The Next Step in Religion Part 5

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Christianity pa.s.sed through a fire of criticism which rocked it to its foundation. To those who lived at that time, the transition from the older, and more dogmatic, form was accompanied by spiritual and moral struggles which seem to us exaggerated. The very indifference of the present age shows that the atmosphere has cleared and that new values have come to the front. A short while since, I picked up Hutton's once famous book, _Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith_, and read his a.n.a.lysis of the life of Cardinal Newman and his interesting criticism of Matthew Arnold. I must confess that the time-spirit of which Arnold {96} made so much has done its work. The scene is shifting from a religion which stresses a peculiar form of salvation and a career in another world to social and economic conditions and ideals. Is there not something Byronic in much of Arnold's religious poetry? Is there not too much of the pageant of the bleeding heart in his sighs of regret and farewell? Yet he realized that the old faith was dying and that man had not yet found that which could fill its place. It takes time to make an adjustment in these matters, just as it is time alone that softens the griefs of unrequited love or the loss of dear ones.

And it is usually only the next generation, which has been able to make a genuinely fresh start, that settles into a new way of life.

Change is a great physician because it is able to introduce new factors into the situation, and it has been at work since Arnold's day. There are, nevertheless, prophecies in his poems of another world which would before long take the place of the one that was dying; and some of us believe that, in the new democracy which is stirring into life throughout the earth, this new and more creative world is being born:

"The millions suffer still and grieve, And what can helpers heal With old-world cures men half believe For woes they wholly feel?

"And yet men have such need of joy!

But joy whose grounds are true; And joy that should all hearts employ As when the past was new."

In the figure of Jesus, ethical and aesthetic idealization guided by religious emotion has created a {97} personality of a peculiarly appealing type well fitted to remain as an ideal to foster and strengthen the n.o.blest tendencies. But this ideal has become practically self-supporting apart from its mythical scaffolding. Its real foundation to-day is in its appeal to sympathies, natural to social beings, which the spiritual evolution of humanity has developed and given content to. When man succeeds in applying these sympathies rationally, in a social fashion, he may bring upon this sad old earth some measure of that kingdom for which Jesus longed. But Christianity has stood and, on the whole, still stands for certain beliefs in regard to the universe as a whole and the relation of man to it, which only patient reflection and inductive investigation can settle. By their very nature, these beliefs cannot have an historical justification although they have had an historical origin. Taking these beliefs in their simplest form and separating them from all connection with the figure of Jesus and the developed ethics whose stimulus goes back to him, they become an acceptance of an ethical G.o.d, a special providence and immortality. Remove these postulates, and it is doubtful whether theology has not also disappeared. It behooves us to examine the validity of these postulates in the light of modern science and philosophy.

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CHAPTER VIII

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

The conviction that there is a deep-seated conflict between the religious view the world, characteristic of the past, and the outlook which has been shaping under the guiding hands of science and philosophy is held by an ever increasing number. Those who deny this conflict are judged to be either willing self-deceivers or postponers of the evil day of confession. Many books have been written to detail the warfare between the champions of orthodoxy and the leaders of the advance guard of science. The persecution of Galileo, the burning of Bruno, the bitter attacks upon the founders of the theory of organic evolution are cited as examples of the unavoidable warfare. For the nonce, there is a lull in the battle which was waged so fiercely by Tyndall and Huxley; but this lull does not signify that a treaty of peace has been signed, but only that the combatants have shifted their ground. The forces of orthodoxy have sullenly retreated to another line of entrenchments. The objective observer can entertain little doubt that the intellectual forces of orthodoxy have been worsted in the open field and have become disheartened by the growing revelation of the number and strength and persistence of the workers in the service of science. The prestige of science bids fair to equal, if not to surpa.s.s, {99} that of the church. Hence, the desire of the theologian is to avoid a renewal of the conflict, or else to change the mode of the warfare.

And here I shall venture a prophecy. The new battle will be waged around psychology and philosophy. Already the lines are being drawn between the defenders of an extra-organic soul and the experimental sappers in the laboratories of biology and psychology who are seeking to show that mind and body are inseparable, that, indeed, mind is just a term for certain capacities of control exercised by the brain. The crucial character of this growing conflict, which is yet not much beyond the status of a skirmish, leaps to the eyes, as the French say.

Is not even the soul to be spared the siege before which the human body fell? Is it to be placed on the dissection-table and teased apart into its component strands? Even so. The process has already begun, and far more has been accomplished than is generally known. The solution of the mind-body problem is already in the air. And, with it, will come theoretical consequences by no means secondary to those a.s.sociated with the theory of evolution. With some of these consequences we shall be concerned in a later chapter.

Christianity has been bound up with the letter and even with the spirit of a sacred book. Naturally, this book reflects the view of the world held by people about two thousand years ago. It contains primitive notions of the origin of things, a nave conception of the relation of the sun to the earth, a belief that demons are the cause of sickness, a conviction that souls merely inhabit bodies temporarily, and an apocalyptic idea of the end of the world in a last judgment. As we have seen, no part of this outlook was particularly unique, but it was {100} accepted by the Christian Church as inspired because it was found in the canonical writings accredited to prophets and apostles. During the Middle Ages, this biblical view of the world was united with the astronomical and physical teaching of Aristotle and hardened into a system. So intimate was this union between these cosmological elements and Christianity felt to be that an attack upon one was taken as an attack upon the whole. To doubt the primitive notions of the world and man's place therein, was to doubt the bible; and to doubt the bible as an inspired compendium of information was to doubt Christianity.

For the sake of perspective, it will repay us to note the order in which these primitive ideas were attacked and replaced by more adequate ones. It will be noticed that the general cosmological setting was first reconstructed and that the growing point pa.s.sed thence to the center, the nature and destiny of man. As we indicated above, the replacement of older by newer and better-founded views is proceeding most rapidly at this crucial point. Having obtained a different and vaster heaven and earth, man has turned the microscope upon himself.

The suspicion is growing ever more insistent that he, also, is a natural part of this procession of things.

When, at the time of the Renaissance, modern science was born, the first field invaded with success was that of astronomy. Copernicus became convinced that the current theory, called the Ptolemaic, was untenable because it led to insuperable complexities in the interpretation of the observed paths of the heavenly bodies. He was led to suggest that the sun was the actual center of the system and that the earth revolved around it in the {101} course of a year. One can easily imagine the furore such a daring hypothesis aroused. The Copernican theory was scoffed at by learned and ignorant alike, for it upset the whole picture of the world which had been tranquilly accepted from early times, except by such a radical non-conformist as Aristarchus of Samos. To appreciate the intellectual revolution threatened, one has only to read Dante's "Divine Comedy," for Dante journeys from planet to planet and thinks of them as arranged within crystalline spheres revolving slowly about the earth. In the second canto of Paradise, he speaks of the blessed motors who make the holy spheres revolve. These motors are angels of various orders resident in the spheres and transmitting to them the efficacy of the Divine Intelligence. Thus infant science had to challenge the appearance of things to the eye, and a system bound up with the religious view of the world.

It is obvious that the old geocentric view of the world, which thought of the earth as the center of the universe, was nothing more than a statement of the apparent relations of the visible heavens to the broad earth which stretches out on either hand as far as eye can see. That this natural view of things was taken up into the religious picture of the universe was the occurrence to be expected. Had it not been and had the priests and prophets enunciated the Copernican theory, there would be reason to suspect a hidden source of revelation. Needless to say such a reversal of the natural sequence never occurs.

It is only when we grasp the nave outlook of early days that we can realize the full significance of many Christian doctrines. Let us take the articles of the {102} creed. We are taught to believe that Jesus descended into h.e.l.l and then ascended into Heaven and sitteth on the right hand of G.o.d. What is this h.e.l.l into which Jesus is supposed to have descended? It is the Sheol of the old Hebrews, a misty region below the surface of the earth; it is the Hades of the Greeks, the place of the departed shades; it is the Avernus of the Romans, the lower regions where ghosts flit and gibber. This place of the dead is at first the grave and sinks deeper into the earth as time pa.s.ses and the myth-making fancy has been directed upon it. But it is thought of literally as in the bowels of the earth. All through the Middle ages this nave view was held. There was an absolute down and a subterranean h.e.l.l, and every country told of some cavern which was one of its many mouths. With the advent of the Copernican view what becomes of these age-old ideas? To save them they must be transformed and given another location or a merely symbolic meaning. But why save them? They are as pure myths as any others to be found in olden days.

They are brother to Tartarus and the Battle of the t.i.tans and the Slaying of Rahab. The early Christians believed in a literal h.e.l.l beneath the surface of the earth. Their belief was wrong beyond the shadow of a doubt. We cannot make it true by modifying it out of all recognition.

The ascent into Heaven was thought of as a literal ascension of the resurrected body by the majority of early Christians. We have seen, however, that Paul did not teach any such doctrine. But even for Paul, Jesus, as the Messiah, was literally in the heavens directly above the earth. Into this region Paul is caught up in ecstasy--even to the third heaven. It is from {103} this region, not very far above us, that the last trump will sound and the day of judgment dawn. The account, given by the so-called "Revelation of St. John the Divine,"

which has led to so much foolish controversy among certain protestant sects, is typical of the apocalyptic literature of the time. No scholar to-day believes that it was written by an apostle or by any one in direct relation to an apostle. It is simply an example of the current religious phantasies of the age just before and after the Fall of Jerusalem. What factual basis could there be for such myths of the end of the world? To take this old picture of the days to come as having anything but historical interest is to live in a mist. Only the scholar can understand the allusions made and connect the ideas with the beliefs of this vanished world. It is poetry, a creation of generations of dreamers steeped in the tremendous idea of a coming destruction preceded by portents and disasters. We can understand how it arose in the motley and chaotic press of the Roman Empire in the East with its memories of oppressions and conquests and changing kingdoms; but to regard it gravely as a revelation, to be taken seriously, of the destruction of the world is impossible. The universe was a small affair for the men of that time and the little planet we call the earth and live upon was the center of all things. We who think in terms of light-years, and nebulae in which our solar system could be lost, and huge constellations far off in the pathless void, realize that we have outgrown even the imagery of this apocalyptic poem.

Religion was loth to give up the simpler and more child-like ideas of the universe and to displace the earth from its proud preeminence as the one foot-stool of {104} deity. Man feels lonelier in the tremendous s.p.a.ces and stellar systems which astronomy has revealed to his eye and mind. But the facts piled up by science in its patient work of investigation were too strong to be ignored, and religion had to modify its teaching by at least a pa.s.sive acceptance of the new world outlook which would have been so strange to Jesus and Paul. It is evident that this involves the quiet giving up of the truth of the story of creation, as well as the doctrine of a day of judgment. When we once realize that the earth is a pin-point in the physical universe, these stories, woven in days when it was regarded as the stable center of things, are seen to be outgrown myths.

But astronomy was followed by biology with its hypothesis of evolution.

No sooner had religion resigned itself to a larger world than its peace was again broken by the teaching that man was the end-term of an evolution of animal life going far back into the dim past. Instead of the neat little tale which Hebrew literature had pa.s.sed on to the Church, men were asked to believe that ages of slow change had elapsed while one form of life changed to a more complex form adapted to new conditions. Soon facts rained in from all sides to make this new position impregnable. Geology studied the various strata of rock and found fossil remains which could only be dated back millions of years.

Strange creatures unlike those to be found now upon the earth were brought to light. Reptiles of monstrous size, fishes of strange shapes, huge trees resembling our ferns, botanically weeds, yet towering into the heavens, were unearthed until the imagination caught glimpses of past ages teeming with life. The teaching of geology was reenforced by comparative anatomy, which showed {105} the similarity of different animals which had been thought of as quite distinct. Man, himself, was examined and was found to contain traces of an older mode of life. Only in this way could certain atrophied organs, like the appendix, be understood. Before long, comparative embryology arose and it was seen that the embryo pa.s.ses through certain stages of development which roughly indicate the past life of the organism. On all lines, investigation taught the same conclusion. That there was evolution in nature, so that new forms of life developed while old forms pa.s.sed away, no one who knew the facts doubted. What factors were at work to produce these changes was not entirely known. The new outlook was set in the place of the old myths; but the details of the evolutionary process required careful working out by patient experiments and observations.

The mythical background of Christianity was thus again attacked. The struggle was violent and bitter. Christians were so accustomed to the primitive myth of man's creation in a Garden of Eden, as narrated in the Old Testament, that they refused for a long time to consider any other view. Bishops and laymen denounced Huxley and Darwin and their supporters, and often resorted to parodies of their position in order to awaken the prejudices of the ma.s.s of the people. It was affirmed that they believed that man was descended from an ape or monkey. But the clergy were waging a losing fight, as is always the case when the facts are overwhelmingly against an old dogma. The educated people of to-day accept some form of the theory of evolution as naturally as they accept the automobile and electric street-car. They see no reason to believe that {106} primitive people who made no study of animal life knew more about its origin than those who have devoted their time to careful and earnest investigation. Facts speak for themselves and conquer what opposes them no matter what traditions bolster it up.

The refuge which Christianity has taken is the usual one resorted to by religions which find themselves in conflict with views more adequate than those they hold. The myths are either allegorized or thrust into the background. Allegorization of myth is only a work of fancy, but it always implies a tendency to self-deception. So long as we see tales like the stories of creation in a sanely historical way, we realize that these men of the past were stating their own nave beliefs and were not teaching our own views in the guise of a poetic version. The only way to be true to ourselves is to give up any attempt at compromise and acknowledge that the account of man's creation given in "_Genesis_" has simply been outgrown.

Thus, step by step, the framework of nature and man's place in it as taught by Christianity has come in conflict with more thoroughly founded views and has had to give way. Before science arose, man guessed at things and appealed to the G.o.ds at every step. The G.o.ds, as superhuman powers capable of doing anything, were naturally introduced to account for origins and mysterious events. Such an agent seemed a sufficient answer to any problem. How did man arise? G.o.d created him.

How did the earth come to be? G.o.d created it. But science has come to see that an agent which answers every question in this easy-going fashion does not really answer any of them. It is a verbal answer and does not give us any specific information. {107} Investigation is gradually showing just _how_ men did arise and _how_ the earth once formed part of a larger whole from which it was whirled off.

The only valid position to take in the light of this retreat of the biblical view of the world is to accept the evident conclusion that those who wrote the various books of the bible told the beliefs of their time. Some half-hearted converts to this conclusion try to take the edge off the admission by saying that the bible does not teach science. Let us put it frankly and say that the bible taught the knowledge of the olden days, their science, but that this does not at all agree with what we have come to know by real investigation.

While the primitive view of the world had the strength which came to it from the sincere belief of Christians, it struggled valiantly against the new knowledge. Unfortunately, Christians were, by their training, dogmatists and sought to silence the rising whispers of doubt by persecution, rather than by frank appeal to fact and reason. Because of this att.i.tude, there developed the tradition of antagonism between science and religion which is so often referred to. The primitive view of the world, woven into historical Christianity, because shot through the bible, was helpless in the face of this vigorous enemy which was nourished by the intellectual adulthood of man. Its partisans were shocked by the denial of beliefs that seemed to them bound up with the most sacred and important facts. What could be more natural than an appeal to force to put down such impious suggestions! The story is not a pleasant one but it should not be looked upon as unexpected.

Christianity used its power but was defeated. The fight is to all intents and purposes over; the primitive view of the {108} world has gone forever and Christianity is in the throes of the effort to loosen itself from it, as a swimmer tries to free himself from the embrace of a corpse which would drag him down.

But this is not the first time that Christianity has been forced to give up a belief that would not fit in with the facts of a wider experience. We saw that the early Christians believed in the coming of the kingdom of G.o.d upon earth in their own day and generation. This hope was relinquished by the Church as time pa.s.sed and it was not fulfilled. The date of the great change was simply postponed indefinitely. But the problem which the growth of modern science caused could not be met so easily. The conflict was stern, and it was only after defeat stared her in the face that Christianity tried to adapt herself to the new view of the world.

Were this adaptation possible simply by giving up the mythical elements in the bible and in the traditional theology, there can be no doubt that it would be accomplished. Many protestant denominations have practically gone thus far. There is reason to believe that, sooner or later, the doctrine of the virgin-birth, with its only too evident dependence upon cla.s.sic mythology and its obvious violation of biological facts, will be resigned and Jesus acknowledged to have been born as all men are. We moderns see no shame in such biological facts.

Since historical criticism and biology point in the same direction, there can hardly be a doubt as to the outcome. However reluctantly, Christianity must yield to knowledge.

Even after Christianity has surrendered her mythical envelope and resigned herself to the less dramatic and pictorial account of the beginning and end of things, {109} taught by modern science, she is not secure. The struggle has only pa.s.sed from the outer works of religion to its very citadel. To yield the nonessentials, which were the wrappings of its early manhood, to this stern seeker after knowledge, in the hope of a treaty of peace, will only lead to disappointment.

Because of her worship of the book, Christianity has set too high a value upon beliefs which were simply doomed to destruction. Hence she has no right to look upon her surrender of these beliefs as an act of great merit. It is simply a preliminary step to the basic conflict between science and religion. The question which confronts the human mind at the present time concerns the problem of the harmony or disharmony of the views of the world essentially connected with religion and science respectively. Before this fundamental problem, these minor conflicts which have occupied so much attention shrink into insignificance. This problem involves the character of the agencies at work in the universe. Can science admit the reality of a special providence at work in the world? Let us see to what issues this problem leads.

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CHAPTER IX

THE LIMITS OF PERSONAL AGENCY

Religion was born from need wedded to ignorance. But needs change, and illusions fade away and are replaced by knowledge. That religion reflects these factors of which it is a function cannot be doubted.

Some thinkers, who have sincerely pondered the problem, declare that religion will only be transformed. Others, as earnest, a.s.sert that it will disappear, and speak of the non-religion of the future. Is not the question in large measure one of definition? That man will continue to evolve ethically can scarcely be doubted, but it can be doubted with good right that he will continue to seek to fulfill his needs by rites designed to enlist superhuman agents in his behalf. Is there not more than a note of skepticism in that much-approved saying: "G.o.d helps those who help themselves?" Already, man is beginning to cla.s.sify his needs and to believe that his material needs, at least, can best be met by industry and knowledge. He supplicates less and works more. Let us not forget what tremendous economic and social changes have occurred since the days of the little, helpless communities that lifted up praying hands to their G.o.ds lest famine and war destroy them completely. To-day, man does more harm to man than does nature. The face of things has changed more radically than we are accustomed to realize. Social habits and beliefs {111} cannot fail to reflect this change. It may very well be that we shall be forced to conclude that what were, in a sense, the by-products of religion have become all that promises to survive when man has, indeed, eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

We have seen that primitive man read his surroundings in the light of his own consciousness. Everywhere he saw the evidence of will and anger, desire and caprice. The world was the theater of personal agents not so dissimilar to himself. Technically, we should speak of this outlook as anthropomorphic animism. Perhaps a still lower stage existed in which things are full of _mana_ or a mysterious power for good and evil. As man felt his own powerlessness in the midst of tremendous, and often hostile agencies, which overtopped his own meager powers, he was led to feel the desire to ally himself with these agencies and propitiate them in order that all might be well with him.

Man was ever more convinced that his own life was bound up with the plans of the G.o.ds. To displease them was to incur the most serious danger. The anger of Jove, or Neptune, or a.s.shur, or Yahweh was not easily turned aside once it was kindled. The winds which threaten shipwreck, the rains which give increase, the drouth which dries up the earth, the plague which brings death are under the control of the G.o.ds; and it behooves man to walk warily in order not to offend them. Thus was the path set in which man was to travel until he reached an ethical monotheism.

As time pa.s.sed, demons and G.o.ds gave way, in theory at least, to the sovereignty of one powerful deity who gathered to himself the powers and activities of the old multiplicity of agents whom man had worshipped and {112} placated. It is probable that this movement toward a consciously held monotheism reflected the changing political organization of society. The old chaos of superhuman agents, each doing what was right in his own eyes, gave way to a growing heavenly order in which one powerful agent exerted his suzerainty over minor princ.i.p.alities. Yet monotheism has always been relative, for the one G.o.d has his agents of subordinate rank--agents, powers and intercessors--just as the most absolute monarch has his ministers.

Political imagination cannot go beyond its source.

Christianity is usually regarded as the best type of monotheism; yet the early Church Fathers thought of the old G.o.ds as demons working their nefarious will upon man. It is notorious that many of the saints of the calendar are only re-christened pagan deities adopted by the Church to meet popular demands. The peasantry _would_ believe in the agency of local divinities whose reputation had been great for the healing of sickness, or the granting of children to the childless, or the causing of rain to fall in seasons of drouth; and the Church, wisely enough, controlled and adopted what it could not prevent. The old pluralism of agencies refused to give way more than formally to a single agent. The psychology of this resistance is simple enough.

Just as the king is unable to give his personal attention to the requests of all his subjects but must delegate authority to officers to look after details, so the one deity cannot give ear and attention to the incessant cries of his myriads of creatures. I cannot help feeling that the pious catholic has more psychological realism in these matters than the protestant sectarian who wearies his deity with all sorts of trivial matters. Surely a {113} million pet.i.tions at the same time would distract any conceivable kind of personal deity!

But, in the present chapter, we are not concerned so much with the problem of the number and inter-relations of the superhuman agents at work in the universe as with the idea of personal agency itself. The point I wish to call attention to is that the change from polytheism to monotheism did not involve any essential modification of the accepted notions of agency. Nature--and human life with it--was thought of as under the control of a superpersonal agent who guided the course of events in accordance with his purposes. An ethical refinement of the idea of deity had supervened which lifted it far above the crudities of the so-called nature-religions. Was this not because man and human society had evolved ethically and socially? But no marked break in the setting of the idea had arisen. And this fact presents the thinker with a problem.

In its origins, religion is innately hostile to the extension of impersonal causation to the cosmos, for the obvious reason that such a conception conflicts with the operation of special agency. Religion begins with the postulation of powerful agents whom man can placate.

Up to the present, the evolution of religion has not involved a withdrawal of this primary a.s.sumption but only its ethical refinement and the reduction of the number of agents. In the Western world, at least, religion and the idea of an ethical control of the course of nature have been inseparable. This latter idea underlies prayer for material blessings, miracles, and the various conceptions of providence. Can this primary a.s.sumption be taken from religion without destroying it?

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The difficulties which confront this a.s.sumption for the educated man of to-day must not blind us to its naturalness in the past. But that is the very point to grasp. The primitive view of the world is not being so much refuted as outgrown. Slowly and painfully, man has learned that events are conditioned by antecedents of an inflexible character, and that his wishes and desires must have hands and feet working for them before they can affect things. He has bettered his condition through invention and discovery and social organization. Of course, the world might have been different, and moral categories might have been the proper ones to apply to nature; but the brute fact of the case is that our particular universe is not of that sort.

Once given the notion of superhuman agents of a social character, the after-development of religion is inevitable. Man adopts toward them the att.i.tude that he takes toward his own rulers. To pray to the G.o.ds is as natural as to pray to those who have power and who, we hope, may be moved by our prayers. Psychologically, there is no difference in the att.i.tude involved. Providence is merely the action of an agent who is more than human. For primitive man it did not imply an intervention with nature, for the very good reason that the G.o.ds were active in nature. Nature was the sphere of the activities of the G.o.ds in the same way that it was, in a minor degree, the sphere of the activity of men. We must rid ourselves of the modern conception, nourished by science, of nature as a realm of causal relations. For ages, man had no such conception; all activities were thought of as acts. Nature, man and the G.o.ds acted together in a sort of social whole. Law, as we understand the term in science, would have had no {115} meaning to primitive man just as it has little meaning for many at the present day.