Truth
The Truth in Religion
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 4 July 2008
Force for Good?
The ability of those Christians to bleat and distort reality is astonishing. The poacher turned gamekeeper, John Polkinghorne, a scientist who has taken holy orders, has written reviews in the Times Literary Supplement in which his correct title of Reverend were conveniently omitted leaving him to seem like a normal scientist, unless you looked closely enough.
Nothing is better for the Christian apologist than to imagine you are among a set of persecuted martyrs. Only Moslem apologists are better at this. Some of them decide to be martyrs. Polkinghorne begins by establishing to his own satisfaction that Christianity is under attack. The reason is, of course, that some people have recently written books criticising religion in general, and western religion, Christianity, in particular. Now, something sent by God is not meant to be criticized, and Christians still resent the fact that modern laws stop them from incinerating their critics, but they still do the best they can, from the privileged position they have.
Christianity is meant to be a force for good, but the evidence mostly shows the opposite, it is a huge social force for evil. No one is supposed to point out such truths as that Christians burnt people and committed genocide until only a few centuries ago. The good deeds of individual Christians, of which there are many, because they are human beings and there are a lot of them, are put in the balance against the massive institutional evil of their religion. They fail to tip the balance more than a twitch. There are good and bad among everyone as human beings, but the bad apples predominantly fall into the Christian barrel. The reason is plain. Anyone wicked needs to have a veneer of goodness to hide their true nature, and professing Christianity provides it. Test samples of believers and atheists, and the believers statistically are more criminal.
What do we hear from Polkinghorne?
Despite their assertions of the rationality of atheism, the style of their onslaughts has been strongly polemical and rhetorical, rather than reasonably argued. Historical evidence is selectively surveyed. Attention is focused on inquisitions and crusades, while the significance of Hitler and Stalin is downplayed. Believers in young earth creationism are presented as if they were typical of religious people in general.
So, polemical and rhetorical arguments cannot be rational for this deceitful dunce. The former poacher does not bother to compare the good deeds of innocent Christians against the wickedness of their institutional bodies, but against the wickedness of a couple of twentieth century dictators. His point seems to be that dictators are godless and anti Christian, but Christians are convinced liars, and, in fact, Hitler was a Christian, having been brought up in Austria, a strongly Catholic country by a devoutly Catholic mother, and remained a Christian all his life. Nor did any pope withdraw the “benefit” of the holy communion from him. Stalin was also brought up by a pious mother, this time of the Orthodox Christian faith, she had him educated in a seminary, hoping he would be ordained as an orthodox priest. Before he graduated, however, he discovered Marxism and became a Bolshevik, where eventually, he applied all he had learned as a boy about Christian organization and methods as the dictator of the Russian Empire.
Now quite apart from the facts of these particular examples that Christians are fond of, the whole point about Christianity, we are led to believe, is that it is a force for good. One should expect that Christians would behave better than anyone not subject to Christian proselytizing and propaganda. It can therefore be no defence of Christianity that it is no worse than the way nonbelievers are. If the inquisition was excused because atheistic communism was no better, then Christianity is itself condemned as valueless. One might expect a gamekeeper not to realize this, after all they are not usually too bright, but this one once was a poacher. Polkinghorne left science behind to become a vicar! He seems to have lost his reason in the process, no doubt something to be expected, and perhaps an excuse itself!
Priest, Levite or Samaritan?
Christian apologists are rarely honest, whether laypeople or professionals, and Polkinghorne is no exception. His review is meant to be of two books he describes as making a “more temperate contribution to the debate” than the ones by Dawkins and Hitchens, which are far too frank for the taste of any Christian, professional or amateur. The real reason is that both are rather light weight books, one by John Cornwell being a humorous skit at Dawkins and the other, by John Humphrys, being critical of patriarchal religions, but more critical of what he tags as “militant atheism”.
Humphrys calls himself a “failed atheist” because, despite his intellectual abhorrence of Christianity, he has a yen to believe in something! So he ends up preferring the simple, albeit ignorant faith of his working class mother and her friends in South Wales in the middle of the last century, to the rejection of all unsubstantiated belief advocated by “militant” atheists. Never mind that the unsubstantiated belief was an important weapon used to keep the workers subject—and abject—for centuries, and only the failure of belief in the face of reason since the Enlightenment has allowed people like him to become radio and TV anchormen, jobs reserved when he was a boy for sons of the wealthy with plummy British accents.
Polkinghorne, scientist or no scientist, defends the abstract, empty and unverifiable musings of theology as “heavy scholarship” quoting Cornwell in saying Dawkin’s book is as “innocent of heavy scholarship as it is free from false modesty”. It is a nicely ambiguous expression that makes a clever sounding joke at Dawkin’s expense, but it is hardly an example of heavy scholarhip, now, is it?
The heavy scholarship Polkinghorne introduces is the parable of the Good Samaritan! He uses this parable to refute Dawkins’ “highly questionable statement” that Jesus’s call to love our neighbour referred only to relations between Jews. The statement is not at all questionable. For Jesus, the lost sheep of the house of Israel were the Jews. Christians usurped the title Israel to make it apply to them, but it is certain Jesus did not mean Christians by it because there were no Christians who could have been Israel when he spoke, but only Jews.
Moreover, Christians have misinterpreted the parable for their own purposes. The purpose Jesus had in the parable, supposing that it was his, was to expose the self seeking ungodliness of the priesthood of the temple, not to show the Samaritan as being singularly good. The point of it is the contrast. The men who were supposed to be good, the priest and the Levite ignored the victim, a Jew, but the man whom the Jews despised, the Samaritan helped the Jew who was supposed to have been his enemy. The truly godly man was the man who was least loved, while the men who claimed to be godly and close to God were in practice the least loving.
The priests and Levites today are the Christians, and the Samaritan today is the atheist. Many studies have shown that Christians are most likely to pass by a victim, whereas people of little faith or none will stop to help. Jesus despised the wealthy as being impious, something else Christians ignore though it could not be plainer, and here was an example of it. The priesthood were the rich. Jesus taught the first would be last and the last first. The Samaritan was last, but he would be first, and the ones who thought they were first in the queue for God’s kingdom would be the last to enter it. Christians have always used biblical exegesis to suit themselves, and they still do. Ordinary believers feel they cannot contradict the professional Christian “scholars”, and here Polkinghorne sneers because the authority Dawkins cites is not a biblical scholar but a scientist!
Dawkins the Target
Polkinghorne admires Cornwell for his use of the strawman rhetorical ploy, but Dawkins is his target, not the books under review. He tells his readers that Dawkins thinks God is a kind of “Great Science Professor in the Sky”, a “simplistic notion that any thinking theist would be quick to reject” for, neglecting the oxymoron of a “thinking theist”, they know He could be nothing other than a kind of great clergyman in the sky. Dawkins rightly decries theology as no proper academic discipline. It is, after all, equivalent to speculating about the nature of alien abductors, fairies, leprechauns and goblins and the purpose they have in the world, the obvious reason why “theologians have wrestled for centuries” with how human language can describe God.
Speculation about anything that is purely imaginary is self evidently fruitless. The real exercise worth pursuing is why anyone should think it is a proper academic discipline. It could become one, if God is recognized as a device to effect social programs, like being moral and obedient to the law, in which case He is a proxy for keeping order in society, a purely human function, and a necessary one if society is to remain stable. But any such study would devolve to social psychology.
Polkinghorne objects to Dawkins being “relentlessly rude about religious believers”. It is hard indeed not to be rude about people who believe what other people tell them on no proper authority. It is what you expect of children, because, despite the modernists, children cannot be expected to understand what their parents know, and have to be told it on parental authority until they are old enough.
For Christians, the parallel is that God is their father and they are His children, but whereas a parent is tangible, and their concern is real, so that the child soon knows from experience that they should not play with matches or whatever, God is entirely imagined. He is a figmentary father invented in days gone by for social control, and still openly used in the same way by US neocons. Anyone who can be persuaded that a God is directing their behaviour is potentially dangerous in the extreme, as we have seen with the Islamic suicide bombers. That is why God is, was and always will be a dangerous delusion, and Dawkins is right to use every means including derision to counter it.
Dawkins should be courteous enough “to take seriously those of us who are both scientists and believers”, Polkinghorne says. He seems to think that a man who is a scientist should be respected for propagating his delusion that a figment of his brain is telling everyone what to do! Does Polkinghorne actually understand science? Yes, we know he has done it quite successfully, but it can be done mechanically by following certain rules without any thought about what the rules are for. Polkinghorne does not seem to comprehend that belief, unproven belief in something you are told only on authority, is not science, and is incompatible with it.
Victor Stenger, a professor of physics, astronomy and philosophy is far more coherent in declaring that God does not exist because there is not an iota of evidence, scientific or otherwise, that He does. These pages categorise some of it, especially the supposed historical evidence of the Christian holy book. If Polkinghorne were any sort of scientist, he would not be apologizing for his false beliefs but analyzing and criticizing them. Science requires continuous criticism, but belief requires continuous excusing, and no scientist cannot be unaware of it. Polkinghorne has no excuse. He has either joined the Christian tricksters for his own reasons, not likely to be noble, or he is deluded.
Polkinghorne also objects to Dawkins calling childhood indoctrination with unprovable, and most likely false belief under the guise of religion, child abuse. Fatuously, Cornwell, it seems interprets child abuse as child sexual abuse, and it is interesting therefore that more childhood sexual abuse occurs in the homes of devout believers than in the homes of those with no strong beliefs. And Christian and Moslem homes bring kids up as passive receptors, ready to obey any right wing father figure, as professor George Lakoff can show from evidence.
Polkinghorne, the clergyman, ought to read some of the proper evidence available these days, evidence that, like that of Galileo, clergymen refuse to look at, let alone consider. All of this is precisely why sincere scientists can do nothing other than treat people like Polkinghorne with contempt. Plainly intelligent men who wilfully ignore the evidence of their original profession, science, in favour of incredible and harmful fancies, cannot be doing it for anything other than ignoble motives. Teaching people falsehoods cannot be noble, and if God approves of it, then God is not noble. Christians then have the wrong God. That would explain a lot.
Theodicy and Conscience
Polkinghorne likes the John Humphrys approach because he is “respectful of religious belief and the kind of life that often, but not invariably, issues from it”, yet Humphrys also criticizes belief for its incoherence and contradictions. No one doubts that some people can benefit from religious belief—clergymen for instance—but there is plenty of doubt these days whether anyone benefits from being taught fairy tales as truth. For everyone who fears God so much that they remain law abiding when they might have been criminals, someone else thinks God is directing them to do something necessary, like murdering prostitutes or homosexuals, sexually abusing children in their care, suicide bombing innocent passengers, or carpet bombing innocent foreigners. It seems true to some of us that the kindness of many individual Christians is human kindness whereas the institutional horrors of religion defy the compassionate instincts of us all, and oblige intrinsically kind people to be monsters.
Like most Christians, Polkinghorne effortlessly speaks double talk when he talks about faith. Humphrys “displays much more even-handedness”. He “remains open and questioning about these matters”. Now ask any Christian to voice an opinion about the pros and cons of Satanism. Will they be even handed? Will they be open and questioning? 99 out of a 100, if not more, will not be! They have no evidence that the god of this world, even if it is not their own God, is not wicked. They are convinced on the basis of this lack of evidence that their God is good and is also the God of this world, even though this world is anything but perfectly good. It offers theologians every opportunity to speculate about God’s thinking and His nature, none of it grounded in a milligram of reality.
Yet the simple religious answer is offered by the Zoroastrians, and the Gnostics—the good God is not alone, but is accompanied by another equally strong god who is responsible for wickedness, or a local god, the god of this world, is in charge here and responsible for wickedness in his own precinct. Indeed, Christians try to have the best of both monotheism and dualism by having a wicked agent called Satan, not a god but merely a wicked angel responsible for evil, and so subject to the great and the good God above. The theologians then have to try to get into God’s brain again to figure why He does not splat the wicked God, or confine him to his proper nether domain, and leave the rest of us in peace. Naturally, they have no answer to this because real answers answer something—they demonstrably solve a problem, and no one can demonstrate what constrains a figment of the mind.
Humphrys finds some solace for his unbelief in our experience of conscience, impelling us to do what is right, and restraining us from doing what is wrong by feelings of guilt and compunction. For Humphrys, it hints at the “something” he wants to believe in, yet he seems incapable of seeing this something as natural. That might be excusable, even though Humphrys is an intelligent man. He has plainly been much influenced as a child by his mother’s devotion. Polkinghorne, though, is a trained scientist, meant to be skeptical as that is the very foundation of science, yet all he can do is to condescend to admit:
No doubt, evolutionary thinking offers us some partial understanding of this, with its concepts of kin altruism (protecting the family gene pool) and reciprocal altruism (I’ll help you in the expectation that you will help me).
It does not, Polkinghorne argues, explain the “radical altruism which led Irena Sendlerova repeatedly to risk her life in saving 2,500 Jewish children who were trapped in the Warsaw ghetto.” What are we to suppose makes this altruism radical? Is it the risking of one’s own life, or the number of others saved? This is an anecdote, and little can ever be decided on anecdotal evidence, because single instances might be utterly untypical. Moslems mainly do not wire themselves up as suicide bombers, but some do. They are not only risking their lives but voluntarily sacrificing them for a cause which they believe is greater than themselves, the defence of Islam against people they perceive as out to destroy it. Is that radical altruism or is it insanity induced by failure to analyse one’s own belief system adequately?
Morals, Evolution and Society
The point about morality is that it is evolutionarily conditioned by us being social animals. Evolution is not just a partial answer but is the answer for altruism, but the altruism we have can be misguided by our beliefs. Society depends upon a compromise, the compromise between individuality and sociability. We have to yield some of our individuality, our selfishness and self centeredness for the good of the group, and we are willing to do it because living socially is beneficial to us all as individuals. Altruism illustrates one of the benefits. Under duress, we will make sacrifices for the good of others, expecting the same in return.
Living socially therefore gives us security, but it necessitates sharing and restraint on personal action. Plainly, acceptance of killing within the group cannot give any of us a sense of security. Social groups therefore can only admit killing under specific rules agreed by everyone. Social behaviour is evolved behaviour, evolved to suit our being communal animals, and once we become able, out social laws and ethics are simply explicit statements of what is best for us as communal animals.
The “something” Humphrys senses as a “transcendent dimension in life, which he values but does not know how to explain from an atheist point of view” is there all right, and is indeed explicable from an atheistic point of view. It is the instincts to be social he has been born with, and the conditioning as a social animal he has been brought up with. What could such instincts and conditioning seem other than transcendental, because they are not simply consciously decided. Much of our behaviour is unconscious as cognitive science shows. Training is often training our unconscious reflexes!
Much of it all, in ancient times, was laid down in religion, but now we can see the truth of the matter. It is religion which was the partial and temporary answer to morality, not evolution. Evolution is necessary and sufficient to explain it. Ancient religions are no longer needed. We can justify good behaviour by reference to our sociability, and civilization is precisely a society in which we are all conscious of our social duties.
When Humphrys criticizes Christianity as “riddled with holes” like its related patriarchal religions, Polkinghorne takes offence:
He fails to acknowledge the subtlety and truth seeking character of theological thought…
What can be true about mere speculation? except whatever is true by sheer accident, yet theology is speculating emptily however subtly, from biblical premises that are themselves ill-founded or wrong. If it is in some way valuable as an intellectual exercise, that is all it is, and there is no way it can produce truth. Any scientist ought to be able to see that. Any who cannot has failed to comprehend science, and religion.
Polkinghorne ends up admitting a “world claimed to be the creation of a good and powerful God, but which nevertheless contains so much evil and suffering” is a challenge to theism. Is it not even more of a challenge that much of that suffering has historically been caused by religions which inevitably become cruelly murderous when on the defensive. Only since the Enlightenment has Christianity seemed to be respectable in civilization, and it would be hard to argue that it was merely coincidence. To judge by modern fundamentalists, any loss of Enlightenment principles will be accompanied by unspeakable horrors at their hands. Christianity has never been intrinsically good. It is good only when it is under control. Polkinghorne is such a dunce he admits he is perplexed by it:
One could not claim that there is a complete and straightforward answer available to remove the perplexity.
Could it be that his very premise is wrong? Wouldn’t a good scientist faced with such a problem consider it? Not a bit, he can dredge up arguments that give “modest help as theologians struggle with the problems of theodicy”. It turns out that some things are inseparable, like good and ill! “The integrity of creation is a kind of package deal.” Yes, indeed. God is not almighty after all. If mutation is needed for evolution, seen by Polkinghorne as God’s method of creating diversity, then the occasional malignancy has to be put up with. “You cannot have the one without the other.” It is a fair bet that plenty of US Christians have already discarded him as a devil.
An almighty God can do just as He wishes, so malignancy can be stopped while mutation causing diversity could continue, if it were necessary to the fundamentalist mind, but evolution is anathema to the fundamentalist, so Polkinghorne is doubly damned by his brother Christians. The answer Polkinghorne gives is that a world with continuous divine intervention would be a magical world, and this world is not magical because God is not a magician. There he goes again, offending Christians. God can be a magician if He chose to be, and God could create life in chaos, if He wanted to. Most believers think God can do the impossible, He is so almighty!
Personal Experience
Polkinghorne is a whimpering puppy with its head caught in a briar. He hopes, by faithful whining, God will come and save him. The fact is that the definitions of God that believers want to stick with are incoherent and contradictory. God cannot be what Christians and their theologians have in their heads—except, of course, in their heads! Now despite this obvious conclusion, Polkinghorne assures his admirers that faith and reason too often “have been pitted against each other, as if they were in necessary contradiction”. Faith, he says, differs only from science in that science only considers impersonal experience open to repetition at will, while faith handles personal experience and encounters with God.
So, we are expected to believe that science has nothing to say about personal experience. It is incompetent therefore to handle cases of mental illness. If Polkinghorne thinks he is Napoleon, are we to believe that he is indeed Napoleon? If Polkinghorne talks to God, are we to think that indeed he does so? Psychology and neurophysiology are sciences, and such studies are showing us more about the natural causes of belief. That is what professional Christians like Polkinghorne do not like.
He thinks the “power of imagination to explore reality” is as valid as “scientism”—science having just transmogrified into scientism, a pejorative word popular among scientific detractors. I can change my own reality by imagining I am superman or even God, and putting my finger into a light socket to prove it. Fortunately, I can imagine the outcome, knowing cases of it and the power of electricity. Imagination evolved for us to recollect what we have experienced, not to generate novel truths, though with suitable training, it can suggest novel truths from the experience we have. That is what science does, but the revelations have then to be tested for their truth. They cannot be assumed to work.
Polkinghorne draws a parallel with poetry, as a supposed truth brought up from the imagination. Has he not noticed that most poetry is garbage? Most people cannot write it, even though every healthy human has an imagination. And poetry has to be tested on other people. Mostly they pass it over as boring or irrelevant. For some it might be relevant and interesting, but it depends on their experience. We have to conclude that Polkinghorne is himself producing insufferable garbage from his imagination, but doubtless Christians will like it.
He concludes, having spent several paragraphs disdaining science as truth, and spouting falsehoods, that truth is as important to religion as it is to science. We can see this is valid as long as he is speaking of a particular kind of truth—the one called untruth.
There are grounds offered for religious belief, though admittedly different people evaluate their persuasiveness differently. Religion does not have access to absolute proof of its beliefs but, on careful analysis, nor does science.
The grounds offered for religious belief are false and have been shown to be false. As many Christians boast, if there were grounds for faith, then faith would be superfluous. Faith is necessary because there are no sufficient grounds for religious belief. The reference to absolute truth is a typical apologetic decoy. What we need is proof in the world of our own experience. Everything we think of is the product of our experience since birth. Science is based on establishing common truths in this real world of experience. Religion is based on ignoring them.
As Polkinghorne admits, in real life we can attain a basis for rational commitment. Not in some imaginary metaphysical life. That requires religious faith. The man who thinks he is Napoleon wears his hat sideways on. His response to his imaginary state is a real one. Faith is the same. It is a real response to something imagined, and a response that is often not good or useful.
What stops us having faith in what is established as true in the life we know? At least we have a basis for it, but just to imagine something does not make it so. That is what faith is. It is trust in something entirely imaginary suggested by someone with a vested interest in propagating it as belief. Anyone sensible will stick to reality, and any competent scientist could do nothing else.
