of them got on to permanent scams that gave them security. Christianity is the one that lasted, but it might have been Asklepios, and, in some senses, it was because Jesus was given all the main titles that Asklpeios had, so that Jesus became the healing god, instead of Asklepios. This sort of syncretism is completely denied by Christians but is plain to anyone who examines the evidence.
Miracles
Fuller now comes to miracles themselves. He regards them as integral to the gospels and therefore, one assumes, he means they are true. He gives three “alternatives” here for considering them.
- They are all true.
- They illustrate the power of God but “poetically”. They are not true.
- They happened but were not miracles. Various natural explanation can explain them.
The first and last can safely be discarded by anyone who is not a Christian. If, for the sake of argument, the miracles were real, then Jesus was acting as a god in doing them, not as a man. That Jesus was wholly a man is a central tenet of Christianity. Later in the book, Fuller tries to argue that if an electron can be a wave and a particle, then Jesus could be a man and a god. More befuzzlement for simple Christians. An electron has properties of a particle or of a wave but under observation not of both simultaneously. Jesus could be observed suffering as a man on the cross, but also doing miracles, and eating fish and honey when he was dead, like a god. He could suffer as a man but simultaneously be a God—or no one could be sure he simultaneously was not when on other occasions he had been. Christians might like to argue that that God the Father did the miracles for God the Son, but then Father and Son were different, when Christians say they are the same.
If the miracles happened but were tricks, then Jesus is not perfectly good, he is defrauding his followers into following a trickster. One of the earliest accusations aimed at Jesus was that he was a trickster. He is called a magician! If they were not intended as tricks but were just misapprehended acts by Jesus, then the holy ghost, another riding in the Trinity is being as usual inept. He is supposed to make everything right.
Only the second can hold sensibly. Christians treat the miracles as if they were metaphors for Jesus’s mission. There is no good reason why they were not actual metaphors from the outset. When Jesus healed a blind man, he was not physically blind but blind to the message that Jesus was giving. Healing meant that he came to accept it. He was converted, in modern parlance. It was likely to have been an Essene code based on the scriptures, such as Isaiah. They often used codes to hide their intentions, one of the obvious conclusions from the Dead Sea Scrolls. No one can be certain what the codes meant but it seems they meant something different. A blind man was simply an unbeliever. A paralytic was perhaps a Jewish collaborator with the Romans. A leper was perhaps a temple priest. Who knows, at this distance? But the idea, supported in essence by the scolls, makes good sense, and removes the healing miracles in a convincing way.
The miracle of feeding 5000 (or 4000) people was never intended to mean that these people were fed a hearty picnic. The feeding with a morsal of bread was what Christians still do to this day with a wafer biscuit. The feeding was a ritual spiritual feeding, the exact equivalent of the Christian communion conducted as the Pope does at Easter, for a mass of people. They were fed spiritually and so a morsal of bread sufficed. Similarly, the miracle of turning water into wine in John was a blessing of water to turn it into ceremonial wine. If these people were Nazarites, they did not drink wine. Their wine was “new” wine—blessed water, just as Christians use for some rituals. Christians refuse to accept sensible explanations like these because they mean that Jesus did not initiate the rituals that Christians tell each other he did. The Essenes, of which he was one, already had them!
Myth
Turning to the word “myth”, Fuller tells us that a myth is not untrue, even if it is not true history. It is passed down the generations for some truth it has in it. Fuller seems ready to accept some parts of the New Testament as not literally true, but a sort of mythology. The story of the lamb of God is an example. The New Testament might not be true but is often metaphorically or allegorically true. We can be sure that with the aid of their hopeless ghost, Christians will be certain they know which bits are true history and which bits are true myth. Not that it will matter if they get them mixed up because they will be able to explain it just as well.
Fuller takes important steps here to agreeing with that group of biblical critics—mainly Jews and Christians themselves—who describe the bible as a literary work with a devotional purpose, not mainly true in a historical sense because it is not meant to be. Fuller tells us that much of it is “poetic”, “metaphorical” or “allegorical”, and now “mythical” and he even says it does not matter whether there is a factual basis to the biblical stories or not. If this is generally accepted, then science can certainly coexist with religion. Science would be happy to accept the bible as a book of myths, because that is the conclusion that scientists and critical historians have come to already. No doubt Christians will manage to conjure an objective God out of them nevertheless, and scientists will be happy then to argue about that.
More openly, Fuller wants to defend the position that myths are true, and to do so he sets up the claim that all history is mythical. He has already forgotten he has told us that a myth is not historically true, and instead now wants to tell us that it is true history but a bit romanticised. No description of reality can ever be as complete as reality. Even a good eyewitness cannot give the full story. Good historians know this and try to give as objective an account as they can uncover. They sometimes do not when they are trying to correct a faulty or biased account by someone else. Plainly, then their account is biased oppositely to correct mistakes, but a judicious reading of both accounts should give a more objective impression.
There are many Christians who have never had any interest in any kind of objectivity that might give a proper history of the times and places in the bible, and there are a lot of pseudo-historians who want to earn money by writing romanticised history, but not as novels. Christian histories are paraphrases of the bible presented as if they were the results of objective scholarship. There is nothing that Christians will not do in their dishonest desire to spread their “faith”. So no one should be misled by these divers types of rogues, and everyone should stick with honest historians, who, like scientists, do all the hard scholarship for little reward and few plaudits. They keep in mind the search for truth, something that biblicists cannot comprehend.
Fuller uses the same trick over and over again—the polarity trick. Whatever is not poles apart is standing side by side. So, belief and knowledge are equated because belief contains some knowledge and knowledge some belief. All gold contains a trace of lead, and all lead a trace of gold, so give up your gold ring and take this lead washer. They are just as good as each other. History contains some myth and myth contains some history, so they too are just as good as each other. Is there a hint of Postmodernism here? Is Postmodernism Christian truth extended to all knowledge. Christians have always believed that the holy spirit ensures that whatever they say will be true. That is Postmodernism. The Christian hopeless spirit is the holy spirit of Postmodernism too!
What Christians have always done is to justify lies. It does not matter whether myths contain an unidentifiable trace of history. Fuller has admitted that the purpose of myths is not historical. Historically any myth is therefore a historical lie even if it contains some metaphorical truth. By the criteria that Fuller has discussed, the bible is a historical lie. Fuller seems to admit it is, for the most part, not historical.
Science and History: Galileo
Coming on to the subject of science and history, Fuller waffles for a while leading up to Galileo who was obliged by the Catholic church to recant his views on the heliocentric planetary system, or to suffer some exquisite torment devised by the cardinals of the loving God. Fuller says Galileo is remembered as a hero who stood out against “hostile bigoted opposition”, but he asks:
Might not this be just one more example of history being written by the victors?
It invites an affirmative answer, but who were the victors? Fuller wants the reader to think that Galileo won, but the immediate victors were the cardinals who forced Galileo to recant. Of course, they later lost every engagement with science afterwards, so there is no doubt they are losing the war, but Fuller seems to think it is already lost. Good! Then why doesn’t he surrender? The reason is that the vast coffers of stolen and extorted money at the disposal of the churches, and additional donations to Christian causes by every right-wing corporate boss and financial shark in Christendom can prolong the war as long as they like. So even though the Pope spoke highly of Galileo in 1965 and apologised for his treatment in 1992, Fuller keeps the attack on the great man going.
Fuller’s case is that Copernicus was not badly treated, and his theory it was, and that the scientists of the day supported the Church’s view. Copernicus was prudent enough to delay publication of his book until he felt he was dying and the book only reached him four weeks before he did. So, the church did not have time to treat him badly, and otherwise it would have, as Copernicus knew. Even in 1839 when a statue to him was erected in Poland, Catholics refused to officiate at the inauguration service.
It is scarcely suprising that the “scientists” of the day chose the same cautious stance. Giordano Bruno, who taught that space was infinite, was burnt at the stake in 1600, rightly refusing the cross hypocritically held out to him. It is not hard to see beneath Fuller’s desire to re-try Galileo, the same callous hypocrisy as the bishop offering Bruno this tainted cross.
No one likes the idea of being roasted alive let alone the reality of it. That is why Galileo is viewed as heroic. He was ready to risk it by standing up and saying, “It really moves because that is the way things are”. The cardinals were happy to accept a fudge. “It is as if it moves”, would have satisfied them. Galileo was a seventy year old man, and finally recanted, allegedly muttering sotto voce, “Eppur si muove”—“It moves nevertheless”. When he died in 1642, the Church refused him consecrated ground.
It was an important node in the history of science. Galileo stood up for experimental science as saying something true, and not being an illusion. Fuller thinks this was an “extreme” position for him to have taken. Here we get more of the deluded nihilism of Paul Feyerabend quoted. Galileo was wrong because he made an error in thinking the tides were evidence for the moving earth, so he was irrational, for Feyerabend. It was the cardinals who were more rational.
In a sense they were, as they accepted the Ptolemaic explanation of the movement of the heavenly bodies. It was the only explanation they would consider! It was the ancient explanation accepted by the Church for 1400 years. Feyerabend can be safely dismissed however because he denies that anything is rational, and so his own criticisms cannot be. He uses the word “hagiography” of Galileo, using projection typical of Christians. Hagiographies are the idealized romances they call the lives of the saints. To use it of a critic of Christianity is to tar him with the same brush. Crude techniques like this are a sure sign anyone using them has lost the argument.
Fuller includes, in his dustbin of discredited opinion, C S Lewis, a prolific Christian apologist in the austerity years after the War when even Christians needed reassuring, but otherwise a pipe-smoking, beer swilling misogynist, passing judgement on others with his little tribe of “Inklings”, as Christians do. They all declared that Galileo was wrong by the standards of his day, apparently so stupid or besotted by their Christian apologetics, that they had not noticed Galileo was standing against the ideas of the day because they were wrong.
Sick People
The psychopathic deceit of these Christian professionals, Fuller illustrates with sickening effect when he asks:
Is it more important for a scientist that his or her hands be full of practical achievements than that they be unstained?
That Christians, hiding their bloody hands in their cassocks, and with their hair shirts reeking of the smell of burning human flesh, should be implying that scientists have something to be ashamed of is false, insulting, offensive and disgusting. These ghouls for God, who have traditionally done God’s work by torturing and incinerating their critics alive, sanctimoniously denigrate others’ unstained hands.
Let any one of these self-appointed saints have their hand held in a flame for thirty seconds and they will be screaming for immediate salvation. This is an infinitesimal fraction of the pain they have meted out in the same way to innocent people—most of them fellow Christians. Bruno experienced the whole of his body being consumed by fire and these odious and disgusting hypocrites think a cross should ease his pain. Galileo was willing to risk the same. The many scientists Fuller thinks supported the church were not willing to be cooked by God’s holy inquisition, so their evidence is hardly freely given, and would only be cited by a self-righteous disciple of Torquemada.
The sanctimonious Fuller and his Christian bleaters are scared witless at the thought of dying at all, let alone in agony, and they abandoned the moral high ground centuries ago when Christianity and religious murder simultaneously peaked. The Christian moral heights have always been in the cesspit. Fuller satisfies himself that the Pope had no need to apologise because the conventioanl view of Galileo is “something of a myth”. Perhaps it is, in the Christian view, but it has led on to great discoveries and a way of seeing the world that is transparently true, open and not obligatory. Fuller’s myths stink of death, Christian hands are black and greasy with charred flesh, and Christian minds are polluted with unimaginable lies and excuses. Christianity is a monstrosity that only sick people could admire.
Huxley and Wilberforce
Fuller is trying his best to rewrite Christian history, a noble pastime for Christians because it is so atrocious, but one that they have practised for a long time. At the outset, they falsified the career of a noble Jewish freedom fighter to turn him into a gentile god. He next picks on the debate about evolution between the bishop of Oxford, “Soapy” Samuel Wilberforce, and T H Huxley held in Oxford in 1860. The myth that Fuller wants to debunk is that this was a great defeat for a stalwart of the church, and a victory for evolution. Wilberforce concluded by asking Huxley whether he was descended form an ape on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side. Huxley replied that he would rather be descended from an ape than from such a man as the bishop. That would have been enough to make delicate ladies swoon.
It was a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and even though it was filled to overflowing by academics and townspeople, it did not attract the interest of a newspaper because it seems no verbatim report was made. Mary Midgley, the crypto-Christian apologist, writes that neither Wilberforce’s remark nor Huxley’s reply was sufficiently noted to be reported. She must mean in the newspapers because it was reported. There is an account in Quatrefages and one in the Life and Letters of Darwin. These were therefore mythical.
Fuller says Wilberforce was not defending the Christian position even though he was a bishop and it was a meeting in his diocese. He spoke representing science as a member of the British Association. Yet, Wilberforce said, writing in Quarterly Review, the “principle of evolution was absolutely incompatible with the word of God”, it “contradicts the revealed relations of creation to its Creator” and was “inconsistent with the fulness of His glory”, and “the fall of Adam” offered a “simpler explanation”. It does not sound scientific, and seems unlikely that he would have been giving a much different account on this occasion with many townspeople present.
There is no doubt that the incident, formally reported or not, quickly created a furore. The precise words of both parties were never taken down but an audience of hundreds of intelligent and literate people heard them. This was Victorian society, a publicly polite society in whch the Anglican church was held in high regard and its bishops served in the House of Lords. Bishop Wilberforce was the powerful man with contacts in high places, not Huxley. Yet with all the bishop’s advantages, Fuller and his assorted opinions make out that the story spread about was some sort of Huxleyan conspiracy against the defenceless church. It is the usual Christian special pleading.
It is possible that some of the reports that were made public were exaggerated. The report in Quatrefages has it that Wilberforce congratulated himself that he was not descended from a monkey. Huxley replied that, if he had to chose, he would prefer to be decended from a humble monkey than from a man who uses his knowledge and eloquence in misrepresenting those who are wearing out their lives in the search for truth. Since this echoes what halfwits like Fuller are still doing, doubtless less eloquently than “Soapy” Sam, it can perhaps be accepted as the politer but truer version. To pretend that the gist of the story is invented is what Christians liars always try to do to preserve their religion’s scurvy reputation.
Fuller reverts to Christian pseudo-psychology as an “explanation” of the Darwinists’ supposedly fabricating history. They need a “foundation myth” of their own in which the Darwinists prevail over their foes as the children of Israel did in the “biblical myths”. Nice that Fuller keeps reiterationg that the bible is mythical. If the Christians started acting on some of the things they glibly say they accept but ignore, then scientists might find less to contradict in Christianity. But Fuller will not be stopping quoting as historical truth the myths of the bible to his parishioners in his sermons. It is not in their nature to be consistent—or honest.
He says that scientists need a myth like this because then “theories are validated in some way”. This man is such a dunce his ignorance is tedious. Christians plainly have cognitive problems, but there can be few intelligent readers who will not immediately see that scientists do not need a myth to validate their theories. Experiment and direct observation do it sufficiently well for them not to need any such absurd concept as a myth to validate them. It is Christians who need myths.
Deception
In his concluding paragraphs to chapter 5, Fuller again tells us:
History and myth are both important in theology and may sometimes be so closely bound together as to be inseparable.
Presumably, he is talking about the fount of all Christian theology, the bible, where this is unquestionably true, and offers serious problems of methodology to Christian theologians. If their source is history and myth inextricably mixed up, then how is it to be regarded? As history or myth? The only safe procedure is to treat it entirely as myth. That is what some modern biblical scholars are advocating, but the bulk of Christians cannot bring themselves to accept it. They insist it should be treated as historical even though it is not. To use it knowingly as history when it is not, is, bluntly speaking, to lie!
The conclusion is that the conflict of science and theology is itself an unhelpful myth, and the way ahead is “co-operation, collaboration and mutual instruction, not the shouting of outdated and misconceived accusations from behind entrenched positions”. Fuller has noticed that the Christian position is outdated, misconceived and entrenched, and yet again tries to project the same sad condition on to science. What Christians love is to deceive themselves and each other that Christian lies are truth. Every word that Fuller writes confirms it.
