The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong

In Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), the universal Spirit could only achieve its full potential if it immersed itself in the limiting conditions of space and time; it was most fully realized in the human mind. So too, human beings had to give up the old idea of a transcendent God in order to understand that they were themselves divine. The myth, a new version of the Christian doctrine of incarnation, can also be seen as a cure for the alienation from the world experienced by many modern people. It was an attempt to resacralize a world that had been emptied of the divine, and to enhance the vision of the human mind whose powers had seemed so curtailed in the philosophy of Descartes and Kant. But above all, Hegel’s myth expressed the forward-thrusting dynamic of modernity. There was no harking back to a Golden Age; Hegel’s world was continually re-creating itself. Instead of the old conservative conviction that everything had already been said, Hegel envisaged a dialectical process in which human beings were constantly engaged in the destruction of past ideas that had once been sacred and incontrovertible. In this dialectic, every state of being inevitably brings forth its opposite; these opposites clash and are integrated and fulfilled in a more advanced synthesis; then the whole process begins again. In this vision, there was to be no return to fundamentals, but a continuous evolution toward entirely new and unprecedented truth.

      Hegel’s philosophy expressed the driving optimism of the modern age, which had now irrevocably left the conservative spirit behind. But some could not see why Hegel should even have bothered with God. Religion and mythology were beginning to be viewed by some Europeans as not only outmoded but positively harmful. Instead of curing our sense of alienation, they were thought to compound it. By setting up God as the antithesis of humanity, Hegel’s pupil Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) argued, religion was bringing about “the disuniting of man from himself.… God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man temporal; God almighty, man weak.”⁸⁸ For Karl Marx (1818–83), religion was a symptom of a sick society, an opiate that made the diseased social system bearable and removed the will to find a cure by directing attention away from this world to the next.⁸⁹

      Atheists were beginning to take the high moral ground. This became clear in the aftermath of the publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, by Charles Darwin (1809–82). This represented a new phase of modern science. Instead of collecting facts, as Bacon had prescribed, Darwin put forward a hypothesis: animals, plants, and human beings had not been created fully formed (as the Bible implied), but had developed slowly in a long period of evolutionary adaptation to their environment. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin proposed that Homo sapiens had evolved from the same proto-ape that was the progenitor of the orangutan, gorilla, and chimpanzee. Darwin’s name has become a byword for atheism in fundamentalist circles, yet the Origin was not intended as an attack upon religion, but was a sober, careful exposition of a scientific theory. Darwin himself was an agnostic but always respectful of religious faith. Nevertheless, the Origin was a watershed. It sold 1400 copies on the day of publication. Certainly, it and Darwin’s later work dealt another blow to human self-esteem. Copernicus had displaced humanity from the center of the cosmos, Descartes and Kant had alienated humans from the physical world, and now Darwin had suggested that they were simply animals. They had not been specially created by God, but had evolved like everything else. Indeed, there seemed no place for God in the creative process and the world, “red in tooth and claw,” had no divine purpose.

      Yet in the years immediately following the publication of the Origin, the religious reaction was muted. There was much more fuss the following year, when seven Anglican clergymen published Essays and Reviews, which made the latest biblical criticism available to the general reader.⁹⁰ Since the late eighteenth century, German scholars had applied the new techniques of literary analysis, archaeology, and comparative linguistics to the Bible, subjecting it to a scientifically empirical methodology. They argued that the first five books of the Bible, traditionally attributed to Moses, were in fact written much later and by a number of different authors; the book of Isaiah had at least two different sources, and King David had probably not written the Psalms. Most of the miracles described in the Bible were simply literary tropes and could not be understood literally; many of the biblical events were almost certainly not historical. In Essays and Reviews, the British clerics argued that the Bible must not have special treatment, but should be subjected to the same critical rigor as any other text.⁹¹ The new “Higher Criticism” represented the triumph of the rational discourse of logos over myth. Rational science had subjected the mythoi of the Bible to radical scrutiny and found that some of its claims were “false.” The biblical tales were simply “myths,” which, in popular parlance, now meant that they were not true. The Higher Criticism would become a bogey of Christian fundamentalists, because it seemed a major assault upon religion, but this was only because Western people had lost the original sense of the mythical, and thought that doctrines and scriptural narratives were logoi, narratives that purported to be factually accurate and phenomena that could be investigated scientifically. But in revealing how impossible it was to read the Bible in an entirely literal manner, the Higher Criticism could also have provided a healthy counterbalance to the growing tendency to make modern Christian faith “scientific.”

      Noting the discrepancy between Darwin’s hypothesis and the first chapter of Genesis, some Christians, such as Darwin’s American friend and fellow scientist Asa Gray (1810–88), tried to harmonize natural selection with a literal reading of Genesis. Later the project known as Creation Science would go to even greater lengths to make Genesis scientifically respectable. But this was to miss the point, because, as a myth, the biblical creation story was not an historical account of the origins of life but a more spiritual reflection upon the ultimate significance of life itself, about which scientific logos has nothing to say.

      Even though Darwin had not intended it, the publication of the Origin did cause a preliminary skirmish between religion and science, but the first shots were fired not by the religious but by the more aggressive secularists. In England, Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95), and on the Continent, Karl Vogt (1817–95), Ludwig Buchner (1824–99), Jakob Moleschott (1822–93), and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), popularized Darwin’s theory, touring and lecturing to large audiences to prove that science and religion were incompatible. They were, in fact, preaching a crusade against religion.⁹²

      Huxley clearly felt that he had a fight on his hands. Reason, he insisted, must be the sole criterion of truth. People would have to choose between mythology and rational science. There could be no compromise: “one or the other would have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration.”⁹³ Scientific rationalism was, for Huxley, a new secular religion; it demanded conversion and total commitment. “In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration,” he urged his audience. “And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated and demonstrable.”⁹⁴ Huxley was supported by the whole thrust of modern, progressive culture, which had achieved such spectacular results that it could now claim aggressively to be the sole arbiter of truth. But truth had been narrowed to what is “demonstrated and demonstrable,” which, religion aside, would exclude the truth told by art or music. For Huxley, there was no other possible path. Reason alone was truthful, and the myths of religion truthless. It was a final declaration of independence from the mythical constraints of the conservative period. Reason no longer had to submit to a higher court. It was not to be restricted by morality but must be pushed to the end “without regard to any other consideration.” The continental crusaders went further in their war against religion. Buchner’s best-seller, Force and Matter, a crude book which Huxley himself despised, argued that the universe had no purpose, that everything in the world had derived from a simple cell, and that only an idiot could believe in God. But the large numbers of people who read this book and the huge crowds who flocked to Haeckel’s lectures showed that in Europe