From the Enlightenment and its science has emerged the
historically crazy idea that religion should be rejected because its stories
aren’t true. To what extent has anyone ever believed the stories of Zeus or
Brahma were true, or in what sense? And what about Moses and Jesus and Mohammed?
Surely people believed that the stories about these figures were true? How can
you worship the Western God revealed via these figures if you don’t believe the
accounts of their lives are true?
But no one asked about the truth of these stories until after
the concept of Enlightenment Truth emerged. Of course the followers of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam believed the stories of their founders and principal
figures. But the claim that those stories were true in our modern sense of true—historically
accurate, recorded and told exactly as they happened—could not be claimed for
them until that concept of truth developed. Once that standard was applied to
stories, the stories of course unraveled. But not because they were not true. They fell apart when held to a
standard was applied to them that was unknown to the people who first told them
or read or heard them.
And now we claim very widely that religion is false because
the stories are false because they don’t conform to this alien standard of
truth. It’s like judging nursery rhymes because they don't conform to the rules of
calculus. And even those who today try to save religion from the Enlightenment
critique generally doom themselves by using the structure of Enlightenment thought. And
they are judged as crazy or confused (which of course they are but no more
confused than those they oppose) because they can’t see the plain fact that
ancient stories don’t stand up to Enlightenment standards of truth. The imperfect and so-so Enlightenment. But what these
well-meaning critics of secular thought are in my view really responding to is something
else. They too only have the Modern vocabulary in which to express themselves,
so they express themselves badly. The sense they have however that the real is
something other than what the critics of religion tell us it is is too strong
to die on the altar of Enlightenment. They know that something is missing in the
Enlightenment critique of pre-Enlightenment thought. But they don’t have any
idea how to say what that is. So they listen to all that science has to say;
they never question the absurdity of going to the scientist to ask questions
about God, and they go away thinking “that must be wrong.” If they only press
the question in the vocabulary of the scientist far enough, they’ll see it fall
apart. We’re just not there yet.
But that will never happen. The whole structure of
Enlightenment thought ultimately excludes God. And simultaneously excludes
religion. God is not an object in the universe, not an object at all. God
therefore does not have objective existence. A structure of thought that claims
only what is objective is real declares God unreal. And at the same time it
declares religion false—which is a radically different step. God does not have
to be objectively real—does not have to “exist”—for religion to be an essential
part of the human experience.
And I mean essential in a collective not an individual
sense, though that may be true as well. It may be that humanity cannot persist
without religion. Enlightenment thought repeatedly argues the evil of religion.
It was Nietzsche who finally tore the lid off this one. Religion is the source
of endless evil, personal and civil, wars and murders and intolerance and prejudice
and oppression. War is the great human evil that we’re finally on the verge of
eradicating; though Nietzsche’s dates may have been overly optimistic, the
trajectory is clear.
The counter argument is easy enough to make, though it would
take me off track to make it here. I will only point out that religion did not create
nuclear war or gas chambers or mustard gas. It is not responsible for global
warming or gun violence or capitalism. Freeing ourselves from religion has not
made us a more peaceful species. The claim that if we just continue to push our
Enlightenment thinking until it truly sticks is like the argument of the gun
lobby that tells us that only way to solve the gun problem is to sell more
guns. The same forces that have always used religion to support violence now
use the Enlightenment. The true priests of the Enlightenment say they are
perverting this thought, that they are illegitimate. Sure. The priests of
religious thought said the same thing. And they were right. But then they
had the regulating power of religion to counterbalance the violence. We lack
that today more than ever before. And it does not appear that the regulating
power of Modernism or Scientism or Enlightenment will ever be sufficient to
stop the train of ignorance, greed, and violence. If the end is near, it’s not
because of religion. It may be because we wouldn’t allow religion to save us
from it.
All the old stories are true according to the standards of
truth set up for them. And that standard of truth is no less valid than the
scientific and quasi-scientific standards that we use today to affirm and
condemn all claims. But what is the claim to truth religions make? What
difference does it make that we have lost this mythic realm of truth?
The germs of our modern, Enlightenment, scientific notion of
truth can be traced far back, as far back as you want to go. They are in Augustine’s
critique of astrology and Manicheism. They are an essential ingredient in the
shift from what we today call paganism to monotheism, even in Islam’s critique
of Christianity as it is manifest in the Qur’an. But that plant grew and the
other was weeded.
Much of the most important thought of the 20th Century supported the notion that the human species exists like any other species. In rural Maine they keep a close eye on the dogs at certain times of year because they know that if they smell deer, they’ll gather from one back yard to another and spontaneously form themselves into a pack and start killing the hunters’ prizes. Humans are like this. Hitler did not rise out of nowhere nor did Donald Trump or the Right Wing populist, nationalist nonsense sweeping the world today. It would be irresponsible to oversimplify the analysis of why and how this happened. I contend that the intellectual rejection of religion is an essential factor.
