Modern Myths: Science vs. Religion

“Religious belief systems prefer a universe with mankind firmly at its center. No wonder Cosmos is so threatening.” This is the subheading to a recent article on the controversy over Neil de Grasse Tyson’s revamping of Carl Sagan’s famous Cosmos series, which began airing earlier this year on Fox. Alternet‘s Adam Lee examines the public outcry of many fundamentalist Christians over the show’s portrayal of the history of the universe; as the show is hosted by an astrophysicist and focused on the scientific exploration of outer space, it is unsurprising that the creation stories related in Genesis are not discussed. For those who insist on a literal reading of Scripture, of course, this is a thrown glove, an invitation to ideological combat. Lee, however, sees the issue in much broader terms: for him, this debate between scientists and fundamentalists is really the manifestation of a much deeper and absolute tension between science and religion on the whole.

Massive volumes have been penned on the idea that science and religion are locked in existential combat, and I have neither the space nor the expertise to go into detail here. A Google search or perusing of Wikipedia’s article on the subject can provide a better introduction to the scholarly debate on this narrative than I ever could. The short summary of what I think you will find in those investigations is this: the idea that religion as such and science as such are locked in some unavoidable ideological war is, simply put, a myth–in the full meaning of that word. It is not only mythical in that this narrative is untrue in many respects (i.e. many scientists are religious, many believers are fully accepting of science, and historically, a vast amount of scientific discovery has been achieved by people who were deeply religious and spiritual) but also in the more pernicious sense: this narrative is mythical in that it forms the backbone of a polemical stance that thinkers committed to a certain vision of modernity employ to discredit their opponents and give the impression that readers and listeners must pick a side in this great battle between progress and knowledge, on the one hand, and ignorant superstition, on the other.

But here, in the small space of a single blog post, I want to focus in on one particular claim that Lee makes–let’s return to his subtitle: “Religious belief systems prefer a universe with mankind firmly at its center. No wonder Cosmos” is so threatening.” Many readers will likely find this claim barely worth mentioning, because the assumptions behind it are largely accepted as obviously true. The uncontroversial nature of this claim only drives home how successfully the “conflict thesis” has been accepted in contemporary thought, for the claim is, theologically and biblically, simply untrue. What Lee is describing here–the idea that humanity is ontologically located at the center of reality–can be called anthropocentrism, an idea which is actually closely tied to Enlightenment humanism–not biblical religion. The assumption of human importance in the universe is the bedrock for social contract theory Liberalism and the application of scientific knowledge to the development of industrialism through technology, all tied up in the modern assumption of historical “progress” towards brighter and better futures. But this view is simply not central to Jewish or Christian religious thought. Somehow, however, many people today–even highly intelligent and well-educated people–seem to think that Abrahamic theology is tied deeply to an anthropocentric vision of reality.

This modern confusion is more complex than a simple historical and philosophical misattribution, though. Anthropcentrism’s consequences are meted out to various ideologies in a specific and ideologically-guided way. What we tend to see as the good aspects and achievements of an anthropocentric culture are attributed to science, technology, and liberal democracy, while the bad aspects or failures of anthropocentrism are attributed to religion or traditional culture. Thus, vaccines, air-conditioning, airplanes, computers, and the moon landings are all proof of the glories of scientific living, while the atom bomb, global warming, and the indignities of modern life are attributable to reactionary, unenlightened religious or tribal thought.

But the problem isn’t just that there is ideological cherry-picking here, there is also a mass of unexamined and baseless claims. There are few, if any, sections of the Bible that lend themselves to an anthropocentric reading. It is true that Jewish and Christian Scripture broadly claim that human life is purposeful and inherently meaningful–that God, the creator of all that is somehow cares for us–but humans are by no means placed at the center of creation. Indeed, the Bible is a theocentric, rather than anthropocentric, text. God, not humanity, is at the center of the biblical universe, and it is only in relation to God that humanity can “cash in” its potential, so to speak. Far from being concerned only or primarily with the immediate material concerns of human beings, the Bible stresses that only in consciousness of and service to the Reality that transcends immanent being can humanity understand its true identity. Human life is recognized as fleeting and, in immanent and material terms, almost trite:

Consider, for example, Psalm 103: 14-17 (note that I have left all gendered pronouns referring to God in place; the reader should not take this as my approval of such pronouns. All quotes are from the English Standard Version):

For [God] knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children.

Humanity is “dust” and “grass”, formless and fleeting: it is only by God’s continual creating and sustaining act that humans exist, and it is only in God’s loving act that we can have any hope. This same theme is present throughout the Bible; consider Isaiah 29:15-16:

Ah, you who hide deep from the LORD your counsel, whose deeds are in the dark, and who say, “Who sees us? Who knows us?” You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, “He did not make me”; or the thing formed say of him who formed it, “He has no understanding”?

Here again, any sense of human autonomy from the Ground of Being and Becoming from which it sprang is quashed–only through understanding of the meaning of existence, which is objectively determined apart from humanity, can the particular human harmonize themselves with the reality in which they live. Again, humans are not the center here, but rather a periphery offered meaning and importance precisely to the degree that they conform themselves to the Center, which gives them being in the first place. The writer of deutero-Isaiah continues this theme and even the same metaphor in Isaiah 45:9:

“Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker, those who are nothing but potsherds among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’ Does your work say, ‘The potter has no hands’?

Job also takes up this theme of human impermanence and seeming unimportance, even demanding that God leave him alone to enjoy what little passing pleasure he might:

“Man who is born of a woman is few of days and full of trouble. He comes out like a flower and withers; he flees like a shadow and continues not. And do you open your eyes on such a one and bring me into judgment with you? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? There is not one. Since his days are determined, and the number of his months is with you, and you have appointed his limits that he cannot pass, look away from him and leave him alone,
that he may enjoy, like a hired hand, his day.

This lament, the opening of chapter 14, is later met with God’s reproval in the closing chapters, which maintain humanity’s determined and circumscribed existence while maintaining both God’s transcendent Otherness and sovereignty. Again, there is little room for a hubristic, anthropocentric reading here.

The Christian New Testament leans heavily on these images, continuing the insistence that the meaning–and indeed salvation–of humanity can come only via the human’s willingness to recognize and follow God, not on any human action itself. Thus James warns his comrades:

Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation, because like a flower of the grass he will pass away. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the grass; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits.

Here, even the rich person who seems in control of his or her life, with independent means and social power, is revealed as limited and contingent: the process of becoming will roll over them just as surely as it will over any other particular being in the world; death comes for all life. Similarly, the first letter of Peter directly quotes the lines from Psalm 103 above. And we have only skimmed the surface of this theme’s presence throughout Scripture: a number of other Psalms (e.g. 22, 90, 92) as well as Ecclesiastes explore the theme in greater breadth. But let’s not get carried away with quoting the text–I hope the point has been made.

This, of course, does not mean that religious people are often not anthropocentric in their thinking–but it does suggest, and I would say decisively so, that the source of this anthropocentrism is not their religiosity, but indeed the humanism that informs modern social thought. And here lies the interesting yet often unexplored tension within modern life. For it is modern social thought–social contract Liberalism in the Locke/Rousseau vein–that collides headlong with the scientific determinism of the 19th and 20th centuries–especially the Behaviorism of say, Skinner. The idea that human beings are largely determined and powerless in an often hostile universe is not at all threatening to a biblical view of the world–as we saw above, the Bible itself repeatedly asserts this very fact! It is humanism that finds this view of the world unacceptable and oppressive, for it suggests that humans, despite all our inventive cleverness and power, are ultimately unable to liberate ourselves from our material constraints. This would suggest that it is the largely unspoken yet ubiquitous classical Liberal view of humanity that, contradictorily, leads fundamentalist Christians to so vociferously reject scientific claims that seem to challenge an anthropocentric view of the universe, whether this is the Big Bang or evolutionary theory.

This will likely strike many readers as an odd claim, but, as counterintuitive as it is, I think its a much more accurate reading than the credulous pigeon-holing that Lee employs in his Alternet article. Fundamentalism, after all, is a religious movement that came about precisely to counter the rise of a robust Science in the 19th century; though its roots can be seen in resistance to early historical critical work on the Bible, it is not until geology and then biology undermined traditional readings of the creation stories that a full-throated ‘fundamentalism’ arrived on the scene. But this reaction already shows a major shift in the reading of Scripture, for creation stories that had meant to point to the mystery of creation had been bent–under the guiding rubric of humanism–to instead provide a firm basis for absolute human knowledge of the physical world. It is easy to forget that the basis for Evangelical and fundamentalist theology was and is (primarily) the Swiss Reformation–led by John Calvin, himself an avowed humanist. It was humanism that led to the idea that the Bible could be simply and directly translated–freeing the laity to interpret the text on their own, without ecclesiastical guidance (or interference, depending on one’s view). Although this certainly gave lay Christians more direct access to the Bible, it also meant that this highly diverse and ancient text was divorced from the cultural, philosophical, and hermeneutical context in which it was written–leading easily to a literalistic mode of reading in which the vast majority of the significance of the text is lost. This is, I think, precisely how the theocentric Bible can come to be read in a highly subjective, self-indulgent anthropocentric mode.

Thus, the real conflict here is not between religion and science, but between humanism and science. This seems paradoxical, precisely because we are so used to thinking of science as both the product of and servant to the humanist project: and again, medical, transportation, and information technology breakthroughs fit this narrative well. The last 2 centuries have been witness to an incredible surge in human knowledge, and that knowledge has led to human manipulation of the material environment in ways that have expanded human lifespan and quality of life (at least for those lucky enough to live in “developed” nations and of sufficient class status). This is an obvious historical fact. But of course, this same knowledge has also had its dark ramifications–not only in the development of military technology and the various negative “side effects” of industrialized society (pollution, rising levels of obesity, displacement of traditional culture, etc.) but also in the increased recognition of human beings as more object than subject. The Cartesian/Kantian view of human personhood as based in transcendental reason has collapsed. Humans now are immanent things, objects of science. This has resulted in massive medical breakthroughs–for only as a physical object can the human body be studied and healed scientifically–but it has also raised profound and unsettling questions: for can an object have intrinsic ethical value? When a person was understood as an immaterial soul, the separation of value and fact was not fatal to the maintenance of ethical realism. But if a person is no more than a body, how is a robust ethics to be maintained?

Herein lies the collision of what we might call “early” and “late” modernity: Locke, Rousseau, Descartes and even Kant inhabited a world of transcendent souls animating material bodies. Since the 19th century, this view of humanity has been challenged to the point of obsolescence: yet it remains the basis of our social thought. This philosophical view is necessary so long as we want to maintain modern liberal values of freedom and human rights, as well as the sense of human dignity, because there is no scientific basis for such claims. One cannot show, empirically, the existence of human rights. Nietzsche recognized that the collapse of transcendence meant the end of the old ethics just as much as it challenged old religious views of Divinity; Heidegger too saw the implications for classical Liberalism–and post-structuralist and postmodern thought has continued to drive home these conclusions. Yet, modern society remains caught in the limbo between humanist social thought and scientific determinism. It seems to me that the resistance to evolutionary thought and an “old” universe is as much about salvaging a sense of meaning to human existence–any meaning, religious or otherwise–as it is about defending a particular religious position. Fundamentalist Christians strike me more as the humanist canaries in the coal mine, rather than real countercultural traditionalists. And of course, they are far from the only people frightened by the conclusions of modern science and its manifestation in technology; lamentations of consumerism, the banality of industrialism, and the “disenchanted” nature of modern self-consciousness are common, especially among the artistic Left. What is perhaps unique about fundamentalists, however, is a recognition, even if it is pre-critical, that there is no “going back”–once one accepts the scientific view of the world, the realm of value and meaning seems forever lost.

I am not suggesting that we side with the fundamentalists in their angry, anti-intellectual assault. I am, however, suggesting 2 things that I think Lee–and many others–have missed. First off, fundamentalist angst is primarily humanist, not religious. Secondly, they aren’t wrong for sounding the alarm–their outbursts point to a central contradiction in modern life, the gap between our social/ethical and scientific/technological endeavors. The haughty cultured dismissal of fundamentalist fear only proves the uncritical complacency of many pundits and commentators. In the final analysis, if we are going to affirm science and ethical realism, we will need a new synthesis, a new way forward, that is not dependent on the transcendental individualism of humanistic classical Liberalism. The alternative to developing such a new way forward can only be the ethical relativism that post-structuralism and postmodernity promise. I would argue that such a synthesis can actually only come by reaffirming the theocentric view we briefly touched on above–but that’s a topic needing its own post.

Talking About God, Part 1: Fundamentalism

“God” is a word that is at once fundamental and mysterious. Most people talk about God–affirmatively or dismissively–as if they are talking about something they are well acquainted with. God is understood as a celestial father, or an impersonal force, or a wrathful ruler, or an-loving presence. God is attested to in a variety of scriptures; people claim to have experienced God in a variety of revelations and mystical experiences. The more skeptical dismiss God as a psychological aberration or a political ploy. So what is God? When we are talking about God–that is, when we are doing theology–what is it that we’re talking about?

I’m more interested in talking about what I think God is (and isn’t…we’ll get to the problems with this language in a bit) rather than in dismissing all the approaches to thinking about God that I disagree with. For one thing, there are a lot of ideas about God. Most of them are either outdated or crazy, and there’s centuries worth of literature that enumerates, in excruciating detail, just why those approaches are so wrong. But I will touch briefly on the main currents of thought present in the West now, as I see them. I will now launch in a very long discussion of them, since once I started writing, I realized I couldn’t really say anything worthwhile in just a few hundred words.

Basically, I think you can talk about three broad approaches to thinking about God: one is fundamentalism, which argues that there is a book somewhere that tells us everything we need to know about God. The book is assumed to be revelation, that is, the unadulterated Word of God, unquestionable, and without which any knowledge of God is impossible. The second is complete skepticism, which dismisses the idea of God outright as either a psychological aberration, a holdover from our primitive days that we need to evolve beyond; a cynical political invention used to manipulate poor and/or foolish people; or an idea that intellectually deficient people hold on to as they face the brutal reality of life. Third, there are people who attempt to build a sort of compromise approach. They don’t deny or assert God in any particular way. They often believe in God in the same way that we believe in black holes: they’re interesting, but irrelevant. This is approach is common among folks who ascribe either to agnosticism or who believe in God and may even define themselves as belonging to a specific religious group, but who don’t really assert anything in particular. Often, these folks treat their religion more as a cultural or social group that they enjoy being a part of. While this approach to spirituality has plenty of things going for it–it tends to be highly tolerant, for example–it also strips religion of most of its social criticism and spiritual insight. A compromised theology is unlikely to inspire people to change themselves or their society. It is easily co-opted by the society around it, and lacks any “prophetic” potential to really challenge anyone or anything.

OK, so let’s talk about these each in turn really quickly fundamentalism now and I’ll address the others in subsequent posts (Parts 2 & 3). Fundamentalism is pretty ubiquitous in the US these days. Most people probably assume its the default form of Christianity, and probably think that most Christians are die-hard fundamentalists. The reality, though, is that fundamentalism is a relatively recent phenomenon. While there have always been people who have insisted on a very literal reading of the Bible, for the most part, the dominant thinkers in both Eastern and Western Christianity didn’t, for centuries on end. It was the rise of modern science, which overturned many traditional mythologies, that really launched fundamentalism as a major theological force within western Christianity. With geology, biology, and physics all questioning traditional creation myths, histories, and ontologies, some Christians felt backed into a corner. But it’s worth pointing out that the initial reaction of many prominent theologians to, for example, Darwin’s Origins of Species was positive; they immediately perceived that evolutionary theory could be easily dovetailed to an understanding of God as a creative agent in the world. It would take a less-than literal reading of some passages of the Bible, but most serious readers of the Bible for centuries had known that most of the Bible was never meant to be read literally anyway. It used metaphor, analogy, myth, and poetry to discuss things that can’t be easily discussed–or in some cases, discussed at all–with literal language.

But quickly, a number of church leaders, especially within some Protestant denominations in North America, came out railing against Darwin, modern geology, and any other science that challenged their comfortable interpretations of religious truth. Even though Jesus himself directly challenged religious orthodoxy, a large number of Christian leaders were uninterested in any contemporary challenges, and worked to turn lay believers against the new sciences.

It would be easy to dismiss this as simply an act of ignorance or creedal closed-mindedness, but the truth is probably a lot more complicated. Ultimately, fundamentalism is a lot more about politics than theology. Wealthy elites always need a system to keep the people beneath them in line. Normally, they do this in at least two central ways: first, they pay some small proportion of people decent wages to act as police or soldiers, who then keep the status quo in place through force or threat of force. This is obvious, but in some ways is less insidious than the other major approach: the elites also cultivate ideologies–political, religious, economic, and otherwise–that act to legitimize their position in the society. If they can convince a large enough minority of those below them that they (the elites) deserve their wealth, power, and privilege, those same elites can save a lot of money on police and military security, and much of the work of maintaining the status quo will be done for them by the very people they are exploiting.

Now, some more skeptically-minded folks (who we’ll get to in a bit in a subsequent post because this post is already nearly 2000 words long) might, at this point, argue that religion itself is nothing but a very old and complex form of social manipulation by elites. This is a tempting answer, since it ties everything up in a neat bow, but unfortunately, much of the reality of religion is left outside the knot. For one, religions have launched far too many riots, revolutions, and resistance movements to explain their existence so simply. And these upheavals are not the result of some peripheral aspect of religion; most religions’ central texts are full of contempt and condemnation–and often damnation–for the wealthy and powerful. The idea that they were designed to act as an opium of the masses doesn’t fit the history or the texts. The truth is more complex than that. However, such skeptical dismissals of religion aren’t all wrong–it’s clear that many, really, all, religions, once they become popular enough over a given group, are often appropriated by elites for their own ends. So even if the vestments weren’t sewn in the first place to act as the Emperor’s New Clothes, they certainly are often custom-tailored to the purpose later on.

Fundamentalism represents the primary approach to this appropriation in the modern era. While I’m now definitely diving out of theology and more deeply into politics, I don’t think one can understand fundamentalism without talking about politics. The initial reaction of a number of theologians and Christian leaders to Darwin’s Origin of Species, as I mentioned above, was actually positive. They saw his theory of natural selection as a newer, more scientific way of interpreting God’s creative agency in the universe. But within a few years, that sort of open-minded critical engagement with science was being dismissed, especially in North American Evangelical Christianity, as surrendering to an ominous new threat. Battle lines were drawn, with “Bible-believing” Christians on the one side and the Enemies of Civilization on the other. Industrialization had created vast new wealth, but had also plunged millions into not only horrific poverty, but grindingly inhuman work. The social order was being completely overturned, and many elites recognized a serious threat to their power within society. And a number of Christian leaders decided to step in, ally themselves to those within power, and offer their services to keep at least one sizable segment of the population from embracing any unsettling new ideas–scientific or political. They overlooked the fact that at its heart, the Gospel message is one of liberation, of equality, and of rejection of power, wealth, and privilege, and instead crafted–like so many church leaders before them–a modified Christianity designed not to nurture, enlighten, and liberate their fellow Christians, but rather one customized to keep their fellow Christians in their place.

In the 20th century, the clearest demonstration of this is the “Culture Wars” which were launched by conservative thinkers in the 1970s. Christian allegiance was reinterpreted to mean toeing the line on a limited number of issues–especially a rejection of gay rights and an absolute ban on abortion. Other issues much more central to the Gospel–combating poverty, resisting war, denouncing wealth and power, building loving and compassionate societies–were all sidelined or completely ignored, because they represented a threat to those in power. Gay rights and access to abortion are largely unimportant to powerful people, who have the money, access, and immunity to pursue whatever sexual lives they choose, and the resources to access, for example, contraceptives or abortions if they need. Money can buy anything, even if its illegal. So these two issues are great ones for the elites’ fundamentalist allies to focus on, since by focusing millions of Evangelicals on them, other questions will be left unaddressed, and the status quo can be much more easily maintained. The fact that this has led many Christians to hate, persecute, and even attack and kill homosexuals, their allies, abortion providers, women who seek abortions, and their allies, is seen by fundamentalist leaders not as deeply un-Christian and shameful, but rather as evidence that the Culture Wars are being won.

So what does all of this mean for theology? What does all of this political maneuvering have to do with our understanding of God? Well, the fundamentalist vision of God is one crafted not out of intellectual or spiritual exploration or research, but one that has been designed to fit into the fundamentalist social framework. So, through fundamentalism, politics invades theology and subjugates legitimate theological questions to partisan interests. Not surprisingly, then, the fundamentalist vision of God is not only childishly simplistic, but out of line with Biblical and Patristic theological viewpoints. Fundamentalism isn’t a re-capturing of Christianity’s traditional core, its an utterly warped caricature of that core.

The heart of the most central prophet books of the Tanakh (Old Testament) as well as the Christian Gospel was and is a cry for social justice. Isaiah, for example, in chapter 10:1-3, warns “…those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees,to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?” Psalm 12, verse 5: “Because of the oppression of the weak and the groaning of the needy, I will now arise,” says the Lord. “I will protect them from those who malign them.” Jesus told his disciples, “[i]f you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” In the Epistle of James, chapter 2:3-4, the writer warns his readers that “if you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?”

The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition has always been social justice. God was seen time and time again as the Avenger who would punish the wealthy and powerful for their arrogance, selfishness, and oppression. Fundamentalism’s primary role is in distracting modern Christians from this reality and convincing them that their faith obligates them to toeing a partisan line designed to make it easier for rich people to exploit them. The very heart of the Christian faith is the crucifixion and resurrection: a poor peasant from a peripheral province of a vast empire is killed by the State for sedition. His resurrection was seen then as the proof of God’s promise to overturn the corrupt worldly order and institute the Kingdom of Heaven, where, in the words of Isaiah, chapter 40:4-5: “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all people will see it together…” Fundamentalism is the modern incarnation of the effort by those in power to obscure this message, and replace it with a reactionary one designed not to inaugurate the Kingdom of Heaven, but to keep the current social order intact for as long as possible. As such, fundamentalism is a betrayal of Christ’s message and a huge failure on the part of the church.

OK! So that ended up being way longer than I originally intended. I recognize that my “history” of fundamentalism is very simplistic; I wasn’t trying to describe all the specific historical causes involved in creating the modern fundamentalist movement in all its complexity, but rather in explaining what I think essentially motivates it. I’ll address the other two major modern approaches to theology in later posts, and then try to outline the alternative(s) that many people are developing and that I think is(are) crucial for the future of spiritual systems in general and Christianity in particular.