Christianity and the history of western values

[humphreyclarke]

Hi all

reason I am posting is because I could do with a bit of help with an argument I am having on the internet (imagine that!). This chap decided that the anniversary of 7/7 would be a ideal opportunity to state that all religion is evil. I happened to wade in against this and happened to drop in Bede's comment that a lot of the 'new atheist' ethics are simply Christianity with a bit of free love thrown in. Anyway this pissed the 'free thinkers' off a hell of a lot and they asked me to justify my remarks so I said:

"The new atheism is a reaction against western monotheism but it is also a derivative of it. While the central belief in a creator god has been eradicated, the categories of thinking are still in place despite having been seriously undermined. Most Atheists think that by rejecting monotheistic beliefs they have rejected religion. They get tremendously angry when you suggest otherwise. Actually they always get tremendously angry but that's by the by.

‘New Atheism’ is characterised by the movement’s suppression of its religious heritage and the passing off of ideals that developed from the western religious tradition as somehow the true state of human nature once all superstition has been swept away .The problem is that many of the categories of thinking that go with liberal values come from within Christianity and Judaism; which was partly the reason Nietzsche condemned them. They do not come as an attack on religion. Two examples are the writings of Milton and John Locke, whose philosophy is saturated with Christian references. Then of course there is Spinoza who was a rationalist but also a mystic who, although a critic of his own religious tradition, was certainly shaped by it. It is historically demonstrable that modern ideals of toleration go back way before the enlightenment together with a profound tradition of scepticism in western thought. One thinks of such writers as Pierre Bayle and Michel de Montaigne. All of these came from within western religious tradition, they didn’t attack them although they sometimes criticised them for inhuman practices. One of the oddities of the current wave of new atheism is its collective ignorance of the development of liberal ideology in the history of thought and earlier types of atheism. There is a fundamental error in not studying how we have acquired the concepts and categories we use, how they emerged and developed in the western tradition. This mirrors the tendency of new atheists to erase or play down the significant contribution from religion to the development of western science.

Let’s take the example of American secularism which has cropped up in this discussion. This emerged not from deistic writers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. It emerged in the 17th century from religious dissent that is to say from a type of religion rather than an attack on religion. So even secularism which really goes all the way back to Jesus’ statement ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ which was developed by St Augustine, can be seen as a development from western religion not from the attack on it. The concept of inalienable rights came from Locke who developed his ideas from monotheism.

The present atheism shares two very important features with the Positivist movement of the 19th century. The first is the idea that through all of human history, civilisation is moving towards a global society based on science. There was a period of religion which involved ‘magical’ thinking, then a period of metaphysical thinking which was the middle ages and then the modern age based on science and finally the end of history. What we have is a sort of a revival of the whiggish forms of history that were popular in the late 19th and early 20th century with of course the pious Christianity of the whigs airbrushed out. The very idea that history has this kind of directionality comes from within western theism. In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. The ‘new atheist’ history is often one of crude stereotypes, idiotic medieval, villainous clergymen and heroic rationalists fighting the darkness of superstition. Salvation, in the form of reason, emerges triumphant.

The second feature is that Positivism was a cult of humanity. Positivists like Comte said that now we have got rid of religion we can worship a new supreme being, ourselves basically. Within some of the ‘new atheist’ debate you get a sense of this kind of divinisation, humanity without limits, knowledge will emancipate us and this will lead to the end of wars and all conflicts. The problem is, as history shows, knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.

Let’s return to the conclusions of Provine, namely no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning exists and no free will exists. It’s fairly obvious that while these are the conditions for a materialist world view, the new atheists all seem to choose to live higher than the logic of their own beliefs. For instance the central thread of Bill Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy is the assertion of free will against faith. The young heroine sets out to thwart the Magisterium - Pullman's metaphor for Christianity - because it aims to deprive humans of their ability to choose their own course in life, which she believes would destroy what is most human in them. But the idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is derived from Genesis. The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith. Dan Dennett denies the existence of free will and consciousness but because he is a really nice bloke he asserts it anyway, showing he retains a residue of Christian humanism with its emphasis on the special status of human beings as rational creatures in the cosmos. Instead we are supposed to take a half hearted leap of faith and create a new kind of mythology for human dignity. If we really did chuck out the concept of free will and regard it as the way our genetically programmed selves react to the environment rather than rational choice, there would have to be a wholesale restructuring of our ethical and legal systems as Onfray has proposed.

Having disposed of god, is there any foundation for ethics perhaps through the natural law found in biology?. The evolutionary explanation for morality does not actually explain why slavery and genocide are wrong; it only explains how we became creatures with functioning moral machinery who are capable of having ethics in the first place. This forces us back to the position that almost all the specific morality of our society is a product of our Christian heritage, not our genes or those elusive memes of popular imagination.

I’ll end with some of my own observations. Firstly despite an antipathy towards Judeo-Christian faith, the new forms of atheism retain some seriously faith based concepts. For example both memes and multivere theories are fringe science or metaphysics with little or no evidence to support them but they have been accepted by Dennett and Dawkins respectively and perform a key role in their theories. Secondly despite advances in our understanding, the themes of the bible still lurk on in some of the writings of the ‘new atheists’. In ‘The Selfish Gene’ Dawkins argues that we are blindly programmed sex robots, marionettes suspended on strands of DNA at the mercy of selfish replicators. And yet despite the fact that selfishness lies at the heart of our behaviour, we alone have the capacity to defy our biology. In seeking a suitible narrative to tie together the theories of Maynard Smith and Hamilton he has basically produced a rehash of the fall depicted in Genesis in which man is born imperfect with original sin but has the capacity to seek redemption through our free will. Lastly, most atheists are content merely to sneer at theists. The 'new atheism' is more akin to monotheism in that it is aggressively evangelical and demanding converts. There are even 'new atheist' churches springing up just as happened with logical positivists.

Dawkins and Hitchens are eager to assure us that while they reject the Judeo-Christian God, they do not reject the values of compassion, human dignity, and equality that were developed in the mental landscape of Christianity. This is a noble aim but it would be good to do the decent thing and give credit where credit is due. Religion didn’t poison everything; rather it shaped some of our most precious values. "

Now they are arguing that our morality and ethics existed before Christianity and emerged in spite of and in opposition to religion. Its basically 'the old picture of clever Greeks succeeded by the stupid middle ages who were overthrown by the brilliant enlightenment' Bede mentions. The guys exact words were:

"Only once control was wrested from the church did our enlightenment begin"

The problem is they aren't giving me any specific examples. they are advancing a historical thesis which is based on faith without evidence. They are just quoting enlightenment mythology at me. Aside from pointing this out, does anyone have anything to add to this discussion?. I'm sure you must have encountered this kind of argument on infidels. I fully expect this to be a complete waste of time but its keeping me entertained.

[James Hannam]

Hi Humphrey,

Thank you for sharing your post. It will be better appreciated here.

On the idea that our ethics derive from ancient Greece, you might want to quote Bertrand Russell who, in his History of Western Philosophy, attacks Aristotle and Plato. I recall he felt the ethics of the later to be utterly unacceptable.

As neo-atheists are more likely to listen to Russell than, say, Macantyre, he might be worth using against them.

Best wishes

James

PS: This from IIDB is priceless:

iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=5428651#post5428651

[merkavah12]

Mr. Clarke,

The problem with arguing with Fundamentalist Atheists (as you know) is that rhetoric and baseless accusations is ALL they have to counter with. While this makes for easy exercise (akin to punching a sandbag) it does make one long for the days of more rational opponents. Ultimately, this whole scenario (in my view) will end as follows: you will be left alone. There will be no concession, no admission of error and attempt to regroup, nothing. They will simply run away without a word, occasionally sneaking back in to try and leave the last word in order to create the illusion that it was YOU who ran away.

*sigh*

In any event, an excellent point Mr. Clarke, I look forward to hearing how the rest of your encounter went.

Yours,

M12

[bjorn]

Jul 10, 2008 16:57:05 GMT James Hannam said:

Hi Humphrey,

Thank you for sharing your post. It will be better appreciated here.

On the idea that our ethics derive from ancient Greece, you might want to quote Bertrand Russell who, in his History of Western Philosophy, attacks Aristotle and Plato. I recall he felt the ethics of the later to be utterly unacceptable.

As neo-atheists are more likely to listen to Russell than, say, Macantyre, he might be worth using against them.

Best wishes

James

PS: This from IIDB is priceless:

iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=5428651#post5428651

Funny, some years ago I made a rather similar graph, ref. www.telenor.com/telektronikk/volumes/pdf/2.2004/Page_005-025.pdf, page 7.

Regards
Bjorn-Are

[humphreyclarke]

The argument is going surprisingly well

This was a good response from Washington Irving

In response to Humphrey - you people move too fast, I'm well behind here.

Rather than respond point-by-point, I'm just going to make a few observations.

1) The crucial point that Humphrey is making, and the point we should all be addressing, is surely not about the heritage of modern 'scientific atheism'. It is, as Humphrey put it, that "While the central belief in a creator god has been eradicated, the categories of thinking are still in place despite having been seriously undermined."

2) With this in mind, he identifies 2 features of 'modern atheism' that demonstrate this. One, the idea of human history being some kind of gradual process of improvement towards 'a global society based on science'. Second, a cult of humanity.

In a more general list (i.e. losing the analogy with Positivism) I would also include the idea that, through science, we can come up with theories that describe the world with increasing degrees of accuracy, with the belief that we will eventually produce a grand 'theory of everything'. Underpinning this is a belief in the 'rationality of the cosmos' which, without the basis of God, seems a rather arbitrary belief to hold.

Further, I would include the awful mess we have with morality. Generally, as atheists we understand that killing somebody is as little a violation of some kind of eternal law as crossing the road without a green light. Yet we happily condemn people who break these laws, and seem to think there is something very wrong in doing so. I am making no substantive claims about our moral practices here, just saying that they are a mess. Which they are.

3) With regard to Humphrey's 2 points, the first seems to obviously be a modification of religious ideas. How can humanity be undergoing such a process without some kind of guarantor that we will always succeed in progressing, rather than stagnating, or going backwards? I think this point is really a particular instance of my general point that modern science assumes some sort of rational basis for the universe, given that assumption we might think that as rational beings we will get closer to the truth, and so humanity will progress gradually. But if we reject the rationality, the continual progression seems to make no sense.

4) We need to recognise that there are forms of atheism (that is, developments from the basic foundation that there is no God) that can abandon these old categories, and ways, of thinking. I vaguely remember Humphrey baulking at such things, but Sartre once called Existentialism "an attempt to draw the logical conclusions from a position of consistent atheism." He was right, sort of. Another person mentioned, Nietzsche, had his own approach (really, Nietzsche's work is an attempt to do exactly that - find a new way of thinking about the world now 'God is dead' that isn't the type of scientific view we've been talking about). Personally, I favour something like this approach but I won't bore anyone by explaining in detail here. The basis idea is as follows.

The rejection of the 'god hypothesis' means we no longer have the right to take certain things for granted. We cannot assume that human reason is capable of coming to an understanding of the universe around us, or that the universe around us could ever be completely explained. We cannot take mankind to be anything special, in the sense that we are merely the outcome of various biological processes. We, most importantly, cannot ever take mankind to be 'outside' of nature - that includes rejecting any of the obscure accounts of human freedom favoured by so many old philosophers (Kant's transcendental freedom anyone?).

Once we've done all that, we can start to use science properly - as a way of understanding certain relationships that exist in nature, with any more general theory seen as a valuable insight into nature, rather than as a description of how nature 'really is'.

As an aside, the person who thought you'd find a lot more secularism between the lines of Locke's treatise of human nature would find, by reading above the lines, that Locke didn't write it. If he read Hume's treatise of human nature, then he certainly would find a lot of rather open secularism..

[humphreyclarke]

Jul 10, 2008 16:57:05 GMT James Hannam said:

Hi Humphrey,

Thank you for sharing your post. It will be better appreciated here.

On the idea that our ethics derive from ancient Greece, you might want to quote Bertrand Russell who, in his History of Western Philosophy, attacks Aristotle and Plato. I recall he felt the ethics of the later to be utterly unacceptable.

As neo-atheists are more likely to listen to Russell than, say, Macantyre, he might be worth using against them.

Best wishes

James

PS: This from IIDB is priceless:

iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=5428651#post5428651

Hi James

Thanks a lot for the pointer!

The whole text of the book is avalible online which was very handy indeed. Here is the full quote:

As a result of Christian dogma, the distinction between moral and other merits has become much sharper now than it was in Greek times. It is a merit in a man to be a great poet or composer but not a moral merit; we do not consider him more virtuous for possessing such attitudes or more likely to go to heaven. .......When we come to compare Artistole’s ethical tastes with our own, we find in the first place an acceptance of inequality which is repugnant to much modern sentiment. Not only is there no objection to slavery or to the superiority of husbands and fathers over wives and children, but its is held that what is best is essentially only for the few—proud men and philosophers. Most men are mainly means for the production of a few rulers and sages. Kant maintained that every human being is an end in himself and this may be taken as an expression of the view introduced by Christianity. There is in Aristotle a complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy.

[bjorn]

Jul 11, 2008 7:46:50 GMT humphreyclarke said:

The argument is going surprisingly well

This was a good response from Washington Irving

Reading it shows how strong a tension there is between "Christian atheism" and "Atheist atheism", and - I imagine - a tension that very well may grow stronger (at least in Europe, ref. Onfray).

What Dawkins and his supporters can't quite bring themselves to see, is that they are very much children of a Christian past (like also Russell points out). However, there is no logical reason within the presupposition (or conclusion as they might say) of a godless world to build a "Christian" atheism on. Logically seen, it is hard to avoid moving in the direction of Nietzsche or Irving above.

When Stenger questions the concept of laws in nature (e.g. in "God - The Hypothesis That Failed"), it indicates more than a polemical axe to grind against those arguing from such "laws" to God. It hints at the rather rational conclusion that a world without God would be irrational.

Which implies that if Western culture had become mainly atheistic in late antiquity, it is difficult to see how anything like modern science could have arisen at all.

Without the concept of a rational law ordered universe, it takes some imagination to believe that a sufficiently large group of people would have gotten the idea that there is a rational universe and laws worth (and possible to) study empirically.

[bjorn]

When discussing such matters it may be wise to be aware of Mr. Avalos take on this in the debate on Weikart's to some rather provoking From Darwin to Hitler at www.talkreason.org/articles/Genocide.cfm.

Avalos takes as usual no prisoners. I wonder if Glen Miller has replied?

At least Weikart has debated HA - see the not unexpected take on it at debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/05/hector-avalos-v-richard-weikart-on.html (some of the comments are good, though).

[humphreyclarke]

The arguement is going well, at the moment I am having to show

a) Hitler was not a Catholic
b) Religion didn't hinder the emergence of modern science.
c) The Christians did not burn down the Library of Alexandria

I dealt with all those thanks to the material on Bedes site and my rather extensive second hand book collection.

The ethics bit went well but I think they could have pushed me harder on some of my points. They are essentially arguing that there is this shifting moral zeitgiest which the church piggybacks on. In other words, Christian values are simply ones that have been passed off as 'Christian', but are really either inate in us through biology or part of this changing moral climate.

This arguement is clearly a-historical but setting about it is tricky.

Luckily the battleground was slavery, here is how I dealt with it (stumbled across Tektonics which was a great resource).

Lets knock this issue of slavery on the head because its getting a bit long in the tooth. Your approach is to look at the bible and approach it as a literalist perspective (i.e every phrase in this book including the OT is to be taken as gospel truth and incorporated into our moral system). No wonder then that you can’t see how anything good could ever have come out of it. The problem is that if we take this approach we end up with a caricatured view of history and we don’t come any closer to an understanding of the way historical figures thought.

We are still faced with the fact that, thanks to the actions of Quakers, the Great Awakening and the rise of Methodism and Unitarianism, a zealous pressure group formed that achieved abolition; this at a time when it was still profitable. Why?. You also have to explain why so many slaves and former slaves turned to the bible after they were freed if it supposedly supported the system that oppressed them. The reason was that two concepts were eventually to win the day, the concept of Imago Dei and the Freedom of the Gospel. You can justifiably argue that these are central themes in Christianity.

However, your counter argument to this is that In the NT slavery is endorsed in the passages you quoted. Doesn’t this show that the true message of the text is that the NT condones it?. The important thing to look at here is the historical context, in what way did Roman slavery resemble that practiced in the New World. Not a lot as it happens.

Paul clearly understood that the gospel obviated all class distinctions (Gal. 3:28) but he was never willing to draw out the social ramifications of his understanding and urge manumission. However, The slaveholders [of the New World period] severely misrepresented Paul. First, Paul was addressing nonracial Roman household slavery, a situation quite different from the slavery practiced in the Americas. Household slaves had greater opportunities for freedom, status and economic mobility than did the vast majority of free peasants in Paul's day. As a socio-economic institution it had a very ambiguous character. Given the complex situation, we would not expect blanket commands to 'free the slaves', if for no other reason than that infanticide-rescued infant slaves and aged/infirm/sick slaves would become critically destitute. We do find statements that 'move' the church away from general slave-system orientation:

Paul explicitly denounces slave-trading, which would have restricted the supply of slaves to Christian households [1 Tim 1.9-10]

Paul tells free people to NOT become slaves [1 Cor 7.23]

Paul tells slaves to become free, if they can [1 Cor 7.21]

Paul encourages Philemon to 'free' Onesimus in that epistle [verse 21]

Finally the New Testament humaises slaves by making them equal to their masters in Christ.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you
belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's descendants, heirs according to promise." (Galatians 3:26-29; see also James 1:9-11

It was for this reason New World slave owners had to get around this by portraying their slaves as non-humans, i.e by recategorising them to get around the NT.

When we look at the activities of the early church we even see Christians becoming slaves to fund relief programs.

"We know many among ourselves who have given themselves up to slavery, in order that they could ransom others. Many others have surrendered themselves to slavery, so that with the price that they received for themselves, they might provide food for others."

[Clement of Rome (c.96) 1.70]

The following quote illustrates the attitude to manumission of early Christians.

The principles of Christianity naturally prompt Christian slave-holders to actual manumission. The number of slave-holders before Constantine was very limited among Christians, who were mostly poor. Yet we read in the Acts of the martyrdom of the Roman bishop Alexander, that a Roman prefect, Hermas, converted by that bishop, in the reign of Trajan, received baptism at an Easter festival with his wife and children and twelve hundred and fifty slaves, and on this occasion gave all his slaves their freedom and munificent gifts besides. So in the martyrology of St. Sebastian, it is related that a wealth Roman prefect, Chromatius, under Diocletian, on embracing Christianity, emancipated fourteen hundred slaves, after having them baptized with himself, because their sonship with God put an end to their servitude to man. Several epitaphs in the catacombs mention the fact of manumission. In the beginning of the fourth century St. Cantius, Cantianus, and Cantiannilla, of an old Roman family, set all their slaves, seventy-three in number, at liberty, after they had received baptism. St. Melania emancipated eight thousand slaves; St. Ovidius, five thousand; Hermes, a prefect in the reign of Trajan, twelve hundred and fifty....These legendary traditions may indeed be doubted as to the exact facts in the case, and probably are greatly exaggerated; but they are nevertheless conclusive as the exponents of the spirit which animated the church at that time concerning the duty of Christian masters."

These acts of manumission are unintelligible, if the church had somehow 'sanctioned' slavery. In other words, these acts make sense only if the church had been taught that freedom was something owner-masters should pursue for their servants wherever possible.

Given what 'slavery' was like in Paul's day, we should not be morally 'surprised' at the absence of a blanket manumission statement by him. The New Testament lays clear groundwork for refuting New World Slavery (almost all of which was based on slave-trading and piracy--explicitly condemned by Paul and fought by the early church. By the time slavery loses its ethically ambiguous character as an institution (i.e., in the slave trade of the New World period), it cannot legitimately 'use Paul' to defend itself, for it had mutated into something quite unlike either Hebrew "slavery" in the OT, or "household slavery" in the NT.

On what authority do I declare this the right interpretation of the scripture?. Well I have looked at the original statements in the NT, looked at their socio-historical context and examined the early activites of the church for consitency. That is the way to interpret a historical text rather than quoting things out of context.


Has anyone bothered to reply to the Avalos piece yet?

[humphreyclarke]

Ok so the arguement has run its merry course. This was my closing statement. It will give you some idea of the level of the debate.

It has often occurred to me, that if you lay an argument out as a reductive logical statement, replacing the concepts with letters of the alphabet such as 'x', 'y' and 'z', you can confer on it a false aura of respectability it doesn’t deserve. Let us set your thesis out in textual form so that we don’t get sidetracked by its pretence of plausibility.

I am arguing that Nicolaus Copernicus - a Christian humanist, Canon of Frombork Cathedral, a devout Catholic who often referred to God in his works, who talked earnestly of ‘the movements of the world machine, created for our sake by the best and most systematic Artisan of all’, who read into the works of the ancients what he wanted to find and created his model based on its divine elegance – may just have been inspired by his belief in the Christian creator god and his faith in the rationality of the cosmos to produce 'De revolutionibus'.

However, you contend, that as Copernicus ‘christianised’ some pagan ideas, I have revealed myself as a hypocrite!. I am therefore compelled to accept under the Christian banner, Mr Adolf Hitler, a man who said ‘Christianity is ripe for destruction’, described it as ‘mere wholehearted bolshevism’, ‘a deliberate lie’ which had been supplanted by science, ‘a fairy story invented by the Jews’, who slaughtered thousands of clerics, plagiarised large chunks of the bible to improve his speeches, tried to pass himself off as a messiah and whose whole regime was geared towards the destruction of the Christian religion and its replacement with paganism. All this despite the fact that not one of the major historians of the Third Reich -Kershaw, Burleigh, Evans, Bullock, Trevor Roper- thinks he was ever a Christian, and at least one (Kershaw) doesn’t even think he believed in God.

Blind and fanatical hatred of religion does provide the most curious logic I must say.

[bjorn]

Curioser and curioser, one is tempted to say. Until all that is left is the grin.

[humphreyclarke]

I like this quote

"Dawkins would likely respond that his moral vision derives from either biological or cultural evolution, i.e., from the spread of "memes," his putative unit of cultural evolution. I suspect that biological evolution has endowed us with a rough moral sense; but this can't explain the kind of differences between Judeo-Christian and Confucian cultures noted above. As for memes, I see no difference between saying that my morals derive from, say, Christianity and saying that my brain hosts a "Christian morality meme." In any case, most scientists do not accept Dawkins's theory of memes. Lewis Wolpert's reaction in his new book is typical: "Just what a meme is, and how it is distinguishable from beliefs, I find difficult.... There is no distinction made between memes relating to belief and knowledge. Moreover, no mechanism is proposed for the so-called replication of memes, or what they are selected for."

www.nybooks.com/articles/19775

H. Allen Orr

[rfmoo]

Speaking of quotes on the subject of the Christian origins of Western Values, I found an absolute killer in an article by Joseph Bottum in an article on the Death of Protestant America in the Aug/Sept 2008 issue of First Things (the article is online):

In 1948, as he completed his draft of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Canadian law professor John Humphrey went home and noted in his diary that what had been achieved was “something like the Christian morality without the tommyrot.”

You might find it useful the next time you get involved in arguing with atheists committed to denying the historically obvious.

Best,

Richard Moorton

[humphreyclarke]

Thanks for that!. It gets worse for the atheists the more you look into it.

"In 1981, the Iranian representative to the United Nations, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, articulated the position of his country regarding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by saying that the UDHR was "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition", which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law."

[rfmoo]

Better still. That covers both sides of the issue, the inside and the outside.

Best,

Richard Moorton