A article that nails our current philosophical connundrum spot-on!
As touching as it is to think “all of us possessed of certain fundamental rights simply by virtue of being human”, absent a Judeo-Christian or at least monotheistic view of the world, human rights are not at all self-evident. If you’re just a smart ape, you can have government granted privileges, but you can’t have innate rights. Rights must be built into a being at its creation, and smart apes don’t have a creator.
It is not surprising that Enlightenment-era, liberal creations like freedom of association and freedom of religion and even the right to life are weakening in parallel with Western man’s embrace of so-called humanism. What is surprising is how few (even highly educated) Western people seem to realize the connection.
“you can’t have innate rights.”
If you consider early, small tribes/communities, why could not an innate right be conferred on the newborn by tribal members? I don’t think you necessarily need a creator for certain rights to be bestowed on people by others. Once conferred, in time, it’s considered innate.
“Rights must be built into a being at its creation, “
Or over a period of evolution.
“why could not an innate right be conferred”
Because something the tribe granted the tribe could take away and therefore it is a privilege not a right, as I said above.
Enlightenment liberalism is fundamentally monotheistic because the individual rights it posits logically require a transcendental source of some kind. The fact that this makes atheists very uncomfortable doesn’t change its veracity.
If you believe existence precedes essence, and you may not, then an individual is a free agent. That freedom is innate, it’s what he is, he’s nothing else but that. If you are free then, for me, you have an innate right that is not conferred. If someone takes that right from you, if they believe they have only conferred it on you, then they are committing the greatest crime.
A human as a living biological organism is not innately free. They are determined by cause and effect, thermodynamic laws, biological programming via RNA and DNA and social experiences through memetics.
Humans are simply vessels of cause and effect under the spell of free will which is just an over identification with the human imagination.
How is that ‘freedom’ innate, or remotely realisable to the newborn, which is only marginally less contingent on its mother for the provision of all necessities of life than during its gestation period? The very dependency of the immature usually (normally) engenders a feeling of duty in the mother, and in others in the closest family – perhaps in the wider tribal group or even the vast majority of the human population. But that duty has to be felt and accepted or, at the least, observed (perhaps for fear of reprisals) by those with the capacity to influence the child’s survival and thriving, or it is worthless. Nothing ‘innate’ about it.
“Love” as we experience it is a biological mechanism. It provides bonding of humans, but probably also other species, which enhances survival and therefore procreation thus improving the surviveability of the species or the tribe. The one thing thing it doesn’t require is blind faith in the fabulous.
I think you are rather making Tom Holland’s point for him! You are stating a modern western ideological assumption, which would seem absurd to most human cultures and still today in most of the world.
On a more obviously practical level none of us are ‘free agents’ because we start off in life as helpless babes and thereafter can only exist in human society, despite the conceit of a few libertarians and survivalists that we can go off to live alone in a log cabin in Montana (all of us?!) and hunt for our dinner. I wouldn’t last too long in any case!
The illusion of freedom exists within the context of universal cause and effect, thermodynamic laws, biological programming via RNA and DNA and social experiences through memetics.
Similarly, love translated as a duty of care is a biological mechanism driven by genetics, epigenetics and memetics.
The ‘natural law’ of universal cause and effect, thermodynamics, biological programming via RNA and DNA and social experiences through memetics had been coopted by Christianity and remodeled as proto human rights.
This began the separation between human and animal.
By repeating loads of terms like ‘thermodynamic’, ‘RNA’, ‘DNA’ you fall into the logical fallacy of distraction. What if this so called ‘illusion’ is actually more real than the biological programming. What if the biology is merely the underlying physical mechanism that allows us to use our minds and bodies and the physical world (ie reason) to access the transcendental.
To use a substantive example, does one really need a deity to derive the right to self defense? Or is it fundamentally rooted in all forms of life, requiring no human or deity to ‘derive’ it?
Duties and expectations of the members of a band or tribe were always far more emphasised than any notion of their ‘rights’ – I can’t think of a example of the latter. This of course is still largely true in most non-Western cultures. I often meet for example gay, more accurately ‘predominantly homosexual’ men from Muslim societies, and they certainly aren’t free to decide to not marry (a woman) or to lead their own lives as a British gay man nearly always can. At least, not without devastating consequences such as being completely cut off from family and their name dishonoured.
Christianity gives us no more innate rights than humanism does. We pretend when we transfer our authority to give or not to give from us to a God.
I think the above essay is wrong on most points although I agree the Amsterdam declaration is too. We confer rights on each other partly as risk aversion by conferring rights on ourselves at the same time, partly due to caring about each other.
We have various ingroup boundaries which expanded during the age of exploration and globalisation.
The fallacy of human rights is revealed when we consider the existence of life and death within the context of thermodynamic laws.
The Universe is a procession of life (negentropy) and death (entropy). In other words, the fabric of the Universe is one of continual transformation and therefore the continual recycling of matter and energy.
The belief in human rights relies upon a faith that the life death relationship that underpins the fabric of the Universe does not apply to the human species.
Similarly, a belief in human rights relies upon a faith that human rights can always be realised via infinite biotic and abiotic resources.
Similarly, the right to life cannot be universalised to the entirety of biological life since biological life is sustained by the relationship between life and death.
Thus human rights are inherently particularistic, not universal, and in turn the reductionism of human rights simply leads to the belief in human exceptionalism.
The concept of human rights is a western idea & as such is deeply individualistic. As such it can’t be (although oft claimed) universal. In societies where the importance of family & community is valued over individual rights or freedoms, there is a jarring with this concept.
Although the rights of groups is often talked about, its notable that only an individual can exercise their rights in law. Hence, there’s usually a test case taken by an individual to create a legal precedent that can be used by others or groups.
What’s usually overlooked in the debate about human rights is that it is practically speaking impossible to build a caring society upon such ideas.
I find it interesting that this who champion rights for various special interest groups love their own dogmas, while dismissing religions because of their dogmas.
If God can make someone innately valuable, anyone can. By loving, valuing someone for their innate isness rather than for any external usefulness, I would say that the someone is made innately valuable. Everyone has that amount of power.
Even if you argue against the semantics of the latter point, I don’t see how any description of a God makes a difference to the question.
James Rowlands
3 months ago
Killing a man and burning a lump of coal. Is there any difference? The Atheist of he is honest and consistent might say no. It is after all just rearranging some carbon atoms.
I haven’t found an Atheist yet who will follow through the logic of his conviction and therefore explain the vast numbers murdered by Atheist Governments in order to create a “ just society” or similar
The crimes committed by the likes of Stalin are no more an example of the evils of atheism than the crusades were of Christianity, suicide bombers of Islam or any number of atrocities carried out by lunatics in the name of religion
You’ve missed or deliberately side-stepped Billy Bob’s point: Large scale atrocities occur under religious and non-religious (though ideologically zealous) justifications. People kill in the name of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, the Fatherland, the Revolution, etc.
I personally think morality and human kindness are well-served by a belief in Providence, a just and merciful one. But the notion that “Thou shalt not commit murder” is Christian–or the invention of any particular creed–is an ahistorical overreach.
HL Mencken famously opined that when we claim to need a God, we in fact mean that we need a policeman. As I get older, I’m beginning to see that as more of a sensible proposition than a throwaway bon mot.
“ That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. ”
Sorry, I don’t seem to have the ability to start a Comment? So I posted that ^ here.
Anyway, did the notion of moral obligation to help the less fortunate exist in any society anywhere before Christianity came along? Is it right that Christianity appropriates this, as the author seems to think?
It certainly has Hebrew antecedents, in what Christians label the Old Testament. For example:‘He that oppresses the poor reproaches his Maker, but those who are kind to the poor honor him’ Proverbs 14:31
‘Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice; to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?’ Isaiah 58:5-7 (New Revised Standard Version)
I believe Jesus of Nazareth brought a new message of compassion and righteousness that remains transcendent and powerful (which is almost too obvious to mention), often on a scale and with an emphasis that was unique, at least in the surviving historical record.
But though he challenged the religious dignitaries (Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees) and institutions (God’s church over mankind’s), Jesus was a Hebrew. And not every extant original saying–Christian, Hebrew, Hindu, Buddhist, or Zoroastrian–emerged in a perfect vacuum until it was said or written in its extant form. Such inspired authorship can occur–and does in the teachings of Jesus in several places–in my non-affiliated estimation.
There’s a type of Christian Singularism that’s similar to American Exceptionalism, with its fraudulent claims about having ‘invented’ freedom itself or whatnot.
The Hebrew faith – precursor to Christianity – had as one of its central tenets the caring for widows, orphans and sojourner. As an agricultural practice, lands owners were to leave parts of their fields and vineyards unharvested to allow the poor among them to glean the remnant grain and fruit for themselves and families.
Excuse me …. The proscription against murder is from the Ten Commandments – “Thou shalt not kill.” The is Mosaic Law and the Hebrew Bible. Christianity appropriated it. It is Jewish Law, which in large part, Christians rejected in favor of a saviour and salvation. Perhaps humanism is an attempt to reverse this decision, but a better choice would be to recognise that Judaism is a more beneficial lens through which to view the challenges of humanity.
Surely there was nothing universal about the 10 commandments . They were meant for the ‘chosen people’ .
Did the injunction against murder even apply to killing non -Jews ? Genuinely unsure about this .
Anyone who claims to murder in the name of Christianity clearly is not practicing Christianity. That makes about as much sense as someone murdering in the name of Veganism.
Yes but the point is that atheists have no principled basis to condemn such atrocities by whomever committed, except maybe a tortured utilitarianism that can easily be refuted. Whereas a Judeo-Christian can appeal to God having created man in his own image, etc.
Not really. I’d imagine most religions would consider mass murder to be a crime, as would non believers. To imply I only find it wrong because I’ve grown up in a nominally Christian country I think is incorrect
Killing and murder are two very different things. Killing those who want to exterminate you and your people beforehand is very different than murdering someone in order to steal their property or to keep them from visiting your wife when you leave for work.
Huh? When you talk about the acts of Stalin, are you referring to the several million Ukrainians he starved to death in the early 1930s, the millions of “suspect’ nationalities he “purged” by having them shot in the back of the head later in that decade, or the millions that perished in his frigid Gulags? Or the deaths of the millions of small farmers he accused of being “kulaks”? Just wondering.
You are quite right. What I meant, but said poorly, is this: The acts of Stalin, and those like him, were made possible by Hegel, who said that innocence will come only at the end of History. The midwife of History is violence. Stalin was “on the side of History” precisely because he was not squeamish about murder. Nietzsche put this way: There will never be enough water to wash away all the blood. This is the reality one faces if the acts of Stalin aren’t crimes.
The opening chapter of John Gray’s Straw Dogs, if I recall correctly, addresses this very matter.
If you want a pithier version, Peter Hitchens said that “we live in the afterglow of Christianity”. He was clearly implying that we will be sorry when it has finally died. “Humanism” is just clutching at straws.
We should be haunted by Chesterton’s observation that when men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
I cannot help but be an atheist, but I acknowledge the truth of what they are saying. I cling to agnosticism as my personal, unsatisfactory, way out of my little quandry.
Why should we be haunted by Chesterton’s proposition? The only haunting is carried out by those who continue to quote it, as if it has some special resonance beyond the realisation by those who’ve divested themselves of religious self-deception that morality is, of course, a human construct.
There’s no need for a belief in Humanism any more than there’s a need for a belief in a god. My point is this: there’s no need for belief in an external authority full stop; it only leads to disillusionment when dismantled. The problem the Christian West has inherited is precisely that sense of disillusion. It’s time we started to move on. We exist. It’s in all our self-interests to refrain from doing harm to others, however much we’re unable to fulfil that premise.
No, it is not in all of our interests to refrain from doing harm to others. Colonialism was in the interest of Europe, slavery was in the interest of the slave owners. the subjugation of Xinjiang and the exploitation of resource-producing countries is in the interest of the Han Chinese, the conquest of Ukraine is in the interest of Russians (for the warm feeling of being an empire if nothing else). Sexual exploitation is in the interest of the Epsteins and the grooming gangs, and the masters of the Caliphate. Paedophilia was in the interests of Jimmy Savile, who had a long happy and exciting life right up to the point where he died and rotted. Meat eating is in the interest of humans, come to that. The idea that a group of strong people owe any respect or consideration to weak foreigners is pure abstract morality.
As you say, dogmatic statements just don’t work because people are different and have different priorities. A mother of a child at school does not believe that all are equal and nobody should harm another – she believes that her child is more than equal and, perhaps, can do no wrong. Families are closer than just ‘people’.
Then politicians try to instil a belief that our country is better (= more worthy) than other countries so deaths in France are not quite as sad if you don’t live in France. If you watch Al Jazeera, millions of people are living today in fear and poverty (mainly in Africa) but our main worry today is whether England will get knocked out of the World Cup.
I don’t believe that people are basically nice to other people, nor indeed think of other people unless they are close relations.
Mainly agree with you – but I do not think it is politicians who ‘instil a belief that our country is better (= more worthy) than other countries’. We just naturally care about and identify with our own group against other groups.
Preferring the “in group” is natural, but turning that feeling into hatred of the others and, so to speak, invading Poland, is where the politicians and ideologues enter. Feeling positively toward people we see as like ourselves does not inevitably mean we have to oppress or attack others.
Consider the South African apartheid regime that racially classified everyone as White, Coloured, or Black, kept Blacks in virtual servitude and gave Coloured very limited rights, but declared Japanese national, with whom they wanted commerce, to be “honorary Whites.”
The people in control use every available principle–good, bad or indifferent–as an excuse to do what they want to do, anyway, usually for their own aggrandizement. It is the way of the world.
How nauseatingly Yankophile can one be. Selective ‘morality’ on a grand scale. No mention of the appalling brutality committed by the US and Canada on the First Nations of North America. While, on the other hand being utterly brainwashed by the MSM’s constant repetition of US government propaganda about the false accusations of mistreatment by the Chinese government of the Muslim Uighers.
Why is it that the World Muslim Congress, which represents the interests of Islamic peoples across the globe have no issue at all with the situation in Xinxiang? In fact why is it they they specifically praised the Chinese for the enormous improvement in the living standards of the peoples in Xinxiang?
I despair at human gullibility and our capacity for hatred.
A bit touchy, are you? I started with colonialism and slavery, the first done by my people, the second universal, but historically associated with the US. I cannot list all the massacres of history, there would be no room. You are quite right that the treatment of the Uighurs or Tibetans by China is quite similar to the treatment of the Algerians by France, and not entirely different from the treatment of the Indians by US settlers, but other people’s crimes are not a reason for refusing to accept responsibility for your own actions.
As for the ‘false accusations of mistreatment by the Chinese government’ the known facts speak pretty much for themselves. China is not immune to criticism, however much the wolf warriors would like to make it so. The World Muslim Congress is presumably keeping shtum because there is nothing they can do, they need favours from China, and they are not feeling strong (or arrogant) enough to blame China for mistreatment, particularly since many of them are doing equally bad things themselves.
How come a man named P Branagan is working for Beijing, anyway?
But to continue the discussion above I have to say that I’m in the middle of reading a new book called, “A Village In The Third Reich”.
This book is superbly written and draws you in like a magnet. It is a little scary. It tells the story of a quiet village in the south of Germany, an ultra-Catholic, farming community which very slowly changes its religion. Day by day, week by week, Roman Catholicism morphs into National Socialism.
As you say, it is not the politicians who motivate us; rather it is the desire to be like our neighbours. But if the politicians/clergymen keep saying the same things, one person changes, another copies, then a third…. and so on. Then the individual is scared to argue.
So, the world is now officially woke. Why? The world bemoans the fate of muslims in China but are your friends actually visiting China to find out for themselves? So, you get this polarisation – either you are for or against. But if you stay in the middle of the road, traffic from both directions hits you.
Why start with the brutality committed by Western nations? Why not go all the way back to the beginning of recorded history, which can be summarized in one word, war. That is the point of Christianity in the first place. Man is fallen and should need redemption.
Indeed. Before Europeans reached the Americas, the people there had spent many centuries exterminating and enslaving each other. And Europeans had been doing it to each other for at least as long, or longer, before any came to te New World.
That does not absolve the Europeans who did terrible things in the Americas, but is does provide necessary perspective.
The Mongol horde.
The Viking invasions
The extermination of the native Americans
The behaviour of the native Americans towards each other.
The ubiquitous nature of slavery throughout history.
One could go on for pages.
All driven by self-interest.
It was Christian evangelical zeal that enabled
The Royal Navy to destroy the slave trade – the greatest act of decency in the otherwise squalid history of the human species
“It’s in all our self-interests to refrain from doing harm to others, however much we’re unable to fulfil that premise.”
Perhaps words have different meanings for you than they do for me.
My examples are examples of the excercise of un-restrained self-interest. The perpetrators of those acts were not committing an error of judgement. They understood their own self-interest perfectly well and acted upon it.
I did you the courtesy of re-reading your post.
Thankyou. In referring to self-interest, i’m not referring to acts of violence by groups, but as the word suggests, by the self against one’s own community.
Sounds like there could be a consensus here. There is a self-interested reason to refrain from doing harm to members of one’s own group, but no reason at all to protect non-members in any way. Is that the point you are trying to make?
I’d simply refer back to my original point, which is that there’s no need whatsoever to invoke the authority of a god to enable a working ethos for humanity. In fact, there can’t be, since it all derives from human thought in the first place.
Maybe not for “a working ethos for humanity”, but Christianity has been an extraordinary refinement of a working ethos. Just in terms of Art, imagine a working ethos of humanity without Bach or Mozart, or the whole of English Literature, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, or the architecture – the physical engineering and symbolism – of gothic cathedrals. Christianity inspired all that and more.
Forgive me but “a working ethos of humanity” is a very limited ambition to have for us and typical of a post-modernist outlook. Is that really all you want ? I can’t believe it.
No:
“the greatest act of decency” was undoubtedly the Constitutio Antoniniana or Edict of Caracalla by which all free men across the Roman Empire became full Roman Citizens.
Yes, but also Caracalla is remembered as a cruel and evil tyrant. Context is always crucial to a good understanding.
The Roman empire was experienced in its time as a stupefyingly vast, miraculous creation. Emperors were as gods. To become a Roman citizen was to be admitted into this miracle. Paul was born a citizen and his famously peripatetic ministry is a concrete expression of that citizenship.
Christendom is a mythologising of the Roman empire with the cosmic imperial visions of the Old Testament Jewish prophets. And two thousand years later the myth has largely come true.
Brett, if you have a chest of gold coins in your house and I kill you and take it, then my self interest has been served immensely. Your interests have been poorly served. We can create a village where we agree to respect each other’s life and property but our interests are still served by attacking the neighboring village, killing or enslaving the people and seizing their land and property.
Are your interests really served when you must do this time and time again, and in the process lose valuable members of your own tribe (and you may not always win) and then have to live in a constant state of fear?
Which is what happened for Millenia, under numerous faiths and peoples. Only difference is our villages slowly became bigger and eventually turned into nations, which means now any crime of that nature is seen as being against your own
The problem is that people often think it is NOT in their self-interest to refrain from violence.
Exhibit A is Putin.
Exhibit B is Xi.
Exhibit C is Khamenei.
And yes, there are a number of western leaders in the same boat.
“It’s in all our self-interests to refrain from doing harm to others”. I can list countless examples of pragmatic exceptions to that assertion. The ethic of non-violence cannot possibly proceed from utilitarian philosophy.
I agree with you, I can appreciate that religion has done much good in shaping society and instilling moral values, and to be honest I’m slightly envious of those who are religious as I’d imagine it’s much more comforting to believe that when I die I’ll see all my friends and family again rather than being chucked in a hole and being eaten by worms. Unfortunately I simply can’t bring myself to believe in any of it
I don’t agree with him. There absolutely is a need for an organising belief. Religion outsources, if you will, any metaphysical thinking, and, as the derivation of the word suggests, it binds coreligionists together. I was enormously impressed by “Darwin’s Cathedral” which argues that religious belief is functional and that Christian beliefs and practices particularly so.
I don’t believe it’s been in our self interest to refrain from doing harm to others in our evolutionary past. The ape scene in “2001” is clear enough about that. And as resources are still scarce, I think it’s not true. Ask a Ukrainian if it’s in his self interest to refrain from harming Russian soldiers. Thinking otherwise is merely an unexamined hold over from Christianity.
The disillusionment comes from the dismantling of the binding principles. Tom Holland and Nietzsche both see that.
I’ve referred to Straw Man arguments elsewhere, but the examples of supposed conflicts of self-interest you quote are precisely that. For example, the Christian ethos hardly prevented nations under attack from defending themselves, or seeking to overcome evil regimes as in the two world wars, so why quote the ‘self-interest’ argument as an example in the case of Ukrainians defending themselves?
Religion, if practised committedly, is rarely comforting; it is hard and challenging, requiring self-denial, humility, and the diminishing of one’s ego. Most of us are not up to the job.
Does that make it “true”, in the sense that if based upon a god, that god exists? (There are other religions that aren’t, of course.) And if based upon an untruth, the degree of comfort derived depends upon one’s capacity for self-deception.
Even less reason for me to become religious then. I have to ignore every rational thought in my head to believe something I’d otherwise think to be a loads of codswallop, and all I get for it is hard challenging work? I’ll stick to my life of sin I reckon
Reason does not come into religious faith, faith is beyond reason. It requires you to submit to a power, God, that you do not, nor cannot, understand. It is not easy, it is a giving up of yourself and your own will, it’s hard and an ongoing struggle, but the reward is love.
You have really hit the nail on the head. Religion is about finding a meaning. My mother pooh-poohed religion for almost all of her life but changed suddenly after her 70th birthday. A sort of panic set in.
I am like you. I would rather create a challenge for myself than believe a fairy tale. But it gets more difficult as you get older.
Yes I do. Our lives have meaning because humans are more advanced than other life forms and have a memory and consciousness about how our actions affect the lives of others and our surroundings, but ultimately our lives have no more meaning than that of any other animal, hence the reason the vast majority of us disappear into irrelevance once our lives are over
You don’t necessarily have to believe in it. You can believe you will be eaten by worms, and still light a candle and say a prayer. It might even do you some good
My grandfather was lucky to survive the war having been pinned down on a few occasions (and shot during a couple of them), and he thought religion was a load of bullocks. If I had bullets whizzing over my head, the fables in the bible would be a long way from my mind I imagine
I have little against God or faith, I take issue with organised religion. Since Covid, I have begun to see science as another form of organised religion. Especially when the government and Sage would say “follow the science… but not that science… follow our science” and people followed without question because to question science was foolish. Ironic as good science was always about questioning, in my view.
The Crusades were completely typical of the theology of a militant Catholic church at the time. To be fair, the Roman church was also responding to attacks by Muslims in the Holy Land.
Jihadist attacks are entirely consistent with major fundamentalist interpretations of Islam.
Stalin is a logical outcome of abandoning innate human dignity and treating human beings as eggs (as in Lenin’s comment that “you have to break some to make an omelet”.)
None of these are the result of lunatics. They follow completely rationally from their proponents underlying assumptions. Depraved? Yes. Deranged? No.
“Also responding”? Come on, “attacks by Muslims in the Holy Land” was both a necessary and sufficient cause and exhausts the religious element. The rest was the all of human follies of seeking adventure and status.
If you believe in innate human dignity, you haven’t read the essay properly.
I didn’t say anything about the original article. The commenter said Stalin was just crazy and cited the other 2 as examples of historical lunacy. My point is that he’s wrong on all 3 counts.
Believing that major historical events are mostly caused by lunatics (instead of ideas and events) makes it too easy to ignore the lessons of history, which is exactly what Billy wants to do in this case.
The crusades were a response to an appeal from the Emperor in Constantinople for help, as he was losing ground against the muslims. If Constantinople fell, the muslims would be into Europe. Europe responded with force; an sample of self-interest?
Definitely agreed about the First Crusade. The Fourth is not so clear. Perhaps less of the world would have been Islamized without the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople weakening the Empire, or perhaps the lack of Greek scholars fleeing the collapse a quarter millennium later would have meant no Renaissance, no rise of science in the West, and a more equal struggle between Christendom and the Islamic Ummah closer to the present time. Historical what-ifs are always tricky to work out if it can be done at all.
Thanks for mentioning the little known truth about Christians seeking to fight back the fast encroaching peoples from the East, who were hell bent on exterminating them. The historic myth of the Crusades being nothing more than blood thirsty ventures of conquest needs to perish.
The toxic combination is when atheism is linked to a utopian totalitarian ideology. Then there is no higher power to whom we must give account, to be judged on the scales of good and evil. And the totalitarian ideal we are striving towards justifies any act no matter how heinous. The number of people killed in the 20th century by those in service of atheistic creeds is somewhere between 100 and 200 million. They didn’t kill people because of their atheism, but their atheism allowed the likes of Hitler and Stalin to believe they would never be called to account .
That doesn’t make sense. Stalinism was a deliberate repudiation of Christianity in pursuit of an atheistic ideology. The Crusades were a few years earlier and show Christianity failing to live its own standards. That doesn’t invalidate the standards.
The millions murdered by “atheists” in Soviet Union and Communist China, were not killed because of atheism, but because their murderers believes in Communism.
Which itself is a religion. You don’t need Gods and idols to be a blind, superstitious, murderous mob.
There was very little difference in mindset between the Christians in the German concentration camps or Mexico, the Islamics wherever they invaded or communism.
All communists are atheists.
Not all atheists are communists.
Not all communists are murderers.
Are all communist murderers also atheists?
Where’s a Veen diagram when you need one? (And the answer is, yes, they are.)
More to the point of this article though, communism was justified by utilitarian humanism: “surrender all your rights as human beings and we will create a world of such plenty it will be Heaven on Earth.” Apparently Lenin was absent the week they studies Thomas More in college.
Your last paragraph describes perfectly the new world order as proposed by the World Economic Forum led by the unelected Klaus Schwab. Their philosophy, shared, it has to be said, by King Charles who admires Schwab and his pro-communist China friends greatly is ‘You will own nothing. You Will be happy’. They haven’t yet got around to adding ‘Or else!’ but its threat is there nonetheless. Of course, none of this will apply to the super wealthy who will be allowed to retain all that they own.
It’s a constant source of fascination for me that the religious cannot imagine a source of morality existing outside belief in God. I’m not offended, though; it says more about them than it does about us. Implicity what they are saying is, “The ONLY reason I hold my ethical beliefs is because of religion. If *I* didn’t think God existed, I can’t imagine any reason not to go on a homicidal bender.”
As a religious person I’d say that you can certainly have a source of morality without believing in God. Buddhists do, just for starters. The point is that sources of morality cannot be rational, let alone scientific. Science is about what is, and you cannot go from ‘is’; to ‘ought’. So by all means stick to your atheist morality. Just do not pretend that it is any more rational or any less arbitrary than ours.
Personally I find that the idea of right and wrong makes no sense to me unless there is a way of finding out what it is. And believeing in God at least means that *someone* knows what is right, even if we cannot figure it out. But that is just me, I do not claim it is an argument.
Can you derive moraility from the scientific observation of the physical world? Sam Harris thinks you can, but most scientists and philosphers think you can’t – “There is no is that makes an ought”.
I’m a non-homicidal atheist. But I’ve spent enough time on introspection to realize that the only reason I would not easily kill another is because I’ve been programmed to be averse to killing, not because of some non discoverable absolute truth. My genetics is the firmware and being raised in the Western tradition is the software. But it could be otherwise – see Rwanda
There have been lots of experiments on baby social behavior – some human social tendencies have a genetic component. This whole article spent a lot of time discussing the positive social benefit of Christianity. Didn’t your parents teach you its wrong to kill? That is (beneficial) programming.
I think God created humans with a capacity to be moral, but that this capacity requires first the loving bond between mother and infant to activate it. If that is later joined by the firm input of a loving father then the child is on it’s way morally.
In other words it is love that is the key to morality and God is Love.
I think you’ve got it the wrong way round. They believe there is a source of objective, unchanging morality, of treality, really, that makes for a stable universe with the possibility of knowledge. That unchangimng reality that underpins it all is called God, though it can also be called other things.
If you just don’t believe in a source of morality, then you don’t believe in a morality with any particular force or reality.
A constant source of fascination indeed. As is the sidestepping of the ‘possibility’ that whilst believers claim they are following God, they are actually following tenets thought up, written down, and promulgated by….man. The God claim allows them to assume surety, simplicity and superiority.
Religions all play on people’s desires and fears, on their caring. The caring comes first, the religion uses it to twist someone into a monster or into a weirdly self sacrificing or other type.
People simply care, about themselves and others, caring less about members of more distant ingroups. The differential caring can lead to conflict.
They care about having a good life before death and after it. Atheists mostly don’t believe in life after death, so they are not coerced, not by that belief at least, to kill someone for an insult or to be abnormally nice.
Different sects teach different ways to improve life now or after death. Monotheist Jesus taught mainly opposite morality to Islam and Judaism,. Atheist liberal humanism, with support for freedom of thought and expression, is nothing like the atheist sects you referred to. Jainism is far from the Viking or Aztec polytheist human sacrifice beliefs.
I never thought humanism meant the worship of humans, I thought it meant just the love of the broad ingroup. Worship is sort of craven, trading your sincerity for some reward. With love, you can admit that your loved ones have social imperfections. With worship, of God or Stalin or your Mum, you choose not to admit it.
Loving is why atheists and most other people are humanist. I don’t think any religion has improved things, except by countering a worse religion. Human contact and familiarisation (family-ising), has done us better than any ideology.
Last edited 3 months ago by Liam Keating
Ludwig van Earwig
3 months ago
I don’t remember Darwin demonstrating that the strong “had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.” Darwin’s work is descriptive, rather than prescriptive.
“The strong – as Darwin had conclusively demonstrated – had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.”
He clearly did say it.
I enjoyed this essay very much but I was not aware that Darwin had conclusively demonstrated the above. He was a scientist not a moralist. From what I have read he was distressed at how his theories were viewed and the effect they had on people’s Christian faith.
Surely the truth is, the idea that “the strong . . . have both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak” is one self serving interpretation of Darwin’s theory. I don’t know enough to judge whether it is reasonable or not, but I doubt it. **
** Late add on,
I do realise now this analysis is flawed, I made a mistake. No need to correct me yet again. Thank you.**
Not exactly from Darwin, but from his half-cousin Francis Galton, who founded the science of eugenics based on Darwin’s ideas. There is a direct line from eugenics to the Holocaust, as explained by Adam Rutherford in his book “Control” https://www.waterstones.com/book/control/adam-rutherford/9781474622387
This is really poor analysis Claire, here is the quote in context:
This, in the opinion of devout Nazis, was a conviction bred not of fantasy or faith, but of the proper understanding of science. The strong — as Darwin had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.
“The churches had had their day. This, in the opinion of devout Nazis, was a conviction bred not of fantasy or faith, but of the proper understanding of science. The strong — as Darwin had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.”
Indeed! Like all science. But he’s ventriloquising the mid-century Germans here, as an example of how easy it is to bodge a moral claim onto an empirical one.
Yes. I suppose it’s the combination of sex and violence that makes Darwin’s theories particularly susceptable to this sort of misconception.
Of course, the science around Darwin’s theories has not been fixed in place. There are various speculations based on “female choice”; including the idea that women prefer less violent men, which has led to a less violent species. (Look around, instead of reading the news, and you’ll see what I mean.) Also, the “grandmother theory” which posits family success, as opposed to individual success, as a very efficient way of passing genes on to future generations.
There’s more, too. It’s a fascinating field of study, hidden from view by silly politics; all we ever hear about is Creationism.
I can’t seem to locate the new comment space, so replying to you. Enjoyed this beautifully framed and deeply considered thesis. Curious as to the place of Darwin’s book, of which I found a squirrel-damaged 1st edition in the attic of my historic Mainline mansion in Villanova, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal, here. It was a strange prosaic catalogue of facts devoid of any self-evident purpose.
Holland’s argument is descriptive, too, though that seems to be lost on many of his “readers”!
Michael Saxon
3 months ago
Two phenomena are striking. The first is that just about all human progress came out of the Judeo-Christian West. The second is that as the West has abandoned its Christian heritage (whether you subscribe to the faith or not) it has become more and more dysfunctional and its institution’s increasingly incoherent, while bizarre ideas flourish. Much of the world thinks we are losing our minds. We have to return to the five core Judeo-Christian world view principles: All are made in the likeness of God (unique individuals who should have the opportunities to achieve their God-given potential), free will, individual responsibility (these two should operate as a reinforcing loop), love your neighbour and to love God is to obey his commands (natural justice). Shame the Church has re-crossed the Jordan and trekked off into a wilderness of its own making.
I sort of agree with what you’ve said but not the implied conclusion – which is that a return to the Church would be a good thing.
Progress in the past has come from a few ‘intellectuals’ – meaning a very small minority of people who could read and write. They have followed a bible and preached to simpler people that they will be punished by God if they break the rules. So, a minority of churchmen have preached the gospels and caused the simpler people to fear divine retribution.
Things have changed today. People don’t trust their ‘superiors’ in the pulpits, or the governments or the teachers in the schools. Science has taken away the magic from life. So the simpler people will not cower in their houses and fear God if they get ill. They will instead go to the NHS. (On second thoughts, maybe God would solve the problem quicker.)
Faith is very convenient. It takes away a lot of worry and responsibility because there is always someone else to blame.
“I sort of agree with what you’ve said but not the implied conclusion – which is that a return to the Church would be a good thing.”
I don’t think that he is really saying that. I think that, like me, he notes what we have become ( I apologise to him for putting words in his mouth): Whether we like it or not, everything we are is the consequence of 2000 years of christian theology. We cannot throw out the bathwater without also throwing out the baby. I am an atheist, I have no faith, but I cannot help but acknowledge what we have irretrievably lost. I probably come from the last generation of English people raised on The Gospels and The Book of Common Prayer. I am not trying to insult you when I suggest that you don’t even know what they are.
“Faith is very convenient. It takes away a lot of worry and responsibility because there is always someone else to blame”
Faith places duties upon you, it doesn’t give you someone else to blame.
Anyway, let’s end on a light-hearted note. in 2000 I went to church for the last time (I was genuinely curious). The sermon consisted of “Jesus wants you for a sunbeam” accompanied by a Cliff Richard soundtrack.
Depends on the faith and depends on the interpretation of that faith.
I am reminded of an old edition of BBC’s Top Gear, which was filmed in India. The presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, was being driven to work and the driving was ectremely erratic. When they got to their destination the driver admitted that the car had no brakes.
JC was annoyed, “We could have been killed.”
The driver smiled and said that if God wanted them to die on that day, then brakes wouldn’t have helped.
“Depends on the faith and depends on the interpretation of that faith.”
I suggest that you have no knowledge of your own culture and historic faith, or anyone elses.
Total deracination.
The conclusion was explicit: that the Church should return to its former self. The implication was that, if it were to do so, it would act as a conduit for people to bring out the best in themselves, and for that best to improve society.
Well, there is some truth in that, but the same could be said of other faiths and other institutions.Sad to say, it’s also likely that it would provide the vehicle for those who enjoy power to claim moral superiority and exert a malevolent influence.
A the centre of Christian faith – of all faiths – is the realisation that the individual stands alone in time and space in terms of morals, and may make bad choices from the best of motivation, or happen upon the most beneficial course from the basest of motives. Christianity posits that there IS a day of reckoning, but that ‘we have an advocate with the Father’, one who has gone before and knows all our weaknesses but remained perfect until death. Judaism allows for no such advocacy, while other faiths have other ‘solutions’ for the ‘problem’ of human limitations. agnosticism reserves its own judgement, but that perfect knowledge and understanding is possible, even if not yet achieved by humanity.
The outlier is atheism as envisaged by Nietzsche:it allows for no objective observer, whether deity or future-perfect human.
The first is that just about all human progress came out of the Judeo-Christian West.
Hmmm. Perhaps, after spending a day working on an algorithm to calculate some algebra, and then maybe imbibing some alcohol whilst looking up at Algol or Aldebaran, it would be worth musing on this Al chap and how he seemed to have done quite a lot for science, particularly in the bit between the fall of Rome and the start of the Renaissance.
Algebra that of course relied on the positional (hundreds, ten, units) numbering system that was invented in India. And which spawned the idea of the number zero, also developed in India. Which was merged with the principles developed by the ancient Greeks about geometry. But yes, Judeo-Christian west, as you were saying…
Your examples only serve to illustrate the Michael’s point though. You call them out precisely because they’re unique, some of only a few cases of significant progress from a non-Western source. We adopted algebra. But we birthed calculus, trig, geometry, number theory, cryptography, etc…
Western inventions, ideas, and culture have permeated the rest of the world (instead of the other way) for a reason, because they work. And sometimes because we’re arrogant, colonialist twits, but not mostly. Do you like not living in a mud hut and burning dung? Do you like canned food? Do you like fertilizer so you don’t starve? Do you like dental novicane? Do you like having rights as an individual? Western, white men created most of that. You’re welcome
We adopted algebra. But we birthed calculus, trig, geometry, number theory, cryptography, etc…
Trigonometry and Geometry? Like Pythagoras’ theorem and Euclidean space?
I in no way question the contribution the West has made to science since the Renaissance. All I question is the arrogance of “nothing of any value was invented anywhere else”. The West has been leading in science for the last 500 years, but I call into question the exceptionalism that anything before that has no value. It is short-sighted and arrogant. Besides we can turn this around – do you like agriculture? (Oldest example: Syria 9000 bc) Monetary system? (oldest example: 5000 bc, Turkey) Written language? (Uruk, Mesopotamia, 4000 bc). Middle Eastern men created most of that, whilst Europeans were sitting in mud hits and burning dung. You’re welcome.
Newton admitted (albeit grudgingly) that if he had seen so far it was by standing on the shoulders of giants. The world has seen several periods where one empire or another has dominated scientific work, and we are in the one where that has been focussed on the West. But it wasn’t 700 years ago, and there is no guarantee where it will be 700 years from now.
I’m not entirely sure who you are responding to: I don’t see any posts up thread which assert “nothing of any value was invented anywhere else” on behalf of Western civilization. A point that should be made in that regard, is that one of the reasons the West advanced so fast once we abandoned Aristotle’s misbegotten physics, is, mostly because of Christian universalism (there are pre-Christian precedents in the West like Tacitus romanticizing the Germanic barbarians),we did not regard ideas, practices, and technology from other cultures as beneath notice, the way, for instance the Chinese and Japanese did until the mid-19th century, or the way Muslims did after they killed their own scientific flourishing by adopting the occasionalism of al Ghazali and deciding that the time of itjihad was ended so that their understanding of sharia had been perfected. If something from someone else’s culture worked better than what we had, we adopted it quickly.
(As an aside about Aristotle’s physics: how did he get that so wrong? He was Alexander the Great’s tutor, surely he saw arrows and sling-stones in flight — a nice parabola, a conic section known to the ancient Greeks, not the straight line followed by a straight downward fall as his theory of “impetus” would have predicted. He seems to have never actually worked out what his physics predicted.)
Your history of mathematics is a bit off. Using “we” to mean only Christendom and its secular successor culture, our pagan forebearers started number theory and what became algebra in the work of Diophantus, and geometry with Euclid and Archimedes. The Muslim Arabs and Persians developed algebra, basically because the notion of zero they learned from the Hindus was the key to what Diophantus got stuck on, and trigonometry. Calculus, non-Euclidean geometry (necessary to describe general relativity), number-theoretic public-key cryptography*, Fourier analysis, probability theory, statistics, homological algebra, category theory,… are all “our” inventions, along with most of their applications to physics and now computing.
*Cryptography of the private-key sort is of great antiquity and developed independently in many placed.
as the West has abandoned its Christian heritage (whether you subscribe to the faith or not) it has become more and more dysfunctional and its institution’s increasingly incoherent
Christianity was the primary organizing principle of the West for 2000 years; it gave society cohesion, a shared vision. As Christianity is abandoned the shared values are questioned or lost. Without shared values society becomes dysfunctional, with tribe against tribe. We need a replacement vision.
In the US, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution provide that vision, although their constraints on government are continually tested and stretched by those who do not really support their underlying philosophy of government. Once lost it will be hard to re-establish a shared vision.
The Declaration begins with “all men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights”. Saying it’s “being stretched by those who don’t support its underlying philosophy” is accurate, but the reason they don’t support it is that they’ve left the Judeo-Christian heritage that birthed that philosophy.
It’s kind of a moot point though. We’re not going to return to Medieval Christendom, regardless of what Sohab Amari and his dozen integralists might fantasize about.
“Much of the world thinks we are losing our minds.”
I’m guessing you mean non Judeo-Christian societies think we’re losing our minds. But they thought we were wrong anyway because of those Judeo-Christian beliefs we held.
Martin Bollis
3 months ago
In many ways this article supports the post modern, critical theory, assumptions that “it’s all about the language.” It is making the case that Christian assumptions are so embedded that anti Christians can only use Christianity’s founding precepts.
China has a huge population and a culture, which predates the west, in which Christianity has not been embedded for 2,000 years. The political system is different but is the fundamental morality of its individuals profoundly different? Are there not some universal standards which conform (very broadly) to something like the 10 commandments?
I’m firmly of the view that we are apes in suits, certainly nothing divine, but like every other tribal species, or pack animal, we’ve developed structures and norms that work for us. The foundations of those norms are similar across a huge range of societal structures even when what is built on them looks very different.
I really enjoyed the essay and subsequent discussion.
There may have long been structures and norms that work for “us”, with us being within any given society, i.e. the “in crowd” as opposed to outsiders. But that is not the same as norms acknowledged to apply to humans generally.
For example, within Mongol society doubtless murder by and of Mongols was frowned on. But that did not preclude one of their moral precepts that any man worthy of his salt should kill at least one non-Mongol during his lifetime, in order to justify occupying his room on Earth!
I am an ape in jeans. I can write quite well and read complicated books about politics and economics. I am a scientist by training. I like to think that ‘societal values’ will allow me to carry on reading about the philosophy of our culture and its success in the past. At the moment I’m thinking about lunch.
But I wouldn’t go to the city centre at night. And that exposes the fallacy of Humanism (and religion).
But I wouldn’t go to the city centre at night. And that exposes the fallacy of Humanism (and religion).
Are you saying that because some people do not follow the widely accepted standards of behavior there are not principles underlying human behavior? Explain.
I’m not sure why this has got downvoted. It is fairly obvious that morality, whether religious or otherwise, has shown a “progressive” trend throughout history to rein in physical violence to the benefit of those capable of exercising intellectual violence.
Chris, if you are just an ape in jeans, what are your rights as a human being grounded in? Locke simply asserts those rights and Jefferson grants them via a creator. How would you defend your right of free speech for example, against someone who wanted to censor you? If you are just an “ape in jeans”, why shouldn’t you be governed by the law of the jungle: might makes right?
I teach civics and one of the things I drive home is the connection between Judeo-Christianity and Enlightenment rights. Specifically, absent a creator, the latter aren’t self-evident at all. In class, I use the line “smart apes don’t have rights” frequently, so you identifying that way piques my interest.
I won’t argue with you, I promise. But knowing how someone who is reasonably well educated and read and describes himself as a smart-ape responds to that would really help me in class. Thanks.
I question whether I really have rights as a human being. I certainly don’t have the right to free speech but Unherd holds this illusory right as a cornerstone of its raison-d’etre.
When we discuss here we are in a semi-protected zone. Many people use pseudonyms because they fear persecution from their neighbours. I can’t think of anywhere I have visited which has freedom of speech (or action). I use the correct definition here – that you don’t cause problems with your listeners.
A while back I worked for a company in Kentucky. I was telling my colleagues about my vacations in Cuba and they got very angry about my visits. It was un-American and therefore bad. As a Brit, I had forgotten about the Cuba issue.
But there were little problems with every discussion we had during my visit. I didn’t want steak but everybody else did. The restaurant did other meals but you had to sit downstairs – only the wimps/wusses sat downstairs. I got annoyed when every discussion started with, “I’m proud to be American”. I kept pointing out that all the American flags in the building had ‘Made in China’ printed on them. So, we didn’t aim to be unfriendly to each other but I couldn’t wait to leave and I believe they wanted me to go.
I have a similar problem with the plethora of flags where I live now; I find them insuting and not conducive to free speech or free anything. So where is freedom. I can’t find it.
“The political system is different but is the fundamental morality of its individuals profoundly different?”
I think the Chinese Uyghurs would say there is.
“Are there not some universal standards which conform to something like the 10 commandments?”
C.S. Lewis uses the exactly the same example to illustrate what God’s law being “written on man’s heart” actually means.
I tried to answer this earlier but I got taken out for some reason. Religion is difficult because there is not just one standard religion but many in different parts of the world. Each would claim his religion to be the one, true thing and that can’t be so.
Then for each religion comes the issue of personal interpretation. I am in the middle of an excellent book called, ‘A Village In The Third Re*ch’. This traces the story of a devoutly Catholic village in South Germany starting around 1920. Mostly people are farmers or metal smiths or manual workers. Everyone is a devout Catholic. Then one person comes into the village, an early fan of National So*iali*m. One by one, the community is infected with the new religion until all have forgotten their Christian upbringing. The story is scary because it starts so innocently and takes place gradually over many years. It shows how devout Americans can get to think very bad things about China. And the reverse of course.
I’m really talking about Joe Soap, the man in the street. The Chinese version has no more say over what happens to the Uyghurs than I do over what happens to asylum seekers.
In his day to day life, is he likely to be that much different to me in terms of his attitude to stealing, murder, adultery etc. I don’t know.
Mr Holland’s argument that pivots on ethics is just as much off centre when considering the purpose of the Christian faith as is the humanists’ claim to own morality apart from that religion. As if Christianity had the objective of making human beings moral to please God.
A concern for our own righteousness can be just as much a self-concern as anything else, only just as cleverly disguised as the Gnostics’ obsession with sating their bodily appetites was by their claim that their spiritual self was already in heaven.
The Apostle Paul wanted his converts to present their bodies to God in such a condition as to make them a temple of the Holy Spirit. Such was the value and the purpose of each person.
In C S Lewis’s Narnia stories, the Green Witch wants the children to believe that hers is the only world. The Witch, inviting the children to grow up (that is, abandon their belief in Aslan/Christ): “Are you not ashamed of such toys…put away such childish tricks.” Susan eventually does this. Susan, mocking her siblings: “Fancy your still thinking of all those funny games we used to play when we were children.”
Susan grows up as the Green Witch wants Jill and Eustace to do. That is, to believe that the world that Susan lives in and aligns her own behaviour and ambition to is the only world. There is no divine authority that each human life is made to magnify in substance and quality – the purpose Paul refers to – and to which each life is accountable for the success or failure to do so, such as Aslan.
The belief that Susan was banished from Narnia by C S Lewis has been repeated so often that we’ve all stopped thinking. Narnia misunderstood is Christianity misunderstood. The same repetition is apparent in the concentration on ethics by both Mr Holland and the humanists.
Sating our craving to be moral, our spiritual appetite, working tirelessly for equality and human dignity, while highly commendable, would not equate to a faith in Christ. It might even be a snare of mankind’s spiritual enemy, an exquisitely worked masterpiece of far greater subtlety and allure than the one that snared the Gnostics with their own craving to sate their bodily appetites. After all, when Jesus met the Sidonian woman who petitioned Him about her sick daughter, He used an example that, while it justified helping her, did not establish her equality or her human dignity. It is her trust in Him that is effectual.
At one point in Lewis’s Narnia stories, Aslan says to Lucy, “Now you are a lioness.” This is not a metaphor. She has become in substance and quality the same as him. That she is female to his male emphasises this in the way that a Christian is said to relate to Christ. It’s for that reason that there is no religion in the kingdom of Narnia. Religion exists in the Calormen empire which, being in the south, not the east, is Lewis’s way of saying that religion satisfies the lower, bodily, needs.
Though Lewis’s Narnia stories are children’s stories, Lewis has something else in mind as well, especially regarding the grown-up Susan. Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3). Susan’s status of once-a-queen in Narnia, always-a-queen is never revoked by Aslan, the only character with the authority to do so. Susan is still a queen – in Narnia. But will she enter it? Would we?
I’ve read this a couple of times and am not sure I’ve grasped it. Not having read the Narnia books doesn’t help but I have read Surprised by Joy and The Screwtape Letters.
My sense is that Lewis believed in metaphysical powers of good and evil as quite literal manifestations, beyond human conception. He views total sublimation to the divine good as a higher order experience perhaps comparable to the Buddhist enlightenment. Human concerns and morality are entirely secondary to this fusion, which is the essence of Christianity and a prerequisite for entry into the Kingdom of God.
Is that what you are saying?
If so, I cannot agree but am willing to accept that my understanding of the world is now framed entirely by scientific rationalism, which is the linguistic air we’ve all breathed since the Enlightenment.
Just a suggestion as to a possible answer Nicholas may have given to your question, “Is that what you are saying?”: this fusion is not the essence of Christianity, rather it is the actual relationship between a human being and Jesus Christ, who is both a living human being and the living God. Susan and the other children in the world of Narnia had direct encounters with Aslan (a living being, and then a resurrected living being), and came to follow him, typifying the encounters of folks in our world with Jesus—folks who recognize him and choose to follow him. I highly doubt Lewis would describe (or distill down) these encounters as “sublimation to the divine good.” While certainly one could suggest a “higher order experience” is at play in these encounters, owing to the fact that there exists no rational way to argue their reality (metaphysical?), the encounter and the response are the heart of Christianity.
“Christianity” is such a loaded term, but it’s what most people use, so I suspect Nicholas used it merely by way of making that distinction, that the relationship (not “Christianity” as generally used) has nothing to do with “the objective of making human beings moral to please God.”
“There is one mediator between God and man, the man, Jesus Christ.” (1 Timothy 2:5)
But the Christian account of a divine source of morality is not dependent upon people learning that morality from Christians or Jews or their writings. St. Paul write of those without the Law keeping its precepts, and being a law unto themselves. The point of the Christian account is that in creation “oughts” are built into the system, consonant with the “ares”, not derivable from them, but no less real. I commend to all readers of this thread, C.S. Lewis’s prophetic little book The Abolition of Man, which deliberately uses the non-Western word “Tao”, rather than “Natural Law”. I call it prophetic because like the prophets of the Old Testament, he both correctly foretells the future and issues a call to repentance.
The question I wrestle with is how/why is homo sapien the only species that supposedly evolved from another species? If we are merely “apes in suits”, why aren’t there examples of giraffes, cockroaches, salmon or even chimpanzees in suits also?
Is it just a matter of timing? Evolution takes place over 100’s of thousands of years.
Todays chimpanzees use tools and have quite complex social structures. How much further advanced are they from whatever is a few millennium back in their line, and where might they be in 100,000 years?
Our technology is highly advanced but it seems we operate hierarchical social structures and exhibit a range of other behaviours that aren’t so different to many herd and pack animals.
I think you omitted some modifier between “only” and “species”, like “sentient” or “conscious” or “technological” or “clothes-wearing” or “theorizing” or I’m not sure what. According to the neo-Darwinian account, all species we observe today evolved from precursor species, not just us.
Tony Reardon
3 months ago
I don’t believe in Gods or an afterlife or any of these trappings of religions. However I see that religions exist and thus, according to my beliefs, these have to be creations of humans.
I see that many have persisted for substantial periods of time and so must have societal value. The ethics expressed in these religions have proved useful and relevant. The reasons to continue to support these values may have changed from an expectation that one is going to be rewarded or punished at the end of life into something more along the lines of creating the sort of society that one wants to live in. It also means that we should take a bit more personal responsibility.
We can actually see this in operation with many of the traditional strictures being quietly abandoned and this approach gives us the freedom to reject religious behaviour that does not contribute to better lives for all of us.
Exactly. “They are of societal value.” They try to stop the clever people who write well from being beaten up by ordinary people, who don’t like the clever people.
Which is why Socrates apparently said “I know nothing”.
Mark Vernon
3 months ago
I don’t doubt Holland’s main thesis, that humanism draws on Christianity, but there is something of the Puritan character in the way he presents it, seen in what he chooses to miss out.
For example, Nietzsche loathed Socrates as much as Jesus for undoing what he valued in the ancient world, which is to say it wasn’t Christianity alone that changed everything.
Alternatively, the Biblical phrase affirming human dignity because made in the “image of God” occurs three times in only one place in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 1-11). Which perhaps explains why inalienable equality was not self-evident to most Christians for much of Christian history.
Genesis is also a relatively young book in the Bible, for all that it is placed at the start, suggesting that the notion of dignity itself has a history, which of course has continued to develop in the modern period as much as any other.
Young book comparing to what? It is certainly older than the New Testament. It may be newer than the oldest strata of the Old Testament, but I don’t know by how much.
John Barton says it’s much debated, of course, but the Old Testament was written across most of the 1st millennium BCE, up to about the second century before Christ, and no doubt contains some older folk memories too, particularly in the Prophets. Genesis is most likely post-exilic, so after 537 BCE into the 400s BCE.
“suggesting that the notion of dignity itself has a history, “
Thats a very interesting point re. Genesis. Can you elaborate a bit more on the word “dignity” in relation to Genesis,
Great essay. I was going to nitpick about the pterodactyls and bats analogy. Convergent evolution was exactly the humanists’ point. Different people in different cultures have concluded similar things because these are either true or work. (They developed wings to fly, not merely vans to beat the air, so to speak. Though I’ve just realised that the Eliot analogy doesn’t work as an evolutionary parallel.)
But I’m glad I read on, because that would have been to miss the point: the humanism Tom Holland is critiquing is the specifically moral one which is obviously derived from Christianity. And he did a great job of explaining why self declared humanists are so insufferable.
Holland views the world through Christian lenses and shoehorns Christianity into everything, even where it is not needed. Some of his insights are brilliant, but many are simply naive.
Altruism, which he ascribes to Christianity, predates Christ, even predates humans. Christianity is a particularly effective meme to provide people with the meaning that they crave and organize society for the benefit of most. When the divinity of Jesus is abandoned people look elsewhere and will find something – anything – to structure their thinking, their lives.
AC Harper
3 months ago
And yet… for the sake of a good argument Tom Holland (like many others) needs to assume that human behaviour follows (if imperfectly) religious belief. But humans have behaved in particular ways towards each other long before religion. Human behaviours may have been influenced by common social religious beliefs but religions come and go, and even long established religions schism and change over time following (not leading) social change.
Epicurus said he believed in gods (it may have been politic to do so) but he argued that gods were made of ‘atoms’ too and were therefore natural. He also argued that as perfect beings they were undisturbable and so took no interest in the activities of ordinary humans. Again not a good example to include in an argument about the primacy of religious thought.
Glad you pointed that out. It’s the same kind of deist “creater” who endowed us with unalienable “rights”. Properties would have been injudicious at the time, but a better word.
Max Price
3 months ago
A wonderful and important article.
Brett H
3 months ago
“The well-spring of humanist values lie not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history: the history of Christianity.”
There is a succession of events in this idea that is this: if there is a God then our ethics and values are his. If you believe this then there is no reason to question the well-spring of our values, but to simply live it. But there is still this, that our values are inherently human, which is why we were so successful in terms of evolution. We formed caring communities, not because it served us to live like that, the selfish gene, not that it was a construct for survival, but because we were naturally caring, that the communities and values were an extension of who we were. And it worked. You must already perceive what is good to recognise it. You don’t need God to do that. The line of succession I referred to was that it was these inherent values that were the basis of Christianity, not the other way around. The well-spring of humanism lies in Christianity only because that is the form our values have come down to us over time.
Consider if we were naturally uncaring. Would we be here today if we were that way thousands of years ago? How would families flourish? How would supportive relationships develop? How would the progressively better state of living occur?
We are naturally caring in the sense that we have that capacity – but we generally exercise it only towards our own group, close friends and relations, and only up to a point. As for self-interest, that only goes as far as we expect (or fear) something back from the people we are uncaring about. ‘What goes around, comes around’ is a good argument – but it fails when we can be fairly sure that the other people will never be in a position to harm us.
Consider white US southerners in the plantation era. Natural caring was limited to your own group and race, and not extended to ‘inferior’ races. And self-interest was overwhelmingly towards keeping the blacks down and the whites (your group) on top, given that you could be reasonably sure to avoid rebellions. As one white southern politician said after the civil war (quoting General Sheridan’s memoirs, from memory): “Of course we are suppressing the black vote; if we did not, no white man would ever be elected in this state again“.
If you want a morality that makes people supportive to all humans, and not just to your own family and in-group, I really cannot see how it could be rooted in either human nature or self-interest. And I doubt that the equality of all humans is a notable feature of most non-Christian belief systems.
Your last sentence is most meaningful when you consider this: the conscience of the white Southern senator as compared to the African warlord selling his own people to Arab slavers who in turn sold them to the Portuguese for further distribution and profit. The senator knew the institution was a grotesque sin with impending if not immediate consequences. The warlords and slavers and merchants didn’t bother themselves about it. And what of the millions enslaved now, in the enlightened 21st Century? How do we go about our daily social media and Netflix-obsessed lives knowing they exist in the millions? I’m only one tiny person, but my prayers, when joined by others, have great power (I pray!).
It is the difference between rights – the idea that all people have some dignity, worth, claim on good treatment, and mere mutual assistance groups. If some action is inherently good or right, that must apply no matter who is on the other side. If it is just a matter of ‘it is unwise to cause trouble among your friends’, we are not talking about ethics, but expediency.
“As for self-interest, that only goes as far as we expect (or fear) something back from the people we are uncaring about. “
Yes, that’s often the argument for altruism, that it’s a tool for survival. But if you think it’s in your interests to be caring towards others then you already understand the idea of caring; it existed before you put it into action. So where did it spring from? Even if you use the idea of care to benefit yourself you’ve used something that existed originally in its pure form within you.
The obvious proposal would be that caring is part of us as something that you naturally do for/to your children, parents, lovers, family, anyway people close to you. It is when you want to extend an obligation of caring beyond this immesidate circle that you need ethics and start being in want of an explanation.
We are naturally both caring and uncaring. As Solzhenitsyn observed:
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained
Hollands basic idea is that many ideas about morality we take for granted are a consequence of Christianity. Especially the idea that the weak and marginalized have value. He stumbled on the idea of this import of Christianity while writing a number of books about the classical period and finding the Greek and Romans exceedingly strange when watched up close. He concluded that Christianity is the difference, and that many things we take for granted, and even things that seems opposite to Christianity is the result, not of religion in general, it of Christianity itself. Examples he give in other places are gay rights (except for Taiwan, gay marriage only exits in post christian countries) and atheism itself. Atheism is simple a branch of Christianity that denies the existence of God.
Christianity ‘pales into insignificance’ when compared to the corpus of Ancient Greek classical thought, and in particular the Corpus Aristotelicum.
It offers little more than mawkish, sanctimonious drivel and makes the simply preposterous claim that FAITH triumphs over REASON.
That it did ultimately triumph is a disaster for Western Civilisation.
Aquinas was a mendicant and a ‘rebel’ and the Church did not endorse his teachings.
(ps If you haven’t been to Fossanova it really is worth a visit.)
Roddy Campbell
3 months ago
Humans have a limitless capacity for self-deceit.
Being able to ignore the simple fact that without God all morality is up for grabs is breathtaking in its enormity.
A secular system of human rights not underwritten by a supra-natural ethical code exists on the shifting sands of utilitarian philosophy or democratic mandate, both of which depend themselves on… a supernatural code of ethics.
Richard Dawkins argues the only plausible alternative: that there is evolution through natural-selection of competing philosophies, with the ‘fittest’ ones surviving and those which don’t promote human or societal survival dying out.
So Universal Human Rights are an evolved concept that exist because civilizations that didn’t have them died out.
That is a neat theory but it only really works in a Western setting, underpinned by 1000 years of (now unacknowledged) Christianity. It isn’t supported by either history or data from elsewhere, where regimes and political systems and whole cultures that occupy a different moral ecosystem seem to thrive as political entities.
The West has enormous struggles with this dissonance, as can be seen by the last 70 years of foreign policy or the knots in which the UN regularly ties itself. The West tries in vain to export its Christian-based so-called Universal Human Rights (blatant cultural colonialism!) to societies that don’t have Christianity embedded in their cultural DNA (sic): and that’s not been an unqualified success.
“Humans have a limitless capacity for self-deceit.
Being able to ignore the simple fact that without God all morality is up for grabs is breathtaking in its enormity.”
The second statement is a great demonstration of the first.
By ‘God’ I meant some sort of supernatural entity that promulgates a code of morality that encourages us to do what is right rather than what serves our purposes.
Where do we get ‘right’ from? ‘Right’ may cost us our fortune, our house, sometimes our life.
What exactly would stop you from murdering a passer by and stealing their money if you needed it and were certain you would get away with the crime?
If you read beyond the first 2 paragraphs of my comment, you will see that the possibility of an evolutionary explanation for our understanding of ‘right’ is described. But this does appear to require some sort of external monitoring to incentivise people away from the expedient in favour of the decent. Where there is none, and no inherited vestiges of one, people often do what they think they can get away with.
It seems you are onto the shame/guilt difference. Shame occur when we’ve done something we’re ok with, but believe others judge us negatively for (like being caught pooping outdoors) – whilst guilt is properly described as the feeling we get when we’ve betrayed our own values (I stole some money, got away with it, but feel bad). Shame is a function of being a sociable beast (dogs feel shame, cats…not so much); guilt stems from being self-aware.
Those with a classic religious mindset (as opposed to spiritual) think that the concept of God solves something – it does so only in so far as giving in emotional comfort, some of which is about not having to think any more or take responsibility – ‘I simply do what God wants me to do’. This is a cop out personally, and in philosophical terms it merely kicks the can down the road – a temporary, false out for those made dizzy by issues of infinite regress.
Rob Keeley
3 months ago
It’s the secular, godless liberal human rights that allow, even encourage both euthanasia and late-term abortion,
but that’s all they’ve got Brett – that’s the whole point. Life is scary – full of pain and uncertainty; but wait, there is a great Sky Daddy who says it’s all going to be ok, so long as you follow these steps. Phew!
Problem is, to the extent that you are committed to the real world and in truth, your mind will have to spend the rest of your life trying to justify, fearfully, that original sin. A person trapped therein will never discover that all of wonderful life, good, bad ugly and indifferent, stems from the reality of being a real human on a real planet, not from fairy tales. What a waste.
David Ryan
3 months ago
An excellent article. Easy to forget how rooted western values are in centuries of Christianity. Easy to forget also how fundamental religion is to human existence. I’m not talking about belief in God, whether God exists or not is a moot point really. Religion helps humans deal with and come to terms with what life throws at them and has done so probably since the dawn of humankind. That’s why it evolved with us, I suspect it’s as Darwinian as anything biological. Jettison it at our peril
CHARLES STANHOPE
3 months ago
Some years ago on a visit to the Natural History Museum in Kensington one of my grandchildren asked “ What was God doing when T-Rex was around? To which I could only answer, not much.
Clear uncongealed question. Children. My young blonde niece whom no one expected to later become a criminal lawyer remarked during her parents’ atheistic chit-chat: “Didn’t Jesus say he’d be right back? It’s been 2000 years. And as for God, no one’s seen him, like, forever!”
John Riordan
3 months ago
“To draw on a fittingly Darwinian analogy, ancient atheists and modern humanists resemble one another in the way pterosaurs resemble bats: as examples of similar features developing in unrelated species. That isolated prefigurings of humanist beliefs are to be found scattered in ancient texts does not in itself demonstrate an evolutionary relationship between them.”
Yes, but this if anything emphasises the existence of deeper truths presupposed to link the two historically unrelated groups. Convergent evolution is a process that occurs because unrelated species facing the same set of selection pressures evolve similar characteristics to adapt to those pressures. The analogy here is to the idea that unrelated historic groupings come to the same rational conclusions when faced with the same weight of evidence – the observable regularities of nature that provoke the conclusion that natural laws must exist.
I’m not saying that that’s defiinitely what happens mind you, merely that the evolutionary analogy can support rather than disprove the supposition in question, as long as we define our terms sufficiently precisely.
“Certainly, the humanist assumption that atheism and liberalism go together is plainly just that: an assumption.”
And this is one assumption I don’t merely question, as the author does, but reject. It seems to me that moral systems devoid of God are equally prone to authoritarianism as are religious ones – in recent history, you could argue, a good deal more so, given the atrocities of the 20th century. I might even go so far as to say that the global fiasco of the 2020 pandemic response was a minor example of the same phenomenon: an elite class of “experts” who found themselves unexpectedly with their hands on the levers of power, and almost immediately disgraced themselves by forgetting what human beings actually are.
On the general argument above, though, I do believe that it is nonetheless possible for human rights to be universal and to be regarded as emerging naturally from a rigorous philosophical examination of history and a scientific examination of the relationship between humans and the physical world. I’m reminded of a brilliant section of prose from one of Roger Scruton’s books in which he rehearses an imaginary debate between Friedrich Hayek and Ronald Dworkin on the role and nature of law, with Hayek’s view, unsurprisingly, winning the debate through an exposition on the history of the Common Law. Here’s one particular paragraph:
“Just as prices in a market condense into themselves information that is otherwise dispersed throughout contemporary society, so do laws condense information that is dispersed over a society’s past. From this thought it is a small step to reconstructing Burke’s celebrated defence of custom, tradition and ‘prejudice’ against the ‘rationalism’ of the French Revolutionaries. To put Burke’s point in a modern idiom: the knowledge that we need in the unforeseeable circumstances of human life is neither derived from nor contained in the experience of a single person, nor can it be deduced a priori from universal laws. This knowledge is bequeathed to us by customs, institutions and habits of thought that have shaped themselves over generations, through the trials and errors of people many of whom have perished in the course of acquiring it. Such is the knowledge contained in the common law, which is a social bequest that could never be adequately replaced by a doctrine, a plan or a constitution, however entrenched that constitution may be in a vision of individual rights.”
The point I would make here is that just because we may not be able to deduce a universal system of human rights a priori through philosophical effort alone, that does not mean that such a system does not exist or that it is not discoverable through rigorous examination of human societies past and present – or, to extend the parallel in Roger Scruton’s prose, that it cannot be constructed iteratively through a system of deductive precedent, as the Common Law has been. Where we are now – the early 21st century, a time when much of the planet has yet to achieve the basic material wealth required for a tolerable level of human dignity – a system of human rights that is properly universal is something that’s a work in progress, that’s all. And the fact that the efforts so far may be inescapably rooted in the Christian tradition ought not to cause humanists to despair (assuming they accept the point at all, of course), because there is nothing that prevents a particular claim being a truth just because it may have emerged as a religious principle in the past.
My conclusion: I accept the point that the humanists of today may not wholly understand the roots of their assumptions, but that doesn’t mean their efforts are in vain.
“immediately disgraced themselves by forgetting what human beings actually are”.
Not the case fortunately with Lord Jonathan Sumption KS, nor Peter Hichins Esq.
Otherwise the late Nye Bevan’s words spring to mind.
A article that nails our current philosophical connundrum spot-on!
As touching as it is to think “all of us possessed of certain fundamental rights simply by virtue of being human”, absent a Judeo-Christian or at least monotheistic view of the world, human rights are not at all self-evident. If you’re just a smart ape, you can have government granted privileges, but you can’t have innate rights. Rights must be built into a being at its creation, and smart apes don’t have a creator.
It is not surprising that Enlightenment-era, liberal creations like freedom of association and freedom of religion and even the right to life are weakening in parallel with Western man’s embrace of so-called humanism. What is surprising is how few (even highly educated) Western people seem to realize the connection.
Completely agree with this. I didn’t realise the connection until recently. Reading ‘Dominion’ helped.
“you can’t have innate rights.”
If you consider early, small tribes/communities, why could not an innate right be conferred on the newborn by tribal members? I don’t think you necessarily need a creator for certain rights to be bestowed on people by others. Once conferred, in time, it’s considered innate.
“Rights must be built into a being at its creation, “
Or over a period of evolution.
“why could not an innate right be conferred”
Because something the tribe granted the tribe could take away and therefore it is a privilege not a right, as I said above.
Enlightenment liberalism is fundamentally monotheistic because the individual rights it posits logically require a transcendental source of some kind. The fact that this makes atheists very uncomfortable doesn’t change its veracity.
If you believe existence precedes essence, and you may not, then an individual is a free agent. That freedom is innate, it’s what he is, he’s nothing else but that. If you are free then, for me, you have an innate right that is not conferred. If someone takes that right from you, if they believe they have only conferred it on you, then they are committing the greatest crime.
A human as a living biological organism is not innately free. They are determined by cause and effect, thermodynamic laws, biological programming via RNA and DNA and social experiences through memetics.
Humans are simply vessels of cause and effect under the spell of free will which is just an over identification with the human imagination.
But they can kill themselves.
How is that ‘freedom’ innate, or remotely realisable to the newborn, which is only marginally less contingent on its mother for the provision of all necessities of life than during its gestation period? The very dependency of the immature usually (normally) engenders a feeling of duty in the mother, and in others in the closest family – perhaps in the wider tribal group or even the vast majority of the human population. But that duty has to be felt and accepted or, at the least, observed (perhaps for fear of reprisals) by those with the capacity to influence the child’s survival and thriving, or it is worthless. Nothing ‘innate’ about it.
“engenders a feeling of duty in the mother, “
Its not duty a mother feels, but love. Love is not learned, love is innate.
You need to explain why if you make that assertion. Where does love come from?
“Love” as we experience it is a biological mechanism. It provides bonding of humans, but probably also other species, which enhances survival and therefore procreation thus improving the surviveability of the species or the tribe. The one thing thing it doesn’t require is blind faith in the fabulous.
at 3am it sometimes feels very like duty
I think you are rather making Tom Holland’s point for him! You are stating a modern western ideological assumption, which would seem absurd to most human cultures and still today in most of the world.
On a more obviously practical level none of us are ‘free agents’ because we start off in life as helpless babes and thereafter can only exist in human society, despite the conceit of a few libertarians and survivalists that we can go off to live alone in a log cabin in Montana (all of us?!) and hunt for our dinner. I wouldn’t last too long in any case!
The problem comes when a larger tribe takes away those rights.
Then it isn’t innate.
Because then it doesn’t exist.
Freedom exists. You can deprive a person acting on it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
The illusion of freedom exists within the context of universal cause and effect, thermodynamic laws, biological programming via RNA and DNA and social experiences through memetics.
Similarly, love translated as a duty of care is a biological mechanism driven by genetics, epigenetics and memetics.
The ‘natural law’ of universal cause and effect, thermodynamics, biological programming via RNA and DNA and social experiences through memetics had been coopted by Christianity and remodeled as proto human rights.
This began the separation between human and animal.
Then I guess you’re an unloved child.
By repeating loads of terms like ‘thermodynamic’, ‘RNA’, ‘DNA’ you fall into the logical fallacy of distraction. What if this so called ‘illusion’ is actually more real than the biological programming. What if the biology is merely the underlying physical mechanism that allows us to use our minds and bodies and the physical world (ie reason) to access the transcendental.
Define freedom
To use a substantive example, does one really need a deity to derive the right to self defense? Or is it fundamentally rooted in all forms of life, requiring no human or deity to ‘derive’ it?
Duties and expectations of the members of a band or tribe were always far more emphasised than any notion of their ‘rights’ – I can’t think of a example of the latter. This of course is still largely true in most non-Western cultures. I often meet for example gay, more accurately ‘predominantly homosexual’ men from Muslim societies, and they certainly aren’t free to decide to not marry (a woman) or to lead their own lives as a British gay man nearly always can. At least, not without devastating consequences such as being completely cut off from family and their name dishonoured.
Christianity gives us no more innate rights than humanism does. We pretend when we transfer our authority to give or not to give from us to a God.
I think the above essay is wrong on most points although I agree the Amsterdam declaration is too. We confer rights on each other partly as risk aversion by conferring rights on ourselves at the same time, partly due to caring about each other.
We have various ingroup boundaries which expanded during the age of exploration and globalisation.
The fallacy of human rights is revealed when we consider the existence of life and death within the context of thermodynamic laws.
The Universe is a procession of life (negentropy) and death (entropy). In other words, the fabric of the Universe is one of continual transformation and therefore the continual recycling of matter and energy.
The belief in human rights relies upon a faith that the life death relationship that underpins the fabric of the Universe does not apply to the human species.
Similarly, a belief in human rights relies upon a faith that human rights can always be realised via infinite biotic and abiotic resources.
Similarly, the right to life cannot be universalised to the entirety of biological life since biological life is sustained by the relationship between life and death.
Thus human rights are inherently particularistic, not universal, and in turn the reductionism of human rights simply leads to the belief in human exceptionalism.
The concept of human rights is a western idea & as such is deeply individualistic. As such it can’t be (although oft claimed) universal. In societies where the importance of family & community is valued over individual rights or freedoms, there is a jarring with this concept.
Although the rights of groups is often talked about, its notable that only an individual can exercise their rights in law. Hence, there’s usually a test case taken by an individual to create a legal precedent that can be used by others or groups.
What’s usually overlooked in the debate about human rights is that it is practically speaking impossible to build a caring society upon such ideas.
I find it interesting that this who champion rights for various special interest groups love their own dogmas, while dismissing religions because of their dogmas.
If God can make someone innately valuable, anyone can. By loving, valuing someone for their innate isness rather than for any external usefulness, I would say that the someone is made innately valuable. Everyone has that amount of power.
Even if you argue against the semantics of the latter point, I don’t see how any description of a God makes a difference to the question.
Killing a man and burning a lump of coal. Is there any difference? The Atheist of he is honest and consistent might say no. It is after all just rearranging some carbon atoms.
I haven’t found an Atheist yet who will follow through the logic of his conviction and therefore explain the vast numbers murdered by Atheist Governments in order to create a “ just society” or similar
The crimes committed by the likes of Stalin are no more an example of the evils of atheism than the crusades were of Christianity, suicide bombers of Islam or any number of atrocities carried out by lunatics in the name of religion
You miss the point; The only reason you consider these crimes is because Christian morality is in your bones.
You’ve missed or deliberately side-stepped Billy Bob’s point: Large scale atrocities occur under religious and non-religious (though ideologically zealous) justifications. People kill in the name of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, the Fatherland, the Revolution, etc.
I personally think morality and human kindness are well-served by a belief in Providence, a just and merciful one. But the notion that “Thou shalt not commit murder” is Christian–or the invention of any particular creed–is an ahistorical overreach.
HL Mencken famously opined that when we claim to need a God, we in fact mean that we need a policeman. As I get older, I’m beginning to see that as more of a sensible proposition than a throwaway bon mot.
The older I get the more I realise that Mencken had an answer for almost anything. It was pointed out to me that he was an anglophobe but:
1) So what?
2) He almost had to be an anglophobe to promote American culture in those days.
Ah, but who will watch the watchmen?
“ That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. ”
Sorry, I don’t seem to have the ability to start a Comment? So I posted that ^ here.
Anyway, did the notion of moral obligation to help the less fortunate exist in any society anywhere before Christianity came along? Is it right that Christianity appropriates this, as the author seems to think?
It certainly has Hebrew antecedents, in what Christians label the Old Testament. For example: ‘He that oppresses the poor reproaches his Maker, but those who are kind to the poor honor him’ Proverbs 14:31
‘Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice; to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?’ Isaiah 58:5-7 (New Revised Standard Version)
I believe Jesus of Nazareth brought a new message of compassion and righteousness that remains transcendent and powerful (which is almost too obvious to mention), often on a scale and with an emphasis that was unique, at least in the surviving historical record.
But though he challenged the religious dignitaries (Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees) and institutions (God’s church over mankind’s), Jesus was a Hebrew. And not every extant original saying–Christian, Hebrew, Hindu, Buddhist, or Zoroastrian–emerged in a perfect vacuum until it was said or written in its extant form. Such inspired authorship can occur–and does in the teachings of Jesus in several places–in my non-affiliated estimation.
There’s a type of Christian Singularism that’s similar to American Exceptionalism, with its fraudulent claims about having ‘invented’ freedom itself or whatnot.
The Hebrew faith – precursor to Christianity – had as one of its central tenets the caring for widows, orphans and sojourner. As an agricultural practice, lands owners were to leave parts of their fields and vineyards unharvested to allow the poor among them to glean the remnant grain and fruit for themselves and families.
These practices emanating from the same Source that birthed Christianity.
Excuse me …. The proscription against murder is from the Ten Commandments – “Thou shalt not kill.” The is Mosaic Law and the Hebrew Bible. Christianity appropriated it. It is Jewish Law, which in large part, Christians rejected in favor of a saviour and salvation. Perhaps humanism is an attempt to reverse this decision, but a better choice would be to recognise that Judaism is a more beneficial lens through which to view the challenges of humanity.
Surely there was nothing universal about the 10 commandments . They were meant for the ‘chosen people’ .
Did the injunction against murder even apply to killing non -Jews ? Genuinely unsure about this .
Christianity didn’t ‘appropriate’ the ten commandments; it inherited them!
Christianity is Jewish!
Jesus said: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.”
Anyone who claims to murder in the name of Christianity clearly is not practicing Christianity. That makes about as much sense as someone murdering in the name of Veganism.
Yes but the point is that atheists have no principled basis to condemn such atrocities by whomever committed, except maybe a tortured utilitarianism that can easily be refuted. Whereas a Judeo-Christian can appeal to God having created man in his own image, etc.
Not really. I’d imagine most religions would consider mass murder to be a crime, as would non believers. To imply I only find it wrong because I’ve grown up in a nominally Christian country I think is incorrect
Especially when military chaplains each blessed their side in the various world wars.
Or sided with the Nazis on religious pretenses #Pius XII
Religions generally follow along one step behind popular cultural morals.
Killing and murder are two very different things. Killing those who want to exterminate you and your people beforehand is very different than murdering someone in order to steal their property or to keep them from visiting your wife when you leave for work.
As did God in the Old Testament
Exactly. The acts of Stalin weren’t crimes, the acts of the so-called lunatics were, and thank God for that.
Huh? When you talk about the acts of Stalin, are you referring to the several million Ukrainians he starved to death in the early 1930s, the millions of “suspect’ nationalities he “purged” by having them shot in the back of the head later in that decade, or the millions that perished in his frigid Gulags? Or the deaths of the millions of small farmers he accused of being “kulaks”? Just wondering.
You are quite right. What I meant, but said poorly, is this: The acts of Stalin, and those like him, were made possible by Hegel, who said that innocence will come only at the end of History. The midwife of History is violence. Stalin was “on the side of History” precisely because he was not squeamish about murder. Nietzsche put this way: There will never be enough water to wash away all the blood. This is the reality one faces if the acts of Stalin aren’t crimes.
The opening chapter of John Gray’s Straw Dogs, if I recall correctly, addresses this very matter.
If you want a pithier version, Peter Hitchens said that “we live in the afterglow of Christianity”. He was clearly implying that we will be sorry when it has finally died. “Humanism” is just clutching at straws.
We should be haunted by Chesterton’s observation that when men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
I cannot help but be an atheist, but I acknowledge the truth of what they are saying. I cling to agnosticism as my personal, unsatisfactory, way out of my little quandry.
Why should we be haunted by Chesterton’s proposition? The only haunting is carried out by those who continue to quote it, as if it has some special resonance beyond the realisation by those who’ve divested themselves of religious self-deception that morality is, of course, a human construct.
There’s no need for a belief in Humanism any more than there’s a need for a belief in a god. My point is this: there’s no need for belief in an external authority full stop; it only leads to disillusionment when dismantled. The problem the Christian West has inherited is precisely that sense of disillusion. It’s time we started to move on. We exist. It’s in all our self-interests to refrain from doing harm to others, however much we’re unable to fulfil that premise.
No, it is not in all of our interests to refrain from doing harm to others. Colonialism was in the interest of Europe, slavery was in the interest of the slave owners. the subjugation of Xinjiang and the exploitation of resource-producing countries is in the interest of the Han Chinese, the conquest of Ukraine is in the interest of Russians (for the warm feeling of being an empire if nothing else). Sexual exploitation is in the interest of the Epsteins and the grooming gangs, and the masters of the Caliphate. Paedophilia was in the interests of Jimmy Savile, who had a long happy and exciting life right up to the point where he died and rotted. Meat eating is in the interest of humans, come to that. The idea that a group of strong people owe any respect or consideration to weak foreigners is pure abstract morality.
As you say, dogmatic statements just don’t work because people are different and have different priorities. A mother of a child at school does not believe that all are equal and nobody should harm another – she believes that her child is more than equal and, perhaps, can do no wrong. Families are closer than just ‘people’.
Then politicians try to instil a belief that our country is better (= more worthy) than other countries so deaths in France are not quite as sad if you don’t live in France. If you watch Al Jazeera, millions of people are living today in fear and poverty (mainly in Africa) but our main worry today is whether England will get knocked out of the World Cup.
I don’t believe that people are basically nice to other people, nor indeed think of other people unless they are close relations.
Mainly agree with you – but I do not think it is politicians who ‘instil a belief that our country is better (= more worthy) than other countries’. We just naturally care about and identify with our own group against other groups.
Preferring the “in group” is natural, but turning that feeling into hatred of the others and, so to speak, invading Poland, is where the politicians and ideologues enter. Feeling positively toward people we see as like ourselves does not inevitably mean we have to oppress or attack others.
Consider the South African apartheid regime that racially classified everyone as White, Coloured, or Black, kept Blacks in virtual servitude and gave Coloured very limited rights, but declared Japanese national, with whom they wanted commerce, to be “honorary Whites.”
The people in control use every available principle–good, bad or indifferent–as an excuse to do what they want to do, anyway, usually for their own aggrandizement. It is the way of the world.
How nauseatingly Yankophile can one be. Selective ‘morality’ on a grand scale. No mention of the appalling brutality committed by the US and Canada on the First Nations of North America. While, on the other hand being utterly brainwashed by the MSM’s constant repetition of US government propaganda about the false accusations of mistreatment by the Chinese government of the Muslim Uighers.
Why is it that the World Muslim Congress, which represents the interests of Islamic peoples across the globe have no issue at all with the situation in Xinxiang? In fact why is it they they specifically praised the Chinese for the enormous improvement in the living standards of the peoples in Xinxiang?
I despair at human gullibility and our capacity for hatred.
A bit touchy, are you? I started with colonialism and slavery, the first done by my people, the second universal, but historically associated with the US. I cannot list all the massacres of history, there would be no room. You are quite right that the treatment of the Uighurs or Tibetans by China is quite similar to the treatment of the Algerians by France, and not entirely different from the treatment of the Indians by US settlers, but other people’s crimes are not a reason for refusing to accept responsibility for your own actions.
As for the ‘false accusations of mistreatment by the Chinese government’ the known facts speak pretty much for themselves. China is not immune to criticism, however much the wolf warriors would like to make it so. The World Muslim Congress is presumably keeping shtum because there is nothing they can do, they need favours from China, and they are not feeling strong (or arrogant) enough to blame China for mistreatment, particularly since many of them are doing equally bad things themselves.
How come a man named P Branagan is working for Beijing, anyway?
Mr Branigan does seem a little biased.
But to continue the discussion above I have to say that I’m in the middle of reading a new book called, “A Village In The Third Reich”.
This book is superbly written and draws you in like a magnet. It is a little scary. It tells the story of a quiet village in the south of Germany, an ultra-Catholic, farming community which very slowly changes its religion. Day by day, week by week, Roman Catholicism morphs into National Socialism.
As you say, it is not the politicians who motivate us; rather it is the desire to be like our neighbours. But if the politicians/clergymen keep saying the same things, one person changes, another copies, then a third…. and so on. Then the individual is scared to argue.
So, the world is now officially woke. Why? The world bemoans the fate of muslims in China but are your friends actually visiting China to find out for themselves? So, you get this polarisation – either you are for or against. But if you stay in the middle of the road, traffic from both directions hits you.
I answered this but it got removed and I can’t work out why?
He could be an Irish Tankie. I only read about them yesterday .
Why start with the brutality committed by Western nations? Why not go all the way back to the beginning of recorded history, which can be summarized in one word, war. That is the point of Christianity in the first place. Man is fallen and should need redemption.
Indeed. Before Europeans reached the Americas, the people there had spent many centuries exterminating and enslaving each other. And Europeans had been doing it to each other for at least as long, or longer, before any came to te New World.
That does not absolve the Europeans who did terrible things in the Americas, but is does provide necessary perspective.
It may be some forms of colonialism were occasionally in the interests of the colonised , or at least a part of the colonised .
.” It’s in all our self-interests to refrain from doing harm to others, however much we’re unable to fulfil that premise.”
??
Quite the opposite!
How so?
The Mongol horde.
The Viking invasions
The extermination of the native Americans
The behaviour of the native Americans towards each other.
The ubiquitous nature of slavery throughout history.
One could go on for pages.
All driven by self-interest.
It was Christian evangelical zeal that enabled
The Royal Navy to destroy the slave trade – the greatest act of decency in the otherwise squalid history of the human species
None of those examples contradict my point, rather prove it!
“It’s in all our self-interests to refrain from doing harm to others, however much we’re unable to fulfil that premise.”
Perhaps words have different meanings for you than they do for me.
My examples are examples of the excercise of un-restrained self-interest. The perpetrators of those acts were not committing an error of judgement. They understood their own self-interest perfectly well and acted upon it.
I did you the courtesy of re-reading your post.
Thankyou. In referring to self-interest, i’m not referring to acts of violence by groups, but as the word suggests, by the self against one’s own community.
Sounds like there could be a consensus here. There is a self-interested reason to refrain from doing harm to members of one’s own group, but no reason at all to protect non-members in any way. Is that the point you are trying to make?
I’d simply refer back to my original point, which is that there’s no need whatsoever to invoke the authority of a god to enable a working ethos for humanity. In fact, there can’t be, since it all derives from human thought in the first place.
Maybe not for “a working ethos for humanity”, but Christianity has been an extraordinary refinement of a working ethos. Just in terms of Art, imagine a working ethos of humanity without Bach or Mozart, or the whole of English Literature, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, or the architecture – the physical engineering and symbolism – of gothic cathedrals. Christianity inspired all that and more.
Forgive me but “a working ethos of humanity” is a very limited ambition to have for us and typical of a post-modernist outlook. Is that really all you want ? I can’t believe it.
No:
“the greatest act of decency” was undoubtedly the Constitutio Antoniniana or Edict of Caracalla by which all free men across the Roman Empire became full Roman Citizens.
Roman slaves might have disagreed with that verdict
If they obtained manumission, as many did, they and their wives now became Roman Citizens.
Yes, but also Caracalla is remembered as a cruel and evil tyrant. Context is always crucial to a good understanding.
The Roman empire was experienced in its time as a stupefyingly vast, miraculous creation. Emperors were as gods. To become a Roman citizen was to be admitted into this miracle. Paul was born a citizen and his famously peripatetic ministry is a concrete expression of that citizenship.
Christendom is a mythologising of the Roman empire with the cosmic imperial visions of the Old Testament Jewish prophets. And two thousand years later the myth has largely come true.
Brett, if you have a chest of gold coins in your house and I kill you and take it, then my self interest has been served immensely. Your interests have been poorly served. We can create a village where we agree to respect each other’s life and property but our interests are still served by attacking the neighboring village, killing or enslaving the people and seizing their land and property.
Are your interests really served when you must do this time and time again, and in the process lose valuable members of your own tribe (and you may not always win) and then have to live in a constant state of fear?
Which is what happened for Millenia, under numerous faiths and peoples. Only difference is our villages slowly became bigger and eventually turned into nations, which means now any crime of that nature is seen as being against your own
In monocultures possibly
Just because you are ignorant of Chesterton’s aphorism doesn’t make it any less true
It is interesting that you mention an external authority; probably the main reason many people choose not to believe in God.
The problem is that people often think it is NOT in their self-interest to refrain from violence.
Exhibit A is Putin.
Exhibit B is Xi.
Exhibit C is Khamenei.
And yes, there are a number of western leaders in the same boat.
“It’s in all our self-interests to refrain from doing harm to others”. I can list countless examples of pragmatic exceptions to that assertion. The ethic of non-violence cannot possibly proceed from utilitarian philosophy.
I agree with you, I can appreciate that religion has done much good in shaping society and instilling moral values, and to be honest I’m slightly envious of those who are religious as I’d imagine it’s much more comforting to believe that when I die I’ll see all my friends and family again rather than being chucked in a hole and being eaten by worms. Unfortunately I simply can’t bring myself to believe in any of it
I don’t agree with him. There absolutely is a need for an organising belief. Religion outsources, if you will, any metaphysical thinking, and, as the derivation of the word suggests, it binds coreligionists together. I was enormously impressed by “Darwin’s Cathedral” which argues that religious belief is functional and that Christian beliefs and practices particularly so.
I don’t believe it’s been in our self interest to refrain from doing harm to others in our evolutionary past. The ape scene in “2001” is clear enough about that. And as resources are still scarce, I think it’s not true. Ask a Ukrainian if it’s in his self interest to refrain from harming Russian soldiers. Thinking otherwise is merely an unexamined hold over from Christianity.
The disillusionment comes from the dismantling of the binding principles. Tom Holland and Nietzsche both see that.
I’ve referred to Straw Man arguments elsewhere, but the examples of supposed conflicts of self-interest you quote are precisely that. For example, the Christian ethos hardly prevented nations under attack from defending themselves, or seeking to overcome evil regimes as in the two world wars, so why quote the ‘self-interest’ argument as an example in the case of Ukrainians defending themselves?
Clarity of thought is required, as ever.
Religion, if practised committedly, is rarely comforting; it is hard and challenging, requiring self-denial, humility, and the diminishing of one’s ego. Most of us are not up to the job.
Does that make it “true”, in the sense that if based upon a god, that god exists? (There are other religions that aren’t, of course.) And if based upon an untruth, the degree of comfort derived depends upon one’s capacity for self-deception.
Even less reason for me to become religious then. I have to ignore every rational thought in my head to believe something I’d otherwise think to be a loads of codswallop, and all I get for it is hard challenging work? I’ll stick to my life of sin I reckon
Reason does not come into religious faith, faith is beyond reason. It requires you to submit to a power, God, that you do not, nor cannot, understand. It is not easy, it is a giving up of yourself and your own will, it’s hard and an ongoing struggle, but the reward is love.
Which is why the gate to heaven is narrow, according to Matthew 7:13-14.
You have really hit the nail on the head. Religion is about finding a meaning. My mother pooh-poohed religion for almost all of her life but changed suddenly after her 70th birthday. A sort of panic set in.
I am like you. I would rather create a challenge for myself than believe a fairy tale. But it gets more difficult as you get older.
Is it really about finding meaning, or just a desperate attempt to comfort ourselves that our existence is not merely based on randomness?
Same thing, surely?
Meaning can be found in other things than religion.
Do you enjoy believing that you are merely a meaningless spec of carbon and have absolutely no purpose being alive? Then, by all means, have at it.
Yes I do. Our lives have meaning because humans are more advanced than other life forms and have a memory and consciousness about how our actions affect the lives of others and our surroundings, but ultimately our lives have no more meaning than that of any other animal, hence the reason the vast majority of us disappear into irrelevance once our lives are over
Well, if you are certain about that, then there is no need for further discussion, is there?
Ever hear the saying, “there are no atheists in a foxhole”?
I’ve spent some extremely uncomfortable moments in a slit trench, as we call it. I’m a rock solid atheist.
Congratulations….I guess.
You could challenge yourself by looking into the ‘fairy tale’ without preconceptions or bias.
Which particular set of fairy tales are we talking about?
You don’t necessarily have to believe in it. You can believe you will be eaten by worms, and still light a candle and say a prayer. It might even do you some good
Not really. It will bring me no comfort praying to something or someone that I don’t believe is there unfortunately.
You know the old saying; there are no atheists in foxholes.
I know some.
My grandfather was lucky to survive the war having been pinned down on a few occasions (and shot during a couple of them), and he thought religion was a load of bullocks. If I had bullets whizzing over my head, the fables in the bible would be a long way from my mind I imagine
A small point, but Chesterton didn’t actually say that. It was originally in an essay about him, by his Belgian translator.
“Émile Cammaerts – Wikipedia” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Cammaerts
Thankyou. I didn’t know that.
I have little against God or faith, I take issue with organised religion. Since Covid, I have begun to see science as another form of organised religion. Especially when the government and Sage would say “follow the science… but not that science… follow our science” and people followed without question because to question science was foolish. Ironic as good science was always about questioning, in my view.
The Crusades were completely typical of the theology of a militant Catholic church at the time. To be fair, the Roman church was also responding to attacks by Muslims in the Holy Land.
Jihadist attacks are entirely consistent with major fundamentalist interpretations of Islam.
Stalin is a logical outcome of abandoning innate human dignity and treating human beings as eggs (as in Lenin’s comment that “you have to break some to make an omelet”.)
None of these are the result of lunatics. They follow completely rationally from their proponents underlying assumptions. Depraved? Yes. Deranged? No.
“Also responding”? Come on, “attacks by Muslims in the Holy Land” was both a necessary and sufficient cause and exhausts the religious element. The rest was the all of human follies of seeking adventure and status.
If you believe in innate human dignity, you haven’t read the essay properly.
I didn’t say anything about the original article. The commenter said Stalin was just crazy and cited the other 2 as examples of historical lunacy. My point is that he’s wrong on all 3 counts.
Believing that major historical events are mostly caused by lunatics (instead of ideas and events) makes it too easy to ignore the lessons of history, which is exactly what Billy wants to do in this case.
The crusades were a response to an appeal from the Emperor in Constantinople for help, as he was losing ground against the muslims. If Constantinople fell, the muslims would be into Europe. Europe responded with force; an sample of self-interest?
If the Crusades didn’t take place, all of Europe, and the world, would be part of a Caliphate today. Indeed, the fight is not over.
Definitely agreed about the First Crusade. The Fourth is not so clear. Perhaps less of the world would have been Islamized without the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople weakening the Empire, or perhaps the lack of Greek scholars fleeing the collapse a quarter millennium later would have meant no Renaissance, no rise of science in the West, and a more equal struggle between Christendom and the Islamic Ummah closer to the present time. Historical what-ifs are always tricky to work out if it can be done at all.
Stalin started out studying to be a priest in a seminary.
Thanks for mentioning the little known truth about Christians seeking to fight back the fast encroaching peoples from the East, who were hell bent on exterminating them. The historic myth of the Crusades being nothing more than blood thirsty ventures of conquest needs to perish.
The toxic combination is when atheism is linked to a utopian totalitarian ideology. Then there is no higher power to whom we must give account, to be judged on the scales of good and evil. And the totalitarian ideal we are striving towards justifies any act no matter how heinous. The number of people killed in the 20th century by those in service of atheistic creeds is somewhere between 100 and 200 million. They didn’t kill people because of their atheism, but their atheism allowed the likes of Hitler and Stalin to believe they would never be called to account .
That doesn’t make sense. Stalinism was a deliberate repudiation of Christianity in pursuit of an atheistic ideology. The Crusades were a few years earlier and show Christianity failing to live its own standards. That doesn’t invalidate the standards.
The millions murdered by “atheists” in Soviet Union and Communist China, were not killed because of atheism, but because their murderers believes in Communism.
Which itself is a religion. You don’t need Gods and idols to be a blind, superstitious, murderous mob.
There was very little difference in mindset between the Christians in the German concentration camps or Mexico, the Islamics wherever they invaded or communism.
All communists are atheists.
Not all atheists are communists.
Not all communists are murderers.
Are all communist murderers also atheists?
Where’s a Veen diagram when you need one? (And the answer is, yes, they are.)
More to the point of this article though, communism was justified by utilitarian humanism: “surrender all your rights as human beings and we will create a world of such plenty it will be Heaven on Earth.” Apparently Lenin was absent the week they studies Thomas More in college.
Your last paragraph describes perfectly the new world order as proposed by the World Economic Forum led by the unelected Klaus Schwab. Their philosophy, shared, it has to be said, by King Charles who admires Schwab and his pro-communist China friends greatly is ‘You will own nothing. You Will be happy’. They haven’t yet got around to adding ‘Or else!’ but its threat is there nonetheless. Of course, none of this will apply to the super wealthy who will be allowed to retain all that they own.
“I haven’t found an Atheist yet who..”. This says much about you and nothimg about ‘atheists ‘.
It’s a constant source of fascination for me that the religious cannot imagine a source of morality existing outside belief in God. I’m not offended, though; it says more about them than it does about us. Implicity what they are saying is, “The ONLY reason I hold my ethical beliefs is because of religion. If *I* didn’t think God existed, I can’t imagine any reason not to go on a homicidal bender.”
As a religious person I’d say that you can certainly have a source of morality without believing in God. Buddhists do, just for starters. The point is that sources of morality cannot be rational, let alone scientific. Science is about what is, and you cannot go from ‘is’; to ‘ought’. So by all means stick to your atheist morality. Just do not pretend that it is any more rational or any less arbitrary than ours.
Personally I find that the idea of right and wrong makes no sense to me unless there is a way of finding out what it is. And believeing in God at least means that *someone* knows what is right, even if we cannot figure it out. But that is just me, I do not claim it is an argument.
Can you derive moraility from the scientific observation of the physical world? Sam Harris thinks you can, but most scientists and philosphers think you can’t – “There is no is that makes an ought”.
I’m a non-homicidal atheist. But I’ve spent enough time on introspection to realize that the only reason I would not easily kill another is because I’ve been programmed to be averse to killing, not because of some non discoverable absolute truth. My genetics is the firmware and being raised in the Western tradition is the software. But it could be otherwise – see Rwanda
“I’ve been programmed to be averse to killing, “
How and by who or what?
There have been lots of experiments on baby social behavior – some human social tendencies have a genetic component. This whole article spent a lot of time discussing the positive social benefit of Christianity. Didn’t your parents teach you its wrong to kill? That is (beneficial) programming.
Did your parents teach you it’s wrong to rape?
Are you a bot?
Let me put it another way. Is it only the law that stops you raping?
You fail the Turing test
I think God created humans with a capacity to be moral, but that this capacity requires first the loving bond between mother and infant to activate it. If that is later joined by the firm input of a loving father then the child is on it’s way morally.
In other words it is love that is the key to morality and God is Love.
I find no reason to disagree with that.
I think you’ve got it the wrong way round. They believe there is a source of objective, unchanging morality, of treality, really, that makes for a stable universe with the possibility of knowledge. That unchangimng reality that underpins it all is called God, though it can also be called other things.
If you just don’t believe in a source of morality, then you don’t believe in a morality with any particular force or reality.
Your first paragraph sounds like Epicurus
Your second is non sequitur .
A constant source of fascination indeed. As is the sidestepping of the ‘possibility’ that whilst believers claim they are following God, they are actually following tenets thought up, written down, and promulgated by….man. The God claim allows them to assume surety, simplicity and superiority.
Religions all play on people’s desires and fears, on their caring. The caring comes first, the religion uses it to twist someone into a monster or into a weirdly self sacrificing or other type.
People simply care, about themselves and others, caring less about members of more distant ingroups. The differential caring can lead to conflict.
They care about having a good life before death and after it. Atheists mostly don’t believe in life after death, so they are not coerced, not by that belief at least, to kill someone for an insult or to be abnormally nice.
Different sects teach different ways to improve life now or after death. Monotheist Jesus taught mainly opposite morality to Islam and Judaism,. Atheist liberal humanism, with support for freedom of thought and expression, is nothing like the atheist sects you referred to. Jainism is far from the Viking or Aztec polytheist human sacrifice beliefs.
I never thought humanism meant the worship of humans, I thought it meant just the love of the broad ingroup. Worship is sort of craven, trading your sincerity for some reward. With love, you can admit that your loved ones have social imperfections. With worship, of God or Stalin or your Mum, you choose not to admit it.
Loving is why atheists and most other people are humanist. I don’t think any religion has improved things, except by countering a worse religion. Human contact and familiarisation (family-ising), has done us better than any ideology.
I don’t remember Darwin demonstrating that the strong “had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.” Darwin’s work is descriptive, rather than prescriptive.
I think he was meaning that it was a Nazi interpretation of Darwin.
I don’t think Mr Holland said that he did.
“The strong – as Darwin had conclusively demonstrated – had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.”
He clearly did say it.
I enjoyed this essay very much but I was not aware that Darwin had conclusively demonstrated the above. He was a scientist not a moralist. From what I have read he was distressed at how his theories were viewed and the effect they had on people’s Christian faith.
Surely the truth is, the idea that “the strong . . . have both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak” is one self serving interpretation of Darwin’s theory. I don’t know enough to judge whether it is reasonable or not, but I doubt it. **
** Late add on,
I do realise now this analysis is flawed, I made a mistake. No need to correct me yet again. Thank you.**
No, he said that the nazis believed that. He is a historian, and they often gives word to the people they describe.
That is what I have just said – “one self serving (ie nazi) interpretation. . .”
Not exactly, Claire. Holland said that this is a conclusion the Nazis drew from Darwin.
I know, my mistake.
Not exactly from Darwin, but from his half-cousin Francis Galton, who founded the science of eugenics based on Darwin’s ideas. There is a direct line from eugenics to the Holocaust, as explained by Adam Rutherford in his book “Control” https://www.waterstones.com/book/control/adam-rutherford/9781474622387
This is really poor analysis Claire, here is the quote in context:
This, in the opinion of devout Nazis, was a conviction bred not of fantasy or faith, but of the proper understanding of science. The strong — as Darwin had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.
I know, I homed in on the sentence in question and launched recklessly into my comment, sigh.
“The churches had had their day. This, in the opinion of devout Nazis, was a conviction bred not of fantasy or faith, but of the proper understanding of science. The strong — as Darwin had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.”
To whom or what is this ‘duty’ owed?
Please see my replies to Phil Mitchell and tom j above.
Indeed! Like all science. But he’s ventriloquising the mid-century Germans here, as an example of how easy it is to bodge a moral claim onto an empirical one.
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Yes. I suppose it’s the combination of sex and violence that makes Darwin’s theories particularly susceptable to this sort of misconception.
Of course, the science around Darwin’s theories has not been fixed in place. There are various speculations based on “female choice”; including the idea that women prefer less violent men, which has led to a less violent species. (Look around, instead of reading the news, and you’ll see what I mean.) Also, the “grandmother theory” which posits family success, as opposed to individual success, as a very efficient way of passing genes on to future generations.
There’s more, too. It’s a fascinating field of study, hidden from view by silly politics; all we ever hear about is Creationism.
I read Tom’s words as descibing the conclusions that the Nazi’s had reached about the ‘true’ meaning of Darwin’s work.
Marx said that violence is the mid-wife of history. Engles said that Marx’s most charming and enduring feature was his closeness to Darwin.
I can’t seem to locate the new comment space, so replying to you. Enjoyed this beautifully framed and deeply considered thesis. Curious as to the place of Darwin’s book, of which I found a squirrel-damaged 1st edition in the attic of my historic Mainline mansion in Villanova, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal, here. It was a strange prosaic catalogue of facts devoid of any self-evident purpose.
Squirrel-damaged? Yes Sir, it’s true – a Squirrel ate my homework.
And more’s the pity. It was a rubbish book but would have been worth a small fortune, but for the squirrels.
Holland’s argument is descriptive, too, though that seems to be lost on many of his “readers”!
Two phenomena are striking. The first is that just about all human progress came out of the Judeo-Christian West. The second is that as the West has abandoned its Christian heritage (whether you subscribe to the faith or not) it has become more and more dysfunctional and its institution’s increasingly incoherent, while bizarre ideas flourish. Much of the world thinks we are losing our minds. We have to return to the five core Judeo-Christian world view principles: All are made in the likeness of God (unique individuals who should have the opportunities to achieve their God-given potential), free will, individual responsibility (these two should operate as a reinforcing loop), love your neighbour and to love God is to obey his commands (natural justice). Shame the Church has re-crossed the Jordan and trekked off into a wilderness of its own making.
Well said.
I sort of agree with what you’ve said but not the implied conclusion – which is that a return to the Church would be a good thing.
Progress in the past has come from a few ‘intellectuals’ – meaning a very small minority of people who could read and write. They have followed a bible and preached to simpler people that they will be punished by God if they break the rules. So, a minority of churchmen have preached the gospels and caused the simpler people to fear divine retribution.
Things have changed today. People don’t trust their ‘superiors’ in the pulpits, or the governments or the teachers in the schools. Science has taken away the magic from life. So the simpler people will not cower in their houses and fear God if they get ill. They will instead go to the NHS. (On second thoughts, maybe God would solve the problem quicker.)
Faith is very convenient. It takes away a lot of worry and responsibility because there is always someone else to blame.
“I sort of agree with what you’ve said but not the implied conclusion – which is that a return to the Church would be a good thing.”
I don’t think that he is really saying that. I think that, like me, he notes what we have become ( I apologise to him for putting words in his mouth): Whether we like it or not, everything we are is the consequence of 2000 years of christian theology. We cannot throw out the bathwater without also throwing out the baby. I am an atheist, I have no faith, but I cannot help but acknowledge what we have irretrievably lost. I probably come from the last generation of English people raised on The Gospels and The Book of Common Prayer. I am not trying to insult you when I suggest that you don’t even know what they are.
“Faith is very convenient. It takes away a lot of worry and responsibility because there is always someone else to blame”
Faith places duties upon you, it doesn’t give you someone else to blame.
Anyway, let’s end on a light-hearted note. in 2000 I went to church for the last time (I was genuinely curious). The sermon consisted of “Jesus wants you for a sunbeam” accompanied by a Cliff Richard soundtrack.
Depends on the faith and depends on the interpretation of that faith.
I am reminded of an old edition of BBC’s Top Gear, which was filmed in India. The presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, was being driven to work and the driving was ectremely erratic. When they got to their destination the driver admitted that the car had no brakes.
JC was annoyed, “We could have been killed.”
The driver smiled and said that if God wanted them to die on that day, then brakes wouldn’t have helped.
“Depends on the faith and depends on the interpretation of that faith.”
I suggest that you have no knowledge of your own culture and historic faith, or anyone elses.
Total deracination.
The conclusion was explicit: that the Church should return to its former self. The implication was that, if it were to do so, it would act as a conduit for people to bring out the best in themselves, and for that best to improve society.
Well, there is some truth in that, but the same could be said of other faiths and other institutions.Sad to say, it’s also likely that it would provide the vehicle for those who enjoy power to claim moral superiority and exert a malevolent influence.
A the centre of Christian faith – of all faiths – is the realisation that the individual stands alone in time and space in terms of morals, and may make bad choices from the best of motivation, or happen upon the most beneficial course from the basest of motives. Christianity posits that there IS a day of reckoning, but that ‘we have an advocate with the Father’, one who has gone before and knows all our weaknesses but remained perfect until death. Judaism allows for no such advocacy, while other faiths have other ‘solutions’ for the ‘problem’ of human limitations. agnosticism reserves its own judgement, but that perfect knowledge and understanding is possible, even if not yet achieved by humanity.
The outlier is atheism as envisaged by Nietzsche:it allows for no objective observer, whether deity or future-perfect human.
Hmmm. Perhaps, after spending a day working on an algorithm to calculate some algebra, and then maybe imbibing some alcohol whilst looking up at Algol or Aldebaran, it would be worth musing on this Al chap and how he seemed to have done quite a lot for science, particularly in the bit between the fall of Rome and the start of the Renaissance.
Algebra that of course relied on the positional (hundreds, ten, units) numbering system that was invented in India. And which spawned the idea of the number zero, also developed in India. Which was merged with the principles developed by the ancient Greeks about geometry. But yes, Judeo-Christian west, as you were saying…
Yes, great building blocks and many more, but, where are India, Greece and the rest today? It was the ‘West’ who assembled them.
Your examples only serve to illustrate the Michael’s point though. You call them out precisely because they’re unique, some of only a few cases of significant progress from a non-Western source. We adopted algebra. But we birthed calculus, trig, geometry, number theory, cryptography, etc…
Western inventions, ideas, and culture have permeated the rest of the world (instead of the other way) for a reason, because they work. And sometimes because we’re arrogant, colonialist twits, but not mostly. Do you like not living in a mud hut and burning dung? Do you like canned food? Do you like fertilizer so you don’t starve? Do you like dental novicane? Do you like having rights as an individual? Western, white men created most of that. You’re welcome
Trigonometry and Geometry? Like Pythagoras’ theorem and Euclidean space?
I in no way question the contribution the West has made to science since the Renaissance. All I question is the arrogance of “nothing of any value was invented anywhere else”. The West has been leading in science for the last 500 years, but I call into question the exceptionalism that anything before that has no value. It is short-sighted and arrogant. Besides we can turn this around – do you like agriculture? (Oldest example: Syria 9000 bc) Monetary system? (oldest example: 5000 bc, Turkey) Written language? (Uruk, Mesopotamia, 4000 bc). Middle Eastern men created most of that, whilst Europeans were sitting in mud hits and burning dung. You’re welcome.
Newton admitted (albeit grudgingly) that if he had seen so far it was by standing on the shoulders of giants. The world has seen several periods where one empire or another has dominated scientific work, and we are in the one where that has been focussed on the West. But it wasn’t 700 years ago, and there is no guarantee where it will be 700 years from now.
I’m not entirely sure who you are responding to: I don’t see any posts up thread which assert “nothing of any value was invented anywhere else” on behalf of Western civilization. A point that should be made in that regard, is that one of the reasons the West advanced so fast once we abandoned Aristotle’s misbegotten physics, is, mostly because of Christian universalism (there are pre-Christian precedents in the West like Tacitus romanticizing the Germanic barbarians),we did not regard ideas, practices, and technology from other cultures as beneath notice, the way, for instance the Chinese and Japanese did until the mid-19th century, or the way Muslims did after they killed their own scientific flourishing by adopting the occasionalism of al Ghazali and deciding that the time of itjihad was ended so that their understanding of sharia had been perfected. If something from someone else’s culture worked better than what we had, we adopted it quickly.
(As an aside about Aristotle’s physics: how did he get that so wrong? He was Alexander the Great’s tutor, surely he saw arrows and sling-stones in flight — a nice parabola, a conic section known to the ancient Greeks, not the straight line followed by a straight downward fall as his theory of “impetus” would have predicted. He seems to have never actually worked out what his physics predicted.)
Your history of mathematics is a bit off. Using “we” to mean only Christendom and its secular successor culture, our pagan forebearers started number theory and what became algebra in the work of Diophantus, and geometry with Euclid and Archimedes. The Muslim Arabs and Persians developed algebra, basically because the notion of zero they learned from the Hindus was the key to what Diophantus got stuck on, and trigonometry. Calculus, non-Euclidean geometry (necessary to describe general relativity), number-theoretic public-key cryptography*, Fourier analysis, probability theory, statistics, homological algebra, category theory,… are all “our” inventions, along with most of their applications to physics and now computing.
*Cryptography of the private-key sort is of great antiquity and developed independently in many placed.
as the West has abandoned its Christian heritage (whether you subscribe to the faith or not) it has become more and more dysfunctional and its institution’s increasingly incoherent
Christianity was the primary organizing principle of the West for 2000 years; it gave society cohesion, a shared vision. As Christianity is abandoned the shared values are questioned or lost. Without shared values society becomes dysfunctional, with tribe against tribe. We need a replacement vision.
In the US, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution provide that vision, although their constraints on government are continually tested and stretched by those who do not really support their underlying philosophy of government. Once lost it will be hard to re-establish a shared vision.
The Declaration begins with “all men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights”. Saying it’s “being stretched by those who don’t support its underlying philosophy” is accurate, but the reason they don’t support it is that they’ve left the Judeo-Christian heritage that birthed that philosophy.
It’s kind of a moot point though. We’re not going to return to Medieval Christendom, regardless of what Sohab Amari and his dozen integralists might fantasize about.
It’s the philosophy of liberty, not Christianity, that is being stretched, even trampled. Christianity has little to say about liberty.
“Much of the world thinks we are losing our minds.”
I’m guessing you mean non Judeo-Christian societies think we’re losing our minds. But they thought we were wrong anyway because of those Judeo-Christian beliefs we held.
In many ways this article supports the post modern, critical theory, assumptions that “it’s all about the language.” It is making the case that Christian assumptions are so embedded that anti Christians can only use Christianity’s founding precepts.
China has a huge population and a culture, which predates the west, in which Christianity has not been embedded for 2,000 years. The political system is different but is the fundamental morality of its individuals profoundly different? Are there not some universal standards which conform (very broadly) to something like the 10 commandments?
I’m firmly of the view that we are apes in suits, certainly nothing divine, but like every other tribal species, or pack animal, we’ve developed structures and norms that work for us. The foundations of those norms are similar across a huge range of societal structures even when what is built on them looks very different.
I really enjoyed the essay and subsequent discussion.
There may have long been structures and norms that work for “us”, with us being within any given society, i.e. the “in crowd” as opposed to outsiders. But that is not the same as norms acknowledged to apply to humans generally.
For example, within Mongol society doubtless murder by and of Mongols was frowned on. But that did not preclude one of their moral precepts that any man worthy of his salt should kill at least one non-Mongol during his lifetime, in order to justify occupying his room on Earth!
I am an ape in jeans. I can write quite well and read complicated books about politics and economics. I am a scientist by training. I like to think that ‘societal values’ will allow me to carry on reading about the philosophy of our culture and its success in the past. At the moment I’m thinking about lunch.
But I wouldn’t go to the city centre at night. And that exposes the fallacy of Humanism (and religion).
But I wouldn’t go to the city centre at night. And that exposes the fallacy of Humanism (and religion).
Are you saying that because some people do not follow the widely accepted standards of behavior there are not principles underlying human behavior? Explain.
I am saying that religion is designed to protect the educated, under-muscled, few from the great number of well-muscled, uneducated, many.
It’s the Rule of Law backed up with a competent police force that does that.
I’m not sure why this has got downvoted. It is fairly obvious that morality, whether religious or otherwise, has shown a “progressive” trend throughout history to rein in physical violence to the benefit of those capable of exercising intellectual violence.
Chris, if you are just an ape in jeans, what are your rights as a human being grounded in? Locke simply asserts those rights and Jefferson grants them via a creator. How would you defend your right of free speech for example, against someone who wanted to censor you? If you are just an “ape in jeans”, why shouldn’t you be governed by the law of the jungle: might makes right?
I teach civics and one of the things I drive home is the connection between Judeo-Christianity and Enlightenment rights. Specifically, absent a creator, the latter aren’t self-evident at all. In class, I use the line “smart apes don’t have rights” frequently, so you identifying that way piques my interest.
I won’t argue with you, I promise. But knowing how someone who is reasonably well educated and read and describes himself as a smart-ape responds to that would really help me in class. Thanks.
I question whether I really have rights as a human being. I certainly don’t have the right to free speech but Unherd holds this illusory right as a cornerstone of its raison-d’etre.
When we discuss here we are in a semi-protected zone. Many people use pseudonyms because they fear persecution from their neighbours. I can’t think of anywhere I have visited which has freedom of speech (or action). I use the correct definition here – that you don’t cause problems with your listeners.
A while back I worked for a company in Kentucky. I was telling my colleagues about my vacations in Cuba and they got very angry about my visits. It was un-American and therefore bad. As a Brit, I had forgotten about the Cuba issue.
But there were little problems with every discussion we had during my visit. I didn’t want steak but everybody else did. The restaurant did other meals but you had to sit downstairs – only the wimps/wusses sat downstairs. I got annoyed when every discussion started with, “I’m proud to be American”. I kept pointing out that all the American flags in the building had ‘Made in China’ printed on them. So, we didn’t aim to be unfriendly to each other but I couldn’t wait to leave and I believe they wanted me to go.
I have a similar problem with the plethora of flags where I live now; I find them insuting and not conducive to free speech or free anything. So where is freedom. I can’t find it.
Read Mathew Stewart’s “Nature’s God”. America’s founders were mostly deists, as was Locke when he was being honest.
I was an ape in a suit, became an ape in jeans and now, some days, am an ape in pyjamas.
The Descent of Man
“The political system is different but is the fundamental morality of its individuals profoundly different?”
I think the Chinese Uyghurs would say there is.
“Are there not some universal standards which conform to something like the 10 commandments?”
C.S. Lewis uses the exactly the same example to illustrate what God’s law being “written on man’s heart” actually means.
I tried to answer this earlier but I got taken out for some reason. Religion is difficult because there is not just one standard religion but many in different parts of the world. Each would claim his religion to be the one, true thing and that can’t be so.
Then for each religion comes the issue of personal interpretation. I am in the middle of an excellent book called, ‘A Village In The Third Re*ch’. This traces the story of a devoutly Catholic village in South Germany starting around 1920. Mostly people are farmers or metal smiths or manual workers. Everyone is a devout Catholic. Then one person comes into the village, an early fan of National So*iali*m. One by one, the community is infected with the new religion until all have forgotten their Christian upbringing. The story is scary because it starts so innocently and takes place gradually over many years. It shows how devout Americans can get to think very bad things about China. And the reverse of course.
I’m really talking about Joe Soap, the man in the street. The Chinese version has no more say over what happens to the Uyghurs than I do over what happens to asylum seekers.
In his day to day life, is he likely to be that much different to me in terms of his attitude to stealing, murder, adultery etc. I don’t know.
I will look up the CS Lewis quote, thanks.
Mr Holland’s argument that pivots on ethics is just as much off centre when considering the purpose of the Christian faith as is the humanists’ claim to own morality apart from that religion. As if Christianity had the objective of making human beings moral to please God.
A concern for our own righteousness can be just as much a self-concern as anything else, only just as cleverly disguised as the Gnostics’ obsession with sating their bodily appetites was by their claim that their spiritual self was already in heaven.
The Apostle Paul wanted his converts to present their bodies to God in such a condition as to make them a temple of the Holy Spirit. Such was the value and the purpose of each person.
In C S Lewis’s Narnia stories, the Green Witch wants the children to believe that hers is the only world. The Witch, inviting the children to grow up (that is, abandon their belief in Aslan/Christ): “Are you not ashamed of such toys…put away such childish tricks.” Susan eventually does this. Susan, mocking her siblings: “Fancy your still thinking of all those funny games we used to play when we were children.”
Susan grows up as the Green Witch wants Jill and Eustace to do. That is, to believe that the world that Susan lives in and aligns her own behaviour and ambition to is the only world. There is no divine authority that each human life is made to magnify in substance and quality – the purpose Paul refers to – and to which each life is accountable for the success or failure to do so, such as Aslan.
The belief that Susan was banished from Narnia by C S Lewis has been repeated so often that we’ve all stopped thinking. Narnia misunderstood is Christianity misunderstood. The same repetition is apparent in the concentration on ethics by both Mr Holland and the humanists.
Sating our craving to be moral, our spiritual appetite, working tirelessly for equality and human dignity, while highly commendable, would not equate to a faith in Christ. It might even be a snare of mankind’s spiritual enemy, an exquisitely worked masterpiece of far greater subtlety and allure than the one that snared the Gnostics with their own craving to sate their bodily appetites. After all, when Jesus met the Sidonian woman who petitioned Him about her sick daughter, He used an example that, while it justified helping her, did not establish her equality or her human dignity. It is her trust in Him that is effectual.
At one point in Lewis’s Narnia stories, Aslan says to Lucy, “Now you are a lioness.” This is not a metaphor. She has become in substance and quality the same as him. That she is female to his male emphasises this in the way that a Christian is said to relate to Christ. It’s for that reason that there is no religion in the kingdom of Narnia. Religion exists in the Calormen empire which, being in the south, not the east, is Lewis’s way of saying that religion satisfies the lower, bodily, needs.
Though Lewis’s Narnia stories are children’s stories, Lewis has something else in mind as well, especially regarding the grown-up Susan. Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3). Susan’s status of once-a-queen in Narnia, always-a-queen is never revoked by Aslan, the only character with the authority to do so. Susan is still a queen – in Narnia. But will she enter it? Would we?
My stubborn tendency is to find fault even when I come to praise but in this instance I’d rather just applaud. Incisive yet subtle, great post.
I’ve read this a couple of times and am not sure I’ve grasped it. Not having read the Narnia books doesn’t help but I have read Surprised by Joy and The Screwtape Letters.
My sense is that Lewis believed in metaphysical powers of good and evil as quite literal manifestations, beyond human conception. He views total sublimation to the divine good as a higher order experience perhaps comparable to the Buddhist enlightenment. Human concerns and morality are entirely secondary to this fusion, which is the essence of Christianity and a prerequisite for entry into the Kingdom of God.
Is that what you are saying?
If so, I cannot agree but am willing to accept that my understanding of the world is now framed entirely by scientific rationalism, which is the linguistic air we’ve all breathed since the Enlightenment.
Just a suggestion as to a possible answer Nicholas may have given to your question, “Is that what you are saying?”: this fusion is not the essence of Christianity, rather it is the actual relationship between a human being and Jesus Christ, who is both a living human being and the living God. Susan and the other children in the world of Narnia had direct encounters with Aslan (a living being, and then a resurrected living being), and came to follow him, typifying the encounters of folks in our world with Jesus—folks who recognize him and choose to follow him. I highly doubt Lewis would describe (or distill down) these encounters as “sublimation to the divine good.” While certainly one could suggest a “higher order experience” is at play in these encounters, owing to the fact that there exists no rational way to argue their reality (metaphysical?), the encounter and the response are the heart of Christianity.
“Christianity” is such a loaded term, but it’s what most people use, so I suspect Nicholas used it merely by way of making that distinction, that the relationship (not “Christianity” as generally used) has nothing to do with “the objective of making human beings moral to please God.”
“There is one mediator between God and man, the man, Jesus Christ.” (1 Timothy 2:5)
Exactly.
But the Christian account of a divine source of morality is not dependent upon people learning that morality from Christians or Jews or their writings. St. Paul write of those without the Law keeping its precepts, and being a law unto themselves. The point of the Christian account is that in creation “oughts” are built into the system, consonant with the “ares”, not derivable from them, but no less real. I commend to all readers of this thread, C.S. Lewis’s prophetic little book The Abolition of Man, which deliberately uses the non-Western word “Tao”, rather than “Natural Law”. I call it prophetic because like the prophets of the Old Testament, he both correctly foretells the future and issues a call to repentance.
Thanks I’ve downloaded it.
Thanks, I’ve ordered it from the library.
The question I wrestle with is how/why is homo sapien the only species that supposedly evolved from another species? If we are merely “apes in suits”, why aren’t there examples of giraffes, cockroaches, salmon or even chimpanzees in suits also?
Is it just a matter of timing? Evolution takes place over 100’s of thousands of years.
Todays chimpanzees use tools and have quite complex social structures. How much further advanced are they from whatever is a few millennium back in their line, and where might they be in 100,000 years?
Our technology is highly advanced but it seems we operate hierarchical social structures and exhibit a range of other behaviours that aren’t so different to many herd and pack animals.
I think you omitted some modifier between “only” and “species”, like “sentient” or “conscious” or “technological” or “clothes-wearing” or “theorizing” or I’m not sure what. According to the neo-Darwinian account, all species we observe today evolved from precursor species, not just us.
I don’t believe in Gods or an afterlife or any of these trappings of religions. However I see that religions exist and thus, according to my beliefs, these have to be creations of humans.
I see that many have persisted for substantial periods of time and so must have societal value. The ethics expressed in these religions have proved useful and relevant. The reasons to continue to support these values may have changed from an expectation that one is going to be rewarded or punished at the end of life into something more along the lines of creating the sort of society that one wants to live in. It also means that we should take a bit more personal responsibility.
We can actually see this in operation with many of the traditional strictures being quietly abandoned and this approach gives us the freedom to reject religious behaviour that does not contribute to better lives for all of us.
Exactly. “They are of societal value.” They try to stop the clever people who write well from being beaten up by ordinary people, who don’t like the clever people.
I wonder about belief and un-belief. I exist in a state of doubt.
See: https://ayenaw.com/2021/10/21/760/
Which is why Socrates apparently said “I know nothing”.
I don’t doubt Holland’s main thesis, that humanism draws on Christianity, but there is something of the Puritan character in the way he presents it, seen in what he chooses to miss out.
For example, Nietzsche loathed Socrates as much as Jesus for undoing what he valued in the ancient world, which is to say it wasn’t Christianity alone that changed everything.
Alternatively, the Biblical phrase affirming human dignity because made in the “image of God” occurs three times in only one place in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 1-11). Which perhaps explains why inalienable equality was not self-evident to most Christians for much of Christian history.
Genesis is also a relatively young book in the Bible, for all that it is placed at the start, suggesting that the notion of dignity itself has a history, which of course has continued to develop in the modern period as much as any other.
Young book comparing to what? It is certainly older than the New Testament. It may be newer than the oldest strata of the Old Testament, but I don’t know by how much.
John Barton says it’s much debated, of course, but the Old Testament was written across most of the 1st millennium BCE, up to about the second century before Christ, and no doubt contains some older folk memories too, particularly in the Prophets. Genesis is most likely post-exilic, so after 537 BCE into the 400s BCE.
So Genesis is roughly contemporary with Pythagoras of Samos,(570-495 BC) somebody who believed in logos/reason and did some real/proper thinking.
Yes. Prophet of number mysticism, visitor to Hades and possessor of a golden thigh too.
Nietzsche was a lunatic.
“suggesting that the notion of dignity itself has a history, “
Thats a very interesting point re. Genesis. Can you elaborate a bit more on the word “dignity” in relation to Genesis,
Just picking up on Holland’s use…
Great essay. I was going to nitpick about the pterodactyls and bats analogy. Convergent evolution was exactly the humanists’ point. Different people in different cultures have concluded similar things because these are either true or work. (They developed wings to fly, not merely vans to beat the air, so to speak. Though I’ve just realised that the Eliot analogy doesn’t work as an evolutionary parallel.)
But I’m glad I read on, because that would have been to miss the point: the humanism Tom Holland is critiquing is the specifically moral one which is obviously derived from Christianity. And he did a great job of explaining why self declared humanists are so insufferable.
Holland views the world through Christian lenses and shoehorns Christianity into everything, even where it is not needed. Some of his insights are brilliant, but many are simply naive.
Altruism, which he ascribes to Christianity, predates Christ, even predates humans. Christianity is a particularly effective meme to provide people with the meaning that they crave and organize society for the benefit of most. When the divinity of Jesus is abandoned people look elsewhere and will find something – anything – to structure their thinking, their lives.
And yet… for the sake of a good argument Tom Holland (like many others) needs to assume that human behaviour follows (if imperfectly) religious belief. But humans have behaved in particular ways towards each other long before religion. Human behaviours may have been influenced by common social religious beliefs but religions come and go, and even long established religions schism and change over time following (not leading) social change.
Epicurus said he believed in gods (it may have been politic to do so) but he argued that gods were made of ‘atoms’ too and were therefore natural. He also argued that as perfect beings they were undisturbable and so took no interest in the activities of ordinary humans. Again not a good example to include in an argument about the primacy of religious thought.
Glad you pointed that out. It’s the same kind of deist “creater” who endowed us with unalienable “rights”. Properties would have been injudicious at the time, but a better word.
A wonderful and important article.
“The well-spring of humanist values lie not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history: the history of Christianity.”
There is a succession of events in this idea that is this: if there is a God then our ethics and values are his. If you believe this then there is no reason to question the well-spring of our values, but to simply live it. But there is still this, that our values are inherently human, which is why we were so successful in terms of evolution. We formed caring communities, not because it served us to live like that, the selfish gene, not that it was a construct for survival, but because we were naturally caring, that the communities and values were an extension of who we were. And it worked. You must already perceive what is good to recognise it. You don’t need God to do that. The line of succession I referred to was that it was these inherent values that were the basis of Christianity, not the other way around. The well-spring of humanism lies in Christianity only because that is the form our values have come down to us over time.
Indeed! Our human imagination created the gods and the systems of belief they were intended to endorse.
If we are naturally caring, how do you explain slavery (widespread everywhere throughout history), or Jimmy Savile?
Consider if we were naturally uncaring. Would we be here today if we were that way thousands of years ago? How would families flourish? How would supportive relationships develop? How would the progressively better state of living occur?
Precisely, but i’d once again reference the self-interest argument. It’s in our self-interest to be caring, and mutually supportive… most of the time!
We are naturally caring in the sense that we have that capacity – but we generally exercise it only towards our own group, close friends and relations, and only up to a point. As for self-interest, that only goes as far as we expect (or fear) something back from the people we are uncaring about. ‘What goes around, comes around’ is a good argument – but it fails when we can be fairly sure that the other people will never be in a position to harm us.
Consider white US southerners in the plantation era. Natural caring was limited to your own group and race, and not extended to ‘inferior’ races. And self-interest was overwhelmingly towards keeping the blacks down and the whites (your group) on top, given that you could be reasonably sure to avoid rebellions. As one white southern politician said after the civil war (quoting General Sheridan’s memoirs, from memory): “Of course we are suppressing the black vote; if we did not, no white man would ever be elected in this state again“.
If you want a morality that makes people supportive to all humans, and not just to your own family and in-group, I really cannot see how it could be rooted in either human nature or self-interest. And I doubt that the equality of all humans is a notable feature of most non-Christian belief systems.
Your last sentence is most meaningful when you consider this: the conscience of the white Southern senator as compared to the African warlord selling his own people to Arab slavers who in turn sold them to the Portuguese for further distribution and profit. The senator knew the institution was a grotesque sin with impending if not immediate consequences. The warlords and slavers and merchants didn’t bother themselves about it. And what of the millions enslaved now, in the enlightened 21st Century? How do we go about our daily social media and Netflix-obsessed lives knowing they exist in the millions? I’m only one tiny person, but my prayers, when joined by others, have great power (I pray!).
I presume the Jews ‘prayed’ big time in Auschwitz, Treblinca etc. But did their God of Exodus etc pitch up and help them ?………Decidedly no!
So, the All Souls question: Why not?
Answer: Because he doesn’t exist, never has nor ever will.
Tough but true.
Maybe it was Primo Levi (not sure) who said if we stopped believing in God, if we believed he abandoned us, then the Nazis have defeated us.
Well, we’ll all find out eventually.
As the renowned neuropsychologist, Peter Fenwick puts it:
“Be curious “.
Most systems are probably not equal. But neither was Christianity until recently. Look at recent problems in Ireland, for example.
Why is equality automatically important?
It is the difference between rights – the idea that all people have some dignity, worth, claim on good treatment, and mere mutual assistance groups. If some action is inherently good or right, that must apply no matter who is on the other side. If it is just a matter of ‘it is unwise to cause trouble among your friends’, we are not talking about ethics, but expediency.
“As for self-interest, that only goes as far as we expect (or fear) something back from the people we are uncaring about. “
Yes, that’s often the argument for altruism, that it’s a tool for survival. But if you think it’s in your interests to be caring towards others then you already understand the idea of caring; it existed before you put it into action. So where did it spring from? Even if you use the idea of care to benefit yourself you’ve used something that existed originally in its pure form within you.
The obvious proposal would be that caring is part of us as something that you naturally do for/to your children, parents, lovers, family, anyway people close to you. It is when you want to extend an obligation of caring beyond this immesidate circle that you need ethics and start being in want of an explanation.
People often come to the aid of strangers.
We’re neither perfect or consistent.
We are naturally both caring and uncaring. As Solzhenitsyn observed:
Hollands basic idea is that many ideas about morality we take for granted are a consequence of Christianity. Especially the idea that the weak and marginalized have value. He stumbled on the idea of this import of Christianity while writing a number of books about the classical period and finding the Greek and Romans exceedingly strange when watched up close. He concluded that Christianity is the difference, and that many things we take for granted, and even things that seems opposite to Christianity is the result, not of religion in general, it of Christianity itself. Examples he give in other places are gay rights (except for Taiwan, gay marriage only exits in post christian countries) and atheism itself. Atheism is simple a branch of Christianity that denies the existence of God.
Christianity ‘pales into insignificance’ when compared to the corpus of Ancient Greek classical thought, and in particular the Corpus Aristotelicum.
It offers little more than mawkish, sanctimonious drivel and makes the simply preposterous claim that FAITH triumphs over REASON.
That it did ultimately triumph is a disaster for Western Civilisation.
Marxism was pure reason.
Bullshit . It was romantic fiction.
I was trying to make the point that when reason triumphs over faith the results can be equally disastrous.
Marxism wasn’t the triumph of reason over faith, it was the substitution of a different faith using faulty reasoning.
St Thomas Aquinas would disagree that faith triumphs over reason.
Aquinas was a mendicant and a ‘rebel’ and the Church did not endorse his teachings.
(ps If you haven’t been to Fossanova it really is worth a visit.)
Humans have a limitless capacity for self-deceit.
Being able to ignore the simple fact that without God all morality is up for grabs is breathtaking in its enormity.
A secular system of human rights not underwritten by a supra-natural ethical code exists on the shifting sands of utilitarian philosophy or democratic mandate, both of which depend themselves on… a supernatural code of ethics.
Richard Dawkins argues the only plausible alternative: that there is evolution through natural-selection of competing philosophies, with the ‘fittest’ ones surviving and those which don’t promote human or societal survival dying out.
So Universal Human Rights are an evolved concept that exist because civilizations that didn’t have them died out.
That is a neat theory but it only really works in a Western setting, underpinned by 1000 years of (now unacknowledged) Christianity. It isn’t supported by either history or data from elsewhere, where regimes and political systems and whole cultures that occupy a different moral ecosystem seem to thrive as political entities.
The West has enormous struggles with this dissonance, as can be seen by the last 70 years of foreign policy or the knots in which the UN regularly ties itself. The West tries in vain to export its Christian-based so-called Universal Human Rights (blatant cultural colonialism!) to societies that don’t have Christianity embedded in their cultural DNA (sic): and that’s not been an unqualified success.
“Humans have a limitless capacity for self-deceit.
Being able to ignore the simple fact that without God all morality is up for grabs is breathtaking in its enormity.”
The second statement is a great demonstration of the first.
Thanks for challenging me on that.
By ‘God’ I meant some sort of supernatural entity that promulgates a code of morality that encourages us to do what is right rather than what serves our purposes.
Where do we get ‘right’ from? ‘Right’ may cost us our fortune, our house, sometimes our life.
What exactly would stop you from murdering a passer by and stealing their money if you needed it and were certain you would get away with the crime?
If you read beyond the first 2 paragraphs of my comment, you will see that the possibility of an evolutionary explanation for our understanding of ‘right’ is described. But this does appear to require some sort of external monitoring to incentivise people away from the expedient in favour of the decent. Where there is none, and no inherited vestiges of one, people often do what they think they can get away with.
Happy to continue this fascinating discussion.
It seems you are onto the shame/guilt difference. Shame occur when we’ve done something we’re ok with, but believe others judge us negatively for (like being caught pooping outdoors) – whilst guilt is properly described as the feeling we get when we’ve betrayed our own values (I stole some money, got away with it, but feel bad). Shame is a function of being a sociable beast (dogs feel shame, cats…not so much); guilt stems from being self-aware.
Those with a classic religious mindset (as opposed to spiritual) think that the concept of God solves something – it does so only in so far as giving in emotional comfort, some of which is about not having to think any more or take responsibility – ‘I simply do what God wants me to do’. This is a cop out personally, and in philosophical terms it merely kicks the can down the road – a temporary, false out for those made dizzy by issues of infinite regress.
It’s the secular, godless liberal human rights that allow, even encourage both euthanasia and late-term abortion,
Its not wise to go claiming the high ground in the name of religion.
but that’s all they’ve got Brett – that’s the whole point. Life is scary – full of pain and uncertainty; but wait, there is a great Sky Daddy who says it’s all going to be ok, so long as you follow these steps. Phew!
Problem is, to the extent that you are committed to the real world and in truth, your mind will have to spend the rest of your life trying to justify, fearfully, that original sin. A person trapped therein will never discover that all of wonderful life, good, bad ugly and indifferent, stems from the reality of being a real human on a real planet, not from fairy tales. What a waste.
An excellent article. Easy to forget how rooted western values are in centuries of Christianity. Easy to forget also how fundamental religion is to human existence. I’m not talking about belief in God, whether God exists or not is a moot point really. Religion helps humans deal with and come to terms with what life throws at them and has done so probably since the dawn of humankind. That’s why it evolved with us, I suspect it’s as Darwinian as anything biological. Jettison it at our peril
Some years ago on a visit to the Natural History Museum in Kensington one of my grandchildren asked “ What was God doing when T-Rex was around? To which I could only answer, not much.
Clear uncongealed question. Children. My young blonde niece whom no one expected to later become a criminal lawyer remarked during her parents’ atheistic chit-chat: “Didn’t Jesus say he’d be right back? It’s been 2000 years. And as for God, no one’s seen him, like, forever!”
“To draw on a fittingly Darwinian analogy, ancient atheists and modern humanists resemble one another in the way pterosaurs resemble bats: as examples of similar features developing in unrelated species. That isolated prefigurings of humanist beliefs are to be found scattered in ancient texts does not in itself demonstrate an evolutionary relationship between them.”
Yes, but this if anything emphasises the existence of deeper truths presupposed to link the two historically unrelated groups. Convergent evolution is a process that occurs because unrelated species facing the same set of selection pressures evolve similar characteristics to adapt to those pressures. The analogy here is to the idea that unrelated historic groupings come to the same rational conclusions when faced with the same weight of evidence – the observable regularities of nature that provoke the conclusion that natural laws must exist.
I’m not saying that that’s defiinitely what happens mind you, merely that the evolutionary analogy can support rather than disprove the supposition in question, as long as we define our terms sufficiently precisely.
“Certainly, the humanist assumption that atheism and liberalism go together is plainly just that: an assumption.”
And this is one assumption I don’t merely question, as the author does, but reject. It seems to me that moral systems devoid of God are equally prone to authoritarianism as are religious ones – in recent history, you could argue, a good deal more so, given the atrocities of the 20th century. I might even go so far as to say that the global fiasco of the 2020 pandemic response was a minor example of the same phenomenon: an elite class of “experts” who found themselves unexpectedly with their hands on the levers of power, and almost immediately disgraced themselves by forgetting what human beings actually are.
On the general argument above, though, I do believe that it is nonetheless possible for human rights to be universal and to be regarded as emerging naturally from a rigorous philosophical examination of history and a scientific examination of the relationship between humans and the physical world. I’m reminded of a brilliant section of prose from one of Roger Scruton’s books in which he rehearses an imaginary debate between Friedrich Hayek and Ronald Dworkin on the role and nature of law, with Hayek’s view, unsurprisingly, winning the debate through an exposition on the history of the Common Law. Here’s one particular paragraph:
“Just as prices in a market condense into themselves information that is otherwise dispersed throughout contemporary society, so do laws condense information that is dispersed over a society’s past. From this thought it is a small step to reconstructing Burke’s celebrated defence of custom, tradition and ‘prejudice’ against the ‘rationalism’ of the French Revolutionaries. To put Burke’s point in a modern idiom: the knowledge that we need in the unforeseeable circumstances of human life is neither derived from nor contained in the experience of a single person, nor can it be deduced a priori from universal laws. This knowledge is bequeathed to us by customs, institutions and habits of thought that have shaped themselves over generations, through the trials and errors of people many of whom have perished in the course of acquiring it. Such is the knowledge contained in the common law, which is a social bequest that could never be adequately replaced by a doctrine, a plan or a constitution, however entrenched that constitution may be in a vision of individual rights.”
The point I would make here is that just because we may not be able to deduce a universal system of human rights a priori through philosophical effort alone, that does not mean that such a system does not exist or that it is not discoverable through rigorous examination of human societies past and present – or, to extend the parallel in Roger Scruton’s prose, that it cannot be constructed iteratively through a system of deductive precedent, as the Common Law has been. Where we are now – the early 21st century, a time when much of the planet has yet to achieve the basic material wealth required for a tolerable level of human dignity – a system of human rights that is properly universal is something that’s a work in progress, that’s all. And the fact that the efforts so far may be inescapably rooted in the Christian tradition ought not to cause humanists to despair (assuming they accept the point at all, of course), because there is nothing that prevents a particular claim being a truth just because it may have emerged as a religious principle in the past.
My conclusion: I accept the point that the humanists of today may not wholly understand the roots of their assumptions, but that doesn’t mean their efforts are in vain.
Anyway, this was a very interesting essay.
Very good.
Thank you.
“immediately disgraced themselves by forgetting what human beings actually are”.
Not the case fortunately with Lord Jonathan Sumption KS, nor Peter Hichins Esq.
Otherwise the late Nye Bevan’s words spring to mind.