The Necessity of Atheism Part 17

"The torture, the maiming, and the murder of Elgira by Dunstan ill.u.s.trates further, amongst thousands and thousands of similar b.l.o.o.d.y deeds, the diabolical brutality of superst.i.tion perpetuated in the name of Christianity upon women in the earlier centuries of our epoch.

Indeed, religious superst.i.tion always has contrived to rob, to pester, to deceive, and to degrade women." (_Bell: "Women from Bondage to Freedom."_)

During the Middle Ages, the ages in which the Church was in complete domination of all forms of endeavor, the status of woman was no better than the general conditions of the time. This Age of Faith is characterized by "the violence and knavery that covered the whole country, the plagues and famines that decimated towns and villages every few years, the flood of spurious and indecent relics, the degradation of the clergy and monks, the slavery of the serfs, the daily brutalities of the ordeal and the torture, the course and b.l.o.o.d.y pastimes, the insecurity of life, the triumphant ravages of disease, the check of scientific inquiry and a hundred other features of medieval life."

(_Joseph McCabe: "Religion of Woman."_)

The Church was chiefly responsible for the terrible persecutions inflicted on women on the ground of witchcraft and this must be taken into calculation when one considers what woman owes to religion. The Reformation reduced woman to the position of a mere breeder of children.

During the sway of Puritanism woman was a poor, benighted being, a human toad under the harrow of a pious imbecility.

The pioneers in the Modern Woman Movement in this country were, of course, Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, and Miss Susan B. Anthony. In their "History of Woman Suffrage" they comment on the vicious opposition which the early workers encountered in New York. "Throughout this protracted and disgraceful a.s.sault on American womanhood the clergy baptised every new insult and act of injustice in the name of the Christian religion, and uniformly asked G.o.d's blessing on proceedings that would have put to shame an a.s.sembly of Hottentots."

And while the clergy either remained silent or heaped abuse on this early movement, such freethinkers as Robert Owen, Jeremy Bentham, George Jacob Holyoake, and John Stuart Mill in England entered the fray wholeheartedly in behalf of the emanc.i.p.ation of woman. In France it was Michelet and George Sand that came to their aid. In Germany it was Max Sterner, Buchner, Marx, Engels, and Liebknecht. In Scandinavia it was Ibsen and Bjornson.

The battle was begun by freethinkers in defiance of the clergy and it was only when the inevitable conquest of this movement was manifest that any considerable number of clergy came to the aid of this progressive movement. The righting of the wrongs imposed on womankind therefore had been started not only without the aid of the churches but in face of their determined opposition. It was not the clergy that discovered the injustice that had been done to women throughout the centuries, and when it was finally pointed out to them by sceptics, it was the rare ecclesiastic that could see it so and attempt to right the wrong.

R. H. Bell, in tracing this struggle of woman in her publication, "Woman from Bondage to Freedom," has this pertinent remark to make. "If there are any personal rights in this world over which Church and State should have no control, it is the s.e.xual right of a woman to say, 'Yes' or 'No.' These and similar rights are so deeply imbedded in natural morality that no clear-headed, clean-hearted person would wish to controvert them.... Enforced motherhood, through marriage or otherwise, is a mixed form of slavery, voluntary motherhood is the glory of a free soul."

In the age-long struggle for freedom, woman's most rigorous antagonist has always been the Church.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE GREAT ILLUSION

_But the powers of man, so far as experience and a.n.a.logy can guide us, are unlimited; nor are we possessed of any evidence which authorizes us to a.s.sign even an imaginary boundary at which the human intellect will, of necessity, be brought to a stand._

BUCKLE.

There has been an effort made in certain religious publications to imply that there is a dearth of thought and thinkers beyond the pale of theism. The subsequent examination of the theological beliefs of great minds will show that there has never been a lack of brilliant thinkers who have not sought truth apart from the dominant faith of their age. It was Socrates, I believe, who first asked if it was not a base superst.i.tion that mere numbers will give wisdom. Granting this truth, it certainly cannot be claimed that the philosophers of any time const.i.tuted a majority of any population, nor that the philosopher, as such, was not greatly in advance of the mental status of the populace of his particular age. It would seem appropriate to briefly comment on the opinions of the philosophers, both ancient and modern, concerning their views on "man's giant shadow, hailed divine."

In former ages, philosophy was the handmaiden of theology. From the time of Socrates and Plato, and throughout the medieval ages, the foremost task of the philosopher seemed to be to attempt the proof of the existence and nature of G.o.d, and the immortality of the soul. The leading thinkers of the seventeenth century, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Malebranche, liberated philosophy from its bondage to theology. The criticism of Kant of the philosophical foundations of belief destroyed the "theological proofs," and modern thinkers now spend little time on the question of the existence and nature of G.o.d and the soul.

Modern philosophy has been completely secularized, and it is a rare occasion to find a philosopher dwelling on the problems of G.o.d and immortality. This question in philosophy, as in all other branches of thought, is utterly irrelevant and at present there is less insistence on G.o.d and more on the world, man, morals, and the conditions of social life.

It cannot be denied that we are under a heavy obligation intellectually to the Greek philosophers. And it may be that the fruitful efforts of those minds were largely due to their unhampered intellectual freedom.

They had no "holy books" and few authorities to check their free speculation and hence these Greek thinkers furnish the first instance of intellectual freedom, from which arose their intelligent criticism and speculation. "They discovered skepticism in the higher and proper significance of the word, and this was their supreme contribution to human thought." (_James Harvey Robinson: "The Mind In The Making."_)

We know the teachings of Socrates only through his disciple Plato, as Socrates wrote nothing himself. From this source we gather that Socrates firmly upheld the right and necessity of free thought. He was mainly a moralist and reformer, and attempted to prove the existence of G.o.d by finding evidence of design in nature. He rejected the crude religious ideas of his nation, was opposed to anthropomorphism, but considered it his duty to conform publicly to this belief. In his old age, he was charged with rejecting the G.o.ds of the state, and was sentenced to death.

The philosophy of Plato has given rise to diverse interpretations and there are those who, on reading the Dialogues, believe that it is not amiss to state that in certain utterances there is ground to hold that Plato argued for the pragmatic value of a belief in G.o.d and personal immortality; that he does not stress the truth of the matter, but argues mainly for the benefit which the State derives from the belief; that such theistic beliefs cannot be demonstrated, and may well be but a craving and a hope, yet it will be of no harm to believe. He inferred the existence of G.o.d from what he considered the intelligence and design manifested in natural objects. Mainly, however, Plato's theism was founded upon his doctrine of a universe of ideas, and as no one today holds that ideas are self-existing realities, the foundation of his theism is destroyed. James Harvey Robinson, in his "Mind in The Making,"

discusses the influence of Plato, and remarks, "Plato made terms with the welter of things, but sought relief in the conception of supernal models, eternal in the heavens, after which all things were imperfectly fashioned. He confessed that he could not bear to accept a world which was like a leaky pot or a man running at the nose. In short, he ascribed the highest form of existence to ideals and abstractions. This was a new and sophisticated republication of savage animism. It invited lesser minds than his to indulge in all sorts of n.o.ble vagueness and impertinent jargon which continue to curse our popular discussions of human affairs. He consecrated one of the chief foibles of the human mind, and elevated it to a religion."

The philosophy of Aristotle is commonly known to be the reverse of Plato's. Plato started with universals, the very existence of which was a matter of faith, and from these he descended to particulars.

Aristotle, on the other hand, argued from particulars to universals, and this inductive method was the true beginning of science. The acc.u.mulated knowledge of his age did not furnish him facts enough upon which to build and he had to resort to speculation. It does not detract from the stupendous achievement of this man that the clergy of the Middle Ages, in control of the few isolated centers of learning, looked upon the philosophy of Aristotle as final and considered his works as semi-sacred, and in their immersion in un-reason and unreality, exalted as immutable and infallible the absurdities in the speculations of a mind limited to the knowledge of centuries before theirs.

In the attempt to explain plant and animal life, Aristotle formulated the theory that a special form of animating principle was involved. The "elan vital" of Bergson and the theory of Joad are modern reiterations of this conception. Aristotle is not quite consistent when he attempts to give us his theistic beliefs. At times G.o.d is, for him, a mysterious spirit that never does anything and has not any desire or will.

Elsewhere, he conceives G.o.d as pure energy; a prime mover unmoved.

Certain modern physicists still cling to this Aristotelian G.o.d. This conception of a deity was far from the beliefs of his age, and it is not strange that Aristotle was charged with impiety and with having taught that prayer and sacrifice were of no avail. He fled from Athens and shortly afterwards died in exile.

These three supreme Greek thinkers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, have not contributed a single argument for the existence of a supreme being which is now not discredited. Socrates relied on the now outmoded argument from design; and only in a greatly modified form are the arguments of Plato and Aristotle accepted by modern theists. Holding such heretical views in an age when history was a frail fabric of legends, and the scientific explanation of nature in its extreme infancy, what would their views be today?

In the consideration of the Greek thinkers of lesser importance one finds that they were continually storming against the religious conceptions of the populace. The philosophers were ever unpopular with the credulous. "Damon and Anaxagoras were banished; Aspasia was impeached for blasphemy and the tears of Pericles alone saved her; Socrates was put to death; Plato was obliged to reserve pure reason for a chosen few, and to adulterate it with revelation for the generality of his disciples; Aristotle fled from Athens for his life, and became the tutor of Alexander." (_Winwood Reade: "The Martyrdom of Man."_)

Anaxagoras, the friend and master of Pericles, Euripides, and Socrates, was accused by the superst.i.tious Athenians of atheism and impiety to the G.o.ds. He was condemned to death and barely escaped this fate through the influence of Pericles; which resulted in the accusation of atheism against Pericles. Euripides was accused of heresy, and Aeschylus was condemned to be stoned to death for blasphemy and was saved from this fate by his brother Aminias. The philosophy of Parmenides was distinctly pantheistic, and Pythagoras, who attempted to purify the religion of the Greeks and free it from its absurdities and superst.i.tions, was exiled for his scepticism.

Democritus, a materialist and atheist of 2500 years ago, formulated a mechanical view of phenomena in accordance with which everything that happens is due to physical impacts. "Such a materialism was a great liberation from superst.i.tion; and had it survived in its integrity, the path of European wisdom would have been vastly different from what it was. What the path would have been, we are beginning to see to-day, for since the nineteenth century we have been treading it more or less consistently but by no means so gallantly and courageously as Democritus." (_G. Boas: "The Adventures of Human Thought."_)

Democritus and the Epicureans strove to deliver men from their two chief apprehensions: the fear of the G.o.ds, and the fear of death; and in so doing rejected the religious beliefs and subst.i.tuted a rational and scientific conception of the universe.

It was Xenophanes, the Voltaire of Greece, who brought to the attention of his countrymen the discovery that man created the G.o.ds in his own image. He attacked the conceptions of the Greek deities with these words, "Mortals deem that the G.o.ds are begotten as they are, and have clothes like theirs, and voice and form ... Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the G.o.ds like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.... The Ethiopians make their G.o.ds black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair."

Considering Greek philosophy in its entirety, we see that it was naturalistic rather than supernaturalistic, and rationalistic rather than mystical. These gifted men saw no clear indication for the existence of a supreme being; very few of them speak of the deity in the role of Providence and fewer still believed in personal immortality.

Professor Boas, in contrasting Asiatic mythology with Greek philosophy, remarks: "The Asiatic myths a.s.sumed the existence of beings beyond the world, not subject to mundane laws, who made and controlled the course of events. There was no reason why they should have made a world. They seemed to be living as divine a life without it as with it. The question was one which persisted in Asiatic thought, and when Christianity became dominant in Europe, much of its theologians' time was spent in answering it. The only plausible answer then was that G.o.d made the world because He felt like it. For no reason could be given sufficiently compelling to sway the will of the Omnipotent. But such an answer was unsatisfactory to the Greek. In his philosophy all this is changed. No G.o.d steps out of the machine to initiate cosmic history. The First Cause is a physical substance, some material thing, which operates by the laws of its own nature. Its every movement is theoretically open to the scrutiny of reason. And hence, a scientific rather than a religious answer can be given to every question."

At the beginning of the Christian era, the cultured Romans were stoics or epicureans. The poet Lucretius was an epicurean who regarded the belief in the G.o.ds as a product of the terrors of primitive man and recommended that the mind should be emanc.i.p.ated from the fear of the G.o.ds and argued against the immortality of the soul. Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius were stoics. Cicero insinuates that the G.o.ds are only poetical creations, that the popular doctrine of punishment in a world to come is only an idle fable, and is uncertain whether the soul is immortal. Seneca wrote against the religion of his country, and the philosophy of cultured Romans of the time of the physician Galen tended towards atheism.

The prime factor of Greek philosophy was the insistence on intelligence and knowledge, and by these means it reached its pinnacle of reasoning.

The blight that exterminated all scientific progress, with the fall of the Roman Empire, carried with it the neglect of the Greek thinkers.

Similar to the retrogression of scientific thought, traced in former chapters, is the corresponding retrogression in philosophic thought. In place of the free inquiry of the Greeks we see arising the theology of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Augustine, and finally that of St.

Thomas Aquinas. At the time of St. Augustine most of the cultural Greek writings had disappeared in western Europe. The greatest store of Greek thought was in the hands of the Arab scholars and led to a marked scepticism, as we see manifested in the writings of the Spanish Moors.

It is significant that during the "age of faith" in Europe no philosopher of merit arose, and the only philosophy permitted was the puerile Scholastic-Aristotelic. This scholastic philosophy, hemmed in between metaphysics and theology, sought to reconcile Plato, Plotinus, and Aristotle with the needs of orthodoxy, and split hairs over subtle essences and ent.i.ties. Francis Bacon impeaches, in this manner, the medieval philosophers: "Having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors, as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did out of no great quant.i.ty of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books."

The sole preoccupation of medieval philosophy seemed to be conjectures as to what would happen to man after death, and the entire system of thought was based on authority. The medieval philosopher turned in disdain from the arduous path of investigation of actual phenomena and confidently believed that he could find truth by easy reliance upon revelation and the elaboration of dogmas. A few brave minds rebelled against this unnatural imprisonment of the intellect, with the usual consequences. Peter Abelard was condemned for his scepticism at a council at Sens in 1140; the philosophy of John Scotus Erigena was condemned for its pantheistic ideas by a council at Sens in 1225; and the pantheistic views of Bruno had much to do with his martyrdom in the year 1600.

Montaigne, the pioneer of modern scepticism, gave voice to his repugnance for dogmas in his brilliant Essays, in which he stated that all religious opinions are the result of custom; and that he doubted if, out of the immense number of religious opinions, there were any means of ascertaining which were accurate. Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes were the inaugurators of a school of thought which is characterized by its practical spirit; and while these men professed theistic beliefs, their systems of thought had done much, when applied and amplified by their followers, to undermine that belief. These men furnished the source of a later agnosticism.

Thomas Hobbes agreed with Bacon and Galileo that all knowledge starts from experience, and, carrying out the inductive method of Bacon, he produced his "Leviathan" in 1651. It was promptly attacked by the clergy of every country in Europe. Hobbes says of the immortality of the soul, "It is a belief grounded upon other men's sayings that they knew it supernaturally; or that they knew those who knew them, that knew others that knew it supernaturally."

Locke concerned himself with a philosophic inquiry into the nature of the mind itself, and was looked upon as a destroyer of the faith.

Descartes based his philosophy on the rejection of authority in favor of human reason for which his works were honored by being placed on the Index in 1663. Hume, with the publication of the highly heretical "Treatise on Human Nature," threw consternation into the ranks of the theists. His theory of knowledge played havoc with the old arguments for belief in G.o.d and immortality of the soul. His works were widely read and were instrumental in leading to the philosophical agnosticism of the nineteenth century.

Spinoza's religious views seemed in his time little short of atheism and brought him the hostility of both Jews and Christians, to which was added the excommunication from the synagogue. In his philosophy G.o.d and nature are equivalent terms and it is pantheistic only in the sense that if man is to have a G.o.d at all, nature must be that G.o.d, and whatever man considers G.o.dlike must be found in nature. Spinoza recognizes no supernatural realm and denies the survival of personal memory. Professor G. Boas, in his "Adventures of Human Thought," discusses the att.i.tude of public opinion of the time of Spinoza. "He was the arch-atheist, the materialist, the subverter of all that was held most dear by the reigning powers. It was only after the French Revolution that he came into his own when certain Germans, captivated by Neo-Platonism, emphasized the pantheistic element in him. But by then Christianity had ceased to be a dominant intellectual force and had become what it is today, a folk belief." In the "Tractus Theologico-Politicus," Spinoza states: "When people declare, as all are ready to do, that the Bible is the Word of G.o.d teaching men true blessedness and the way of salvation, they evidently do not mean what they say, for the ma.s.ses take no pains at all to live according to Scripture, and we see most people endeavoring to hawk about their own commentaries as the word of G.o.d, and giving their best efforts, under the guise of religion, to compelling others to think as they do. We generally see, I say, theologians anxious to learn how to wring their inventions and sayings out of the sacred text, and to fortify them with divine authority."

In France, Pierre Bayle cleverly satirized the absurdity of dogma, and La Mettrie, an army physician, was exiled for the publication of his "Man a Machine." He insisted that if atheism were generally accepted society would be happier. His views were taken up and expanded by such atheists as Helvetius, d'Holbach, d'Alembert, and Diderot, who taught that morality should be founded on sociology and not on theology. The publication of their Encyclopaedia incurred the fierce opposition of the Church. Of Voltaire's anti-clericism little need be said, except to recall our debt to his victory over ecclesiasticism and superst.i.tion.

His a.s.sertion that "a fanaticism composed of superst.i.tion and ignorance has been the sickness of all the centuries," still holds too great an extent of truth. His denial of miracles, the supernatural efficacy of prayer, and the immortality of the soul earned for him the undying enmity of the clergy. Condorcet, another deist, was the successor of Voltaire in the Encyclopaedic warfare.

The "Critique of Pure Reason" of Kant demolished the ontological and the cosmological arguments for the existence of G.o.d and showed the weakness in the teleological argument. He demonstrated that all the current arguments for G.o.d and immortality; the entire basis of rational proof of religious beliefs; were invalid. The theists protested vehemently, and showed their superiority by calling their dogs "Immanuel Kant." In his "Critique of Practical Reason," however, he went on to restore the credit of religion through the moral sense, the "Categorical Imperative," and, as certain commentators have stated, after having excluded G.o.d from the cosmos, he attempted to find Him again in ethics.

Holding that the moral sense is innate and not derived from experience, he reduced the truth of religion to moral faith. Kant believed that he found a divine command in his own conscience; but the science of ethics now gives a natural account of moral laws and sentiments. The study of the evolution of our moral ideas has, today, destroyed Kant's theory of an innate and absolute moral sense.

When Franklin showed the nature of lightning, the voice of G.o.d was displaced from that of thunder. The sciences of ethics and psychology, like modern Franklins, show plainly that conscience is no more the voice of G.o.d than is thunder. Schopenhauer, commenting on Kantian theology, offers the suggestion that Kant was really a sceptic, but became frightened when he contemplated what he thought would happen to public morals if belief were to be denied to the ma.s.ses. Nietzsche speaks of Kant: "With the aid of his concept of 'Practical Reason,' he produced a special kind of reason, for use on occasions when reason cannot function: namely, when the sublime command, 'Thou shalt,' resounds." In his old age Kant became more bold, and perhaps voiced his true views, for we find that in "Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason," he is actively antagonistic to ecclesiasticism, so much so that, for publishing this work, he was censured by the Prussian king, who wrote, "Our highest person has been greatly displeased to observe how you misuse your philosophy to undermine and destroy many of the most important and fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity." Indeed, many a man approaching Kant with a firm theistic belief finds his belief somewhat shaken by Kantian logic.

Schopenhauer's "Will" has nothing in common with the G.o.d-idea as commonly held, and he was bitterly anti-theistic. In a dialogue ent.i.tled "Religion," he places these words in the mouth of his character Philalethes: "A certain amount of general ignorance is the condition of all religions, the element in which alone they can exist. And as soon as astronomy, natural science, geology, history, the knowledge of countries and peoples, have spread their light broadcast, and philosophy finally is permitted to say a word, every faith founded on miracles and revelation must disappear; and philosophy takes its place."

Hegel's deification of thought or reason left no room for personal immortality, and his query, "Do you expect a tip for having nursed your ailing mother, and refrained from poisoning your brother?" is well known. A vague conception of a deity whose existence can be proved, if it can be proved at all, only by the abstruse arguments of a Hegel is not a G.o.d of practical service to the theists.