Without God, Without Creed, Part VI

Christianity's Trojan Horse

The West has experienced prodigious economic growth and increasing living standards for over six hundred years.  The two world wars of last century appear now as a mere blip in a distant horizon.  This has encouraged the secular narrative of life constantly improving and getting better.  In turn, this has supported the just-so story propounded by evolutionism that the world is progressing higher and higher.

Natural calamities, however, when they occur, teach a very important lesson: the future can be worse than the past--much worse. Because one decade succeeds another does not necessarily mean that it will be better.

In the West, Christendom has been overthrown.  It has been replaced by an atheistic materialism that purports to interpret, justify, and explain all reality.  Its hand maiden is naturalistic science.  Because it has succeeded Christendom the conclusion is facilely drawn everywhere that atheistic materialism is better than, an advance upon, the Christian faith.  It is smarter, evidentially based.  It is true and real.  Christianity is a myth, a relic of an ignorant and superstitious past.  And so on. 

But the Word of God itself provides a different narrative.
  Western secularism, whilst temporarily triumphant represents not an advance upon the Gospel, but a devolution.  Covenantally speaking, atheistic materialism represents a divine curse.  Just as Israel prospered for a time under Omri and Zimri, and material wealth was taken as a sign of approbation for the national religion, yet within three hundred years Israel lay devastated under the Assyrians despite, so the West can read its own future.  Unless it repents.  But repentance usually comes after judgment; rarely before. 

Unbelief was rapidly gaining traction in the West by the end of the nineteenth century.  The seeds of Unbelief had been subtly sown in the late seventeenth century; now the tree had grown, and its fruit was fast ripening.  The device employed was to separate Nature from God, and conceive of the world as operating semi-independently of the Creator (in denial of the Bible's revelation on the matter).  As time passed, semi-independence came to be reformulated as complete independence.  Everything eventually came to be interpreted atheistically.  Unbelief's victory became a rout when it was generally agreed that truth and knowledge was the sole preserve of naturalistic science.

If anything was to  be labelled as a fact and be regarded as authentic it had to be evidentially based.  It had to pass the scrutiny of human investigation and authentication by empirical and rationalistic justification.  On this basis, all of Scripture could be dismissed because it failed to pass the tests.  How could one empirically authenticate miracles, for example?  But if Christianity could not be authenticated before the bar of human reason, then it could only be given credence if man, glorious man was subordinated to some sort of illicit authority that insulted the glory of humanity.

James Turner, in Without God, Without Creed: the Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) takes up the narrative.  By the end of the nineteenth century,

. . . more than intellectual qualms pushed these sceptics away from Christianity.  Epistemological doubts bred moral repugnance.  If doctrines rested upon shaky evidence, then belief in them meant bowing to the yoke of authority--the authority of tradition, the authority of the Bible, the authority of the Church--rather than investigating for oneself. "Christianity," fumed the aging abolitionist Lucy Colman, "demand entire subordination to its edicts.  Until the majority of people are emancipated from authority over their minds, we are not safe.". . . Infidelity became a moral obligation as well as an intellectual necessity.
Turner, p. 159

Here we are approaching the heart of the matter.  When men turn away from the Living and true God to follow idols of their own devising and imagination, the animus is always a self-assertion of human autonomy and independence of God.  Whilst this may remain hidden for a time, in the end it always comes to the fore.  The end-game of all idolatry is human sovereignty and autonomy.  Only when Christianity is rejected will man be truly emancipated and have authority over his own mind, says Colman!

But this development is something, argues Turner that the Church itself had unwittingly encouraged.  It does so to this day, in many quarters.  Many Christians think they will never gain respect unless they foolishly submit the God of their fathers to the be verified by the ratiocinations of the Unbelieving mind which is never neutral, but riddled with cant in favour of its own independent autonomy and authority.  When that is the starting point, the God of Scripture cannot possibly exist--from the outset.  Such unwise Christians have already ceded the field of debate, before an argument has even commenced.

As Turner observes:

The problem arose . . . from the application of secular (read "unbelieving") standards to religious knowledge. And for this tendency scientists bore perhaps less responsibility than clergymen.  Leaders of the church had, ever since the seventeenth century, encouraged the application of scientific methods to the work of theology.  This formed part of their strategy for overcoming the effects of secularization, for holding together religious and natural knowledge, for preventing the world from slipping out of the grasp of religion. . . .

As the scope of natural knowledge narrowed, the creeds began to be squeezed out of the realm of knowledge. . . . (A)s scientific language grew increasingly exact, religious language by contrast seemed more and more vague.  To be sure, natural theologians continued to speak of God in what passed for scientific language; and dogmatic theologians could split hairs with a diamond cutter's finesse.  But behind their finespun speculations lay what could not be weighed, measured, or even observed.
Ibid., p. 159-61.

Since it could not be weighed, measured or observed, it could not be knowledge; neither could it be true.  It did not exist.  But these canons had been willingly adopted by many within the church for the past two hundred years as they sought to "prove" God by scientific evidences and analysis.

The watershed for the triumph of Unbelief was, of course, Darwin's Origin of the Species.  Theologians had spent much of the previous one hundred and fifty years talking about watches evidencing (proving) the existence of a Watchmaker.  This had required that they conceive of God as distantly removed from the creation.  He was neither transcendent nor immanent.  (Therefore, the god of which they spoke was a human idol.)  Secondly, it proceeded on the assumption that the Unbelieving mind could test for the existence of God and weigh Him in the balance.

Darwin simply substituted one set of autonomous arguments for another.  Naturally, Unbelief seized upon Darwin because it fitted far more compellingly and reasonably with prior assumptions about the autonomy and sovereignty of man.

Yet, by the end of 1860's science had little use for God.  This was really no sudden transformation (though its last stages raised considerable noise around Charles Darwin).  Rather, the excision of God from science culminated a long trend, the eventual outcome of which had been forecast long before by those disregarded prophets who warned that theologians had not business mixing God and science.  And, in fact, ever since the seventeenth century, God--while remaining essential to the overall scientific enterprise--had become peripheral to progressively larger areas of scientific practice.  After Darwin's Origin of the Species appeared in 1859, God rapidly became redundant in the whole business. 
Ibid., p. 179.

Darwin was not the cause of Unbelief, but the capstone on the edifice, or, as Turner puts it, the axe to the tree.

To the strongest ties that bound science and belief, Darwin applied an ax.  No demonstration showed more forcefully how science let to nature's God than the argument from design.  No proof of God compelled more nearly universal assent than the argument from design.  No theology exuded more confidence than the argument from design.  And no theology ever collapsed so rapidly.  Darwin punctured it, and its plausibility fizzed away like air from a leaky balloon.
Ibid., p. 182.

The transformation, the collapse was so rapid because all along the church had been believing and presenting and discussing, not the true Living God, but an idol--a Baal-god who, whilst lord, was a subject to creation. All along the church had been insisting that the only real knowledge was scientific knowledge.

It was, after all, theologians and ministers who had welcomed this secular visitor into the house of God.  It was they who had most loudly insisted that knowledge of God's existence and benevolence could be pinned down as securely as the structure of a frog's anatomy--and by roughly the same method.  It was they who had obscured the difference between natural and supernatural knowledge, between the tangible things of this world and the impalpable things of another.  By the mid-nineteenth century they had, really no effectual model of knowledge except science.  No wonder that science kept chipping away at religious knowledge, at the stories of the Bible or the doctrines of the creeds: belief was supposed, by theologians themselves, to be subject to scientific canons of knowledge . . . .  We have grown so accustomed to science as the archetype of knowledge that we regard this attitude as natural; it takes an effort of historical imagination to realize that  theology helped to make it natural.  Was it such a surprise that when theologians took science as the standard of reality, scientists and other should do the same?
Turner, op cit., p. 193.

 But, Unbelief--once regnant in the culture--had to move on.  There is a spiritual animus and logic which cannot be denied.  Once the Christian faith no longer could credibly be called truthful, the next step was to identify it as a great evil to human kind.  We will deal with Turner's treatment of this development in our next post in the series.