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BRLSI BELIEF LECTURE SERIES To some an irrelevance, to others vital sustenance. Belief is a touchstone to the human predicament. An unquenched thirst for spirituality coexists with numbing materialism. Thinning congregations in some communities belie proliferation in others. In some ecstatic, in others vacuous. What is belief? Why does it bind, why does it divide? This New Series offers no pulpits; we seek speakers whose subjects will interest no less the Unsure than the Believer – they should fascinate all.
The Utility of Schism: Schism is Good for You Professor William Gosling BRLSI Member 7th April 2004
Summary Religion is found in all existing cultures and goes back to late Neolithic times: 20,000 BC, maybe earlier. It is considered characteristic of our species alone, Homo sapiens sapiens and none other, not even Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. A massive worldwide UNESCO enquiry in 1992, just after the death of Communism, like nothing before or since, produced results shown by these charts.(see fig. 1) The top graph shows the belief systems of world population, showing 80% religious (any religion), 5% atheist, and 15% not religious, that is don’t knows and agnostics. Overwhelmingly, people are religious it seems. Indeed if you put a pistol to the heads of the don’t knows and agnostics, I suspect that quite a lot would pray, so the religious proportion is probably higher still. Most people have some faith. If we include atheism as a belief system, we find 85% have beliefs, and 80% are religious. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed ‘We are born believing: men bear beliefs as trees bear apples’, but we don’t of course all believe in the same thing. The middle chart shows our religious affiliations: Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese folk. Our chairman mentioned that most religions had some kind of writing but there are religions, of which the most numerous are Chinese folk religions, where there are no written documents, just verbal tradition. Then you’ve got various tribal religions, and Sikhs, Jews and others. I always think how amazing it is that the Jewish people, so few on this graph (3%), have made, and continue to make, such an enormous contribution to world culture. Those religious groups break down into subgroups. For example, the Christians, the largest group, twice as many as Muslims, break down into Roman Catholic (more than half), Protestants, Orthodox Catholic, Anglican and some others. The other great religions perhaps showed perhaps as much diversity. For example, Islam (any Muslims please forgive the simplification). First the Kharijites, who still exist, a bit like Puritans, morally strict but also very egalitarian, their decisions belonging within the community. Then there are the Sufi, the mystics, who are a group found in all great religions. The Sunni and the Shii, about seven to one in numbers, split apart over who should be Caliph. A little branch, the Druzes, comes off the Shii in the 11th century, and the Shii subsequently split into twelvers and seveners, according to the numbers of Imams they consider legitimate. Islam dates from the 7th century, but Buddhism started long before Christ, and at the council of Patna, around 300BC, split into the Thervada, or ancient tradition, sometimes impolitely called Hinayana, and the Mahayana, the great vehicle which itself divides into Tibetan, Chinese and Japanese, of which Zen is an offshoot. Hinduism is even more complex, more a group of religions, with perhaps 30,000 gods, though all are seen by some Hindu theologians as forms or manifestations of one high god Brahman. Of Judaism, Rabbi Hillel tells the story of Jewish nations waiting around the foot of Mount Sinai while Moses was receiving the Law. No two Jews saw the same thing, and many strands resulted. Once religions split they rarely reunite. Schisms diverge; they develop different doctrines and attitudes, and do not come back together. Gerald Brennan said ‘Religions are kept alive by heresies, which are really sudden explosions of faith. Dead religions do not produce them.’ Schisms hardly ever heal, but instead may split again, developing in a kind of tree structure, an ever increasing complexity, leading to a jungle of faiths, persuasions, movements, churches, sects and so on. Within the scientific world divisions occur, but they do not lead to schisms. They are transient, and reunite around a new synthesis, a new paradigm. Science is therefore one, but religions are many, their old and new paradigms coexisting, serving different populations. Schisms arise, of course, from irreconcilable disagreements, sometimes over doctrine, as between Catholics and Monophysites, sometimes over governance, as with the Muslims, sometimes over observances, as when Roman and Orthodox Catholics feuded the date for Easter and the ‘Filioque’ clause in the Creed. These differences are usually exacerbated by personality issues, as seen in the Catholic and Protestant wars in 17th century France. Few schismatic factions reunite, but some die, for the Gods too are mortal in their particular instantiations. Some more primitive cults are long gone, such as those of Zeus and Asur, and some higher ones, like Mithras and the mystery cults. Even the Christian persuasions die; there are no more Sandemanians, like the physicist Michael Faraday. The Shakers too have withered away, their furniture admired but their people almost gone, as also are the ‘Peculiar People of God’ of East Anglia where I grew up. Cutting across these vertical divisions may be found horizontal planes of cleavage, representing different approaches to religion. Thus the mystical traditions found in Christian Quakers. Islamic Sufi and Zen Buddhists have much in common. Asceticism is found in Eremites, Anchorites, even in Buddhism, which specifically rejects it. A common lifestyle belies their theologies. Monasticism (Cenobites: monks and nuns) may be found widely in the major religions, even in the Shakers born of the eminently reasonable Society of Friends, the Quakers, who scorn all outward forms of religion. These horizontal and vertical divisions make for a very complex picture. If you measure success by numbers, Christianity is much more successful than all the others, having twice the numbers within Islam. Why? Some Church historians say Christianity was favoured by chance happenings, some say the miracle of its survival shows the existence of God, or proves it alone is true and the other faiths are not. I argue that since we have no certain way of recognising or testing it, the question of truth is void. From a standpoint of its natural history, the striking feature of Christianity has been its mutability, enabling it to adapt quickly to the changing needs of established groups, and of new populations, a history in which new schismatic forms coexist with earlier variants. Conventionally thought to be a scandal, I wish to argue that present multiplicity of Christian denominations and persuasions should rather be seen as a great strength, indicating superior adaptive capacity. This evolution has been persuasively described by Hans Küng, the greatest theologian of our time. Much influenced, I believe, by the argument that science develops through a series of revolutions, Küng argues that religion does change by slow adaptation but that sharp revolutions or discontinuities occur, across whose boundaries dramatically different perceptions of religious truths, different paradigms confront each other. To take the Christian Church because it’s the one I know best, let us look at some of these revolutionary changes.
(Fig.2) This rather busy illustration (but it’s a busy Church), starts with Jesus crucified at top left, the present day being on the right, the time scale being somewhat nonuniform. Soon after the Crucifixion, the Jerusalem Christian church was established, Paradigm 1, or P1, an unstable church with many problems. St Peter was at its head until he left Jerusalem with a group of followers to establish a small schismatic community on the shores of the Sea of Gallilee. Peter subsequently went on to Rome and crucifixion (if you believe the Roman Catholics), or else to Antioch (the more plausible Orthodox view) where he was bishop for some years before being trampled to death in a riot. After Peter, the Jerusalem church was led by James, one of the four brothers of Jesus, but it was not at all like present day Christian churches. Its members were practising Jews, who still kept the law of Moses and attended the Synagogue. They also conducted their own religious rites on Sundays, conveniently the day after the Jewish Sabbath. In P1 Jesus was seen as the promised Jewish Messiah. He’s called the ‘Seal’ of the prophets, (a title later applied to Muhammad) and he taught the Jews what they must do for salvation. They saw nothing miraculous about his birth to Miriam, the wife of Joseph, who went on to bear seven more children (4 brothers and 3 sisters), conceived like Jesus in the ordinary way, as stated both in Matthew’s and Marks’s gospels. They saw Jesus as human, exactly like the rest of us, but adopted after his death by God as His Son, in recognition of his actions in life. This adoption by God after death is not unique in Jewish history. This religious form was P1, its language Aramaic. It had limited appeal to non-Jews, unenthusiastic about Jewish food laws and circumcision, and many seeing P1 theology as simplistic. Judaism was itself a proselytising religion at that time, but made limited headway for the same reasons. There is a rhyme: Roses are reddish, Violets are bluish, If it wasn’t for Christmas We all would be Jewish. ...but I’m doubtful! Jewish Christianity dies out after the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple, in 135 AD, following the revolt by Bar Kochba, who claimed to be the Messiah, killing Christians wherever he could because of their rival Messiah. Christians left Jerusalem never to return in their P1 persuasion. The P1 paradigm then became extinct, and conventionally remains so, though some think Muhammad’s view of Christianity is derived from this source. There is an organisation called ‘Jews for Jesus’ in the US (you’ll find them on the Internet), practising Jews who believe that Jesus was the Messiah, although I am sure there is no real continuity with the Jerusalem Church. In the 1st century, St Paul carried Christianity beyond the Jewish community, establishing the Catholic Church (Catholic means all inclusive, that is for Jews and non-Jews alike) into the culturally Greek world of the Eastern Mediterranean. There P1 could have made no headway, and it underwent a paradigm change to a Hellenistic form, which is P2. Now the Orthodox Catholic Church, this is the oldest Christian paradigm to survive, even if much changed in its Greek, Russian, Serbian and other forms. P2 emerged within an environment of well established Greek philosophical thought about God and human existence, some of which it absorbed or syncretised. Jesus was seen as the Jewish Messiah, but also the Christos, born of a virgin, the divine Logos, and the Son of God, not by later adoption but from all eternity. As a framework for these ideas, though not directly mentioned in the Bible, the doctrine of the Trinity was developed by Origen and the Capadoccian Fathers. One passage in John gives Jesus saying ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh unto the Father save by me’, which may or may not be an assertion of being the 2nd Person of the Trinity, but gives no other clue to Trinitarian significance. The Koran (in Sura 5) purports to reveal that the Christians’ Trinity consists of God the Father, Jesus and the Virgin Mary, which it certainly doesn’t, but conceivably did for Jerusalem Christians. As to the Virgin Mary, the curious idea of virginity as having special sanctity was quite unacceptable to 1st century Jews, so you won’t find it in P1, and it borders on the offensive, of course, to modern minds. Greek myth and tradition considered Heracles and so on, the Greek heroes and demi-gods, to be semi-divine, born of the gods and mortal women. Thus the doctrine of Jesus’ virgin birth, which appears quite early in P2, was necessary to survival in the Greek world. By the time St Irenaeus of Lyon (130-200 AD) described Mary (no longer Miriam) as the universal Mother and first Eve of the New Creation, Catholic Christians believed that Jesus was born of a virgin, but even then, towards the 2nd and 3rd century, many didn’t exclude the possibility that other children in the family were conceived after Jesus in the usual way. Only around 500 AD was the Doctrine of Virgin Birth universally accepted to imply Mary’s perpetual virginity. A little later the Koran repeats this, but by then Mary is seen as Theotokos, the miraculous mother of God of ancient tradition. Though people think this rather scandalous, the developing perception of Miriam, though pre-figured as Theotokos in earlier thinking, into Mary the Blessed Virgin was no more falsifiable than any other religious statement, nor was the Theotokos in any way devalued. So P2 asserts itself with a new Christian doctrine and a new church organisation under the Roman Emperor, then at Byzantium, to whom answered three, and later five Patriarchs, though their loose hierarchical authority allowed much autonomy to individual Bishops. The Bishop of Rome, only later styled Pope, was one of the three original Patriarchs, but subordinate to the Emperor, who deposed Popes, having two of them successfully tried for heresy. The language of the P2 church, like that of the Empire, was Greek. Even in Rome, Latin had lapsed except as official language, reviving as the Roman vernacular only in the middle of the 3rd century. But for a long time Greek remained the language of faith, learning and trade. So flourished P2 Christianity, for as long as the empire remained strong. Catholicism became the official religion of the empire under Constantine in 325 AD, at which point the definitive Christian Bible was created, through selection, creation and rewriting. Tensions arose over the next century, the western Church language now being Latin, the Patriarch of Rome Leo I seeking also to be seen as the Spiritual leader, but the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, trying to resolve these tensions, allowed him to be seen only as primus inter pares. They did however expel the Coptic Church for heresy. The Catholics considered that Jesus, during his incarnation, had two natures, respectively human and divine, whereas to the Coptic Monphysites he had only one divine nature. This was not the first heresy, but it was the first Schism in the Catholic Church. To persisting tensions between Rome and the other Patriarchs was added the threat of the German tribes. Alaric had briefly occupied Rome in 410 AD, but the last Roman Emperor in the West, Romulus Augustus, was deposed in 476 by the Roman army of Odoacer. So political power in the west had fallen to the Germanic people, and though Justinian, Emperor in Byzantine did briefly reconquer Italy, he couldn’t hold it, and after his death early in the 6th century, Byzantium suffered a long, inexorable military and political decline until it fell to the Turks in 1453. The Germanic peoples now dominated the west, and began to be drawn into the Christian world, particularly towards Rome. From then on as the Roman Patriarchate moved towards greater autonomy, taking territory at its back in its long struggle with the Orthodox Catholics of the East. Clovis, king of the Franks, was baptised in 498, the Spanish were Catholic from 586, and Britain came under Roman control increasingly from 597, and entirely after the Synod of Whitley in 664. There had been a vigorous Romano-British, or Celtic church from the 2nd century (probably started by Orthodox Catholics or Copts), but the Roman Patriarchate soon dominated in England, indeed in Britain, and continued its hegemony for a thousand years. Not without danger from the Emperor in the East, the Roman Patriarchate gradually allied itself to the Frankish kingdom. In 751 Pope Zachary anointed Pepin III, Pepin the Short, King of the Franks ‘by the Grace of God’. Charlemagne established control over such a large territory in the western empire that he saw himself as an Emperor in his own right, and in 800 Leo III crowned him Emperor of the Romans, in St Peter’s. This break with Byzantium, where there was also an Emperor of the Romans, removed from Byzantium and gave to the Germanic Emperors the power to appoint Popes, or depose them. In 1054, Pope Leo IX was excommunicated by Byzantium. From then on, there were two Catholic churches, the Orthodox Catholics in the east, and in the west the Roman Catholics. For Rome this was no disaster, rather an opportunity for dramatic renewal, for the enforcement of priestly celibacy (in contrast to the Orthodox practise to this day) and for the evolution of a more hierarchic style of governance, more like a monarchy, with a well-defined Curia under the Pope, and the appointment of Cardinals, like Church trustees. This Schism from P2, accelerated by the German connection, encouraged a new theology depending on St Augustine and later on Thomas Aquinus, the Doctrine of Original Sin being refurbished, that of the Trinity restated, giving Father, Son and Holy Ghost equal status, and the cult of the Blessed Virgin (unkindly known to Protestants as ‘Maryolatry’) becoming central. Thus emerged, coexisting with P2 and a few small, supposedly heretical, groups like the Coptic Monophysites, the Latin Christian Paradigm, P3. It had some difficulties with heresies, such as its bloody crusade against the Cathars to prevent the development of a Gnostic Christian Church in France, but survived largely unmodified through mediaeval times, whilst the P2 Orthodox continued in the East. At the beginning of the 16th century however, in the West pressures for change could no longer be contained, and Pope Leo X, having hesitated for 6 weeks over making Martin Luther a Cardinal, finally excommunicated him. Wherever this new radical movement, the Reformation, took control of religious life, profound changes were made: clerical celibacy was abandoned, Papal supremacy denied. In a doctrinal revolution, which saw the Bible as the only source of authenticity, the Protestant paradigm, P4, was born. With a more modern political cast, as eastern and western empires declined it allied itself to secular rulers of emerging nation states. Now there were three forms of Christianity: a conservative P2 still surviving, P3 reinvigorated again by the Council of Trent after the P4 schism, and the wholly new P4 Protestant paradigm, lively, vigorous, transforming the church. There were two major figures here, Luther and Calvin, a monk and a church lawyer, who created somewhat different Protestant Churches. In England the English Church regained its independence as Anglicans, who consider themselves Catholic yet are Protestant, and had their own offshoots, Quakers and later Methodists. A schismatic group within Roman Catholicism was the Old Catholics, who wouldn’t like me to say that they appeared in the 19th century, as many think. They disagree with the doctrine of Papal infallibility, and claim to be a strand going a long way back, before 1054. They may be; as the Jansenists in the late 16th and early 17th century they had an important role in France. They now call themselves Liberal Catholics. The 17th and 18th centuries brought renewed philosophical speculation, with thinkers like Descartes, Leibnitz and Hegel, which with the emergence of modern science led to a new Christian paradigm P5, based neither on scriptural not church authority. This new liberal theology, P5, sees reason as the ultimate legitimating factor. Developed particularly through people like Friedrich Schleiermacher, this new more romantic theology believes that God is reached directly, intuitively and independently of dogma, and brings with it a new more democratic church order. This is P5. Hans Küng argued that a 6th paradigm is now forming, the post-liberal paradigm. If he’s right, P6 will be of the most profound human significance. With all these paradigms, is it really the same Christianity, the same religion we began with? Schleiermacher offers an excellent definition; ‘Christianity is a monotheistic religion of the teleological type which puts Jesus at its centre’, which does indeed accommodate paradigms P1 to P5. So it seems we haven’t abandoned Christianity in all this process of change. The central message is still that Jesus is Christ, God’s Messiah and Son and uses the same symbolism based on the same scriptures, though in culturally conditioned interpretations and instantiations, each a crucial step toward its present world pre-eminence. Religions compete with each other for a finite number of adherents, subject to continual attrition by death and defection, and cannot survive unless newcomers adopt them, particularly the young. This preferential selection process is so powerful that it can deprive a persuasion of its following within a single generation, or build one up to the widest acceptance almost as fast, as was the case with Islam, spreading across the world in just a generation after Muhammad’s death. Religions have all the four important characteristics of an evolving population: Coherence (permitting identification through time), Mutation (permitting change), Selective Propagation (within a population) and Mortality (allowing death). Thus religions evolve, but theirs is not genetic evolution. It is quite different. Propagation in Darwinian evolution is by breeding; a mutation with a lower reproduction probability will die out fast, a modal form also dies out but more slowly, while a mutation having a higher probability of reproduction will in time become the dominant form. Cultural evolution is analogous but more complicated. Dawkins describes ideas with high infectivity, infecting others, generation to generation but also laterally, and becoming dominant. Religions must change in order to evolve, to become dominant forms, but if they claim to be revealed by God, how can they change? Religions generally emphasize their supposedly timeless character, as revealed by God, yet they must evolve to meet the needs of new populations and cultural situations. How? Two common strategies work well. One strategy says ‘we haven’t changed, you just didn’t understand us before.’ In 1280 a Franciscan friar said the Pope’s pronouncements were infallibly true. Pope John XXII described the idea as the work of the Devil, yet in the 19th century the Roman church formally adopted the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility, saying that John XXII was denouncing only mistaken earlier forms of the doctrine. This strategy is very popular with Roman, Orthodox and Anglo Catholics. The other tactic, popular with Protestants, is to say we haven’t changed, merely restored to purity what was formerly corrupted. Martin Luther saw his Reformation as taking the church back to its Biblical basis (though the Christian Bible we know didn’t exist until 325 AD). Fundamentalists similarly take this line. ‘We’re getting back to the original, not changing anything’ (but of course they are). Attention is deflected from change by keeping archaic forms of language and dress. Though there is no enthusiasm at all for going back to P1, the Jerusalem Christian Church, with Jewish food laws, circumcision and the use of the Aramaic language, these strategies are universally adopted, bolstered by systematic archaism in vestments of the clergy, in liturgical language, etc. Whether by denial or rediscovery of earlier customs, the claim to permanence of faith can be asserted, whilst allowing essential change. Scholarship and forensic science have rescued reinterpretation from former degradations by forgery, and apologists use exegetical skills to reinterpret earlier statements, to show a meaning different from that formerly supposed, even by those that uttered them. Though perhaps misguided it is not necessarily dishonest. The devout naturally assume that past and present must reconcile, faith being eternal and unchanging. The adaptation of religion to changing cultural values is indispensable to its survival. The numerous religious instantiations (religions, churches, persuasions) require for their survival highly adaptive belief packages, even within a static, inherited, intrapsychic environment. Faiths are highly variable, capable of changing through mutation and syncretism. In successive generations, they can proliferate or die, according to their greater or lesser human acceptance. The world of faith is a vigorously evolving population of persuasions of unique appeal, each trying to displace the rest. They all endlessly change, and whilst asserting their beliefs, spread or decline. Even if the words used to express belief don’t change, their meanings do. Things human are never constant. There is no permanence in our doctrines or our practices, only its myth and contrived appearance. Just as we come better to understand the universe, so our religions must come to accept more insight, or die. Just as the universe evolves, so we are seized by this transforming power, as though our cultural evolution is God’s chosen means of reshaping us, and our religious representation of Him here on earth. Our present religions’ variety and condition are simply an extension of earlier evolutionary processes, subject to selection by competition for survival. Thus a positive role may be seen for atheism in God’s purpose for the universe. Atheists challenge all forms of religion, and thus apply selective pressure on evolving faith populations. They serve as predators to pull down the defective and the less robust, leaving only the fittest persuasions to survive, just as the cheetah taught the gazelle to run, and are God’s powerful tool to shape the worlds religions. What may be the consequences of accepting this God-given narrative? St Paul, standing on the Areopagos in Athens, declared (in Acts): ‘God that made the world and all things therein dwelleth not in temples made with hands.’ Nearer our time, William Penn in the 17th century, put the idea well: ‘The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious, and devout souls are everywhere of one religion, and when death hath taken off the mask, they will know one another, though the diverse liveries they wear here make them strangers.’ Perhaps none of the faiths presently claiming to bear God’s revelation has the power to achieve this purpose. Maybe all of them in this evolutionary religious process are only a part. Perhaps what we see is the continuous creation of religion, a process momentous beyond words, and for all we know, unique in the universe. Rather than being cosmically unimportant life forms, as some claim, maybe we humans are unique, engaged in a process of innovation, significant on the galactic scale and beyond. This earth might be the place where the grand design is working out at last, and it could conceivably be the only one. Martin Sturge Questions & Discussion Would one not expect the 3 monotheistic religions, with the improving knowledge, thirst and education of their members, in 500, 1000 or 1500 years to converge? The churches can only come together if they abandon their errors and indeed their identity, which is hard to do. What they get right they have in common, and is therefore not distinctive. It is what they get wrong that makes them what they are. It seems to me the errors are, in Roman Catholicism, their belief in authority; in Anglicanism their obsession with liturgy in trying to fill the pews; in certain branches of Islam; being too definitively legalistic. Is what survives better than what didn’t? Difficult question. Evolution does not produce ‘better’ animals, just better survivors. Yet you can only say religious evolution is just a blind alley if you believe the Universe is without purpose. I happen to see the Universe as moving towards a purpose, guided by God, as evolving religion may thus be too. It may succeed of course, because we are talking stochastic here. A Jewish tale has God, at the Creation of the Universe, turning to the Archangel Michael and saying ‘Let’s just hope it works.’ If it doesn’t He can always make another, and another, until it does. Maybe we are not the first. Do you believe in any truths? Some things are true: 1+1=2, since it defines 2. That is an analytical truth, but other kinds of truth are more difficult, being dependent on observation or consensus. Richard Rorty observed, ‘Truth is a compliment we pay to sentences that earn their keep.’ People say that science is true because it enables prediction, but predictive value does not necessarily indicate truth. Newton’s mechanics fail at very high speed and on very small scales. Maxwell’s electromagnetics derive from the idea of a ‘luminiferous ether’ whose existence was disproved in 1887, yet they still predict well, giving right answers except at high energy levels, where quantum mechanics is better. Conversely, failure of predictive ability, as in weather forecasting, does not prove untruth either, nor invalidate any theory. At a theological level, the trouble is that if God exists, being all powerful He can, if He wishes, make us observe anything He pleases, even silly things. Some Evangelical Christians argue that God created the world 6000 years ago, but also planted false evidence of much greater age of the Earth to test our faith. Is it true? I don’t know – but it can’t be disproved by rational process. Perhaps along the same lines the Bible and the Koran date only from 1850, and God faked human memory and all the evidence to make them seem older. Yes of course, it’s absurd, but you equally can’t disprove it. God can do anything. Famously, Bishop Barclay argued that we are merely figments of God’s imagination, perfectly articulated because that’s the way God is. Could that be true? Frankly, it doesn’t matter, provided we’re such jolly good figments you can’t tell the difference. Whether what we conceive as the truth is only a perfectly contrived deception is indifferent to all tests, provided the deception is indeed perfect. (An inaudible question) I’m being asked, can’t we leave the God question alone – just ‘bracket’ it as Husserl might have said, and move on? The trouble is that an apparent proof of God’s nonexistence could be of His making and therefore proves nothing. So even if we suspect He is not there we can never be sure – that’s an analytical truth about all omnipotent beings. Religion is not a game of truth, it’s a game of consequences. If you have certain beliefs, what do you do as a result? That you can discuss, but not truth. Then on what do you base your own faith? On faith alone, judging its substance by its consequences. I observe a community, I ask ‘Do they live well, die well (very important), care for their children and their old, do good things?’ If on the whole they do, I see substance in their beliefs, otherwise not. George Fox said ‘Let your lives preach.’ Is it possible that early homo sapiens sapiens had spiritual belief and that we might just be genetically disposed towards religious evolution? I quite agree, but why do you say ‘just’? Do you mean it all comes down to chance? Chance is agency without intent, but we can’t know there’s no intent. If I were God and wanted to create the universe, I wouldn’t do it the way it says in the Bible, I would start a process of evolution. I’d make a huge universe, with lots of stars and planets; the bigger stars burning out fast creating the materials for living creatures; with enough stars etc you’ll get a planet somewhere a suitable distance from its star, with water, and you’ll get life, evolution and sentient beings, if you want. Maybe that’s what God wants, and that’s how He has gone about it. So one shouldn’t say ‘just’. In your life, and from what you have said, do you detect a tendency since the intellectual 60s, that the diversity of religions is seen less to suggest bogusness than successive impressions of reality? The world seems to be running away from us all the time. I was reared an Anglican, became an atheist at 16 as everybody should, then was Buddhist for about 8 years until I got fed up with all that Sanskrit, then a Quaker for a long time, then an Anglican again. I’ve never seen diversity as impoverishing, I think it’s very positive, most successful religions are prepared to be diverse. If the evolution of religion is part of God’s purpose, then counting heads is actually quite important. The Orthodox Catholics are extra conservative, not very diverse and haven’t developed their doctrines much. Their numbers have not kept pace with population growth in their areas. By contrast, the Roman Catholics have burst out of early patterns and look at their numbers. Diversity is now more widely accepted. Religions that in the past were far apart and ignorant of each other now communicate. Once few Christians knew about Buddhism or Islam and the rest despised what they ignored, but now the expression ‘The one true faith’ is less commonly heard than it was a generation ago. You said that God planned working though evolution. What about the Taliban? Why does God allow the Taliban? We can’t answer. Why does God let little children die of terrible diseases? Same response. All I can say is that it seems God is constrained by the nature of his own creation. If His presence is too obvious, the whole game’s up, we all become robots, we lose thought and judgement, which seems not to be what He wants. It’s all part of the famous problem of evil, which has a perfectly good answer that only God understands. God is outside time and space. Our thought processes are time sequences, which is a terrible limitation. Thank heavens for the twin Graces of error and doubt. (Voice from the chair: Doubt is the search!) Exactly You stated that God is omnipotent, yet what you’ve just said suggests he’s not. There are constraints set by coherence. I believe that God can’t do mutually contradictory things at the same time. Why does God let us play the games we do? Dietrich Bonhöfer said ‘A God that allowed us to prove his existence would be an Idol’. Unless all miracles can be proved to have alternative naturalistic explanations the game is up. Omnipotence and omniscience may be more complicated than we think. All our experience is of time sequences in a spatially extended domain, that’s all we know. But God doesn’t see the future like a fortuneteller, to Him all time coexists, all space is coincident. Gong back to your chart, how do you see the situation evolving over the next 500 years? (laughter) A lovely question. Hans Küng sees the evolution of P6, a new Paradigm emerging – it may not even be Christian, perhaps an Interfaith Paradigm, which seems plausible. But I am convinced we are seeing the death of scientific rationalism. In the 19th century it was great, a very useful critique of religious ideas, but now we see its dire inadequacies, and I think that wave, having broken on the shore, is receding. Doesn’t Küng argue that the real future for religion is in finding common moral and ethical positions, even if the theology is different? Yes he does, and I’ve heard him argue the case very eloquently. People interested in religion seem to be of two kinds; moralists, who see religion as primarily giving guidance on behaviour, and metaphysicians, like myself, who want to see the structure of things and believe the morals will follow the right metaphysics. I think Kung might disagree, seeing moral issues at the front, but I can‘t quite follow him. A common issue seems to be birth control, the ones that have no faith are the ones that are most successful. That is cultural evolution, not genetic; there isn’t a Roman Catholic gene. Religion is a meme in Richard Dawkins’ word, and its spread sometimes has nothing to do with reproductive rates. It can be a matter of competitive infectivity. Take Islam: people in the late 7th and 8th centuries who read the Koran were immediately convinced, and Islam spread, pushing out Christianity across North Africa. But the epidemiology of religion has never had the study it deserves. Was it not a lot to do with military power? Yes indeed, but even so military power and politics could make a religion stick permanently if it didn’t have the right infectivity. When communism died in East Europe, its religion, which was called ‘scientific atheism’, lacking infectivity died overnight. Why hasn’t Judaism spread like Christianity and Islam? As a practical consideration, the Jewish faith contains a way of life which, with its food laws and circumcision etc, were not attractive to others. Judaism certainly had schisms, but has lacked infectivity. Surely Jews don’t want converts? Not now, but once they did. In 1st,2nd and 3rd centuries Judaism was a proselytising religion, though without great success. Then, under persecution, they withdrew into their communities. What about Judaism being felt as a curse? Very interesting. I myself am a half Jew and I remember the remark of by Fiorello Laguardia, also a half Jew, who said ‘It’s not enough to boast about’.(laughter) (A question from the chair): You don’t like looking for truth. If we consider the Gnostics from say 50 to 200 AD, those who took up similar claims in the sense of insight who were the Cathars (who were in part Gnostics) (Yes) Because of the divinity dispute, because the Gnostics set no value in martyrdom, didn’t volunteer unbid the statement ‘I believe’,Irenaeus denounced them as non Christians. This community with a very strong insight tradition, as taught by Jesus, were ruled out of Christianity from P2 (Yes) and all later tradition, up to perhaps P6 (Who knows?) Also the Reformation and the Quakers, all speak of truth as a cardinal principle. The problem is: what do we mean by truth? A demonstrable truth may not be helpful, and a statement which does do something can be shown to be untrue, such as the Phlogiston Theory which was nonsense. (Yes, but it was useful for a time.) At a time when there wasn’t an answer, which came later by bringing gas into consideration! The problem is that Jesus speaks about truth, and some of his sayings known from the 92 documents discovered at Nag Hamadi spoke much of this inner insight, yet Irenaeus chopped them to pieces. (Yes) What do you think about that? There’s an awful lot in what you say. I talked about the uselessness of the concept of assured truth in religion. People who have talked about truth in the past have really been speaking about intense faith. Jesus says in John’s Gospel ‘I am the resurrection and the life... whosoever liveth and believeth in me, he shall never die’ - Not ‘know the facts’, but ‘believe’. The Arabic word for believe appears 400 hundred times in the Koran – yes, I’ve counted them. So in religion, we have no access to certain Truth but we can talk about and live in Faith, which we evaluate from the consequences of holding to it. By the way, I am unsympathetic to the Gnostic faith because its consequences seem to me fairly dire. Seeing all matter as merely a trap for the soul and the universe as the creation of an evil demiurge does not seem to me to predispose one to constructive, healthy living. (fig 1)
(fig. 2)
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