Slaying the dragons, p.1
Slaying the Dragons, page 1
Slaying the Dragons
“The dragons of the title are the myths, half-truths, and downright untruths that have become fixed in secular thinking and have thus distorted strongly the science–religion debate. The author attacks these dragons with the passion of a latter-day St George and, in a book that is forthright, clear, readable, convincing and sometimes humorous, he sets the record straight. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the relationship between science and religion.”
John Bryant, Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Exeter
“An informed examination of the claim that there is a ‘war’ between science and religion. Historian of science Allan Chapman shows how this claim is mostly founded on myths and legends. A very enjoyable and instructive read.”
Keith Ward, Fellow of the British Academy and Professional Research
Fellow at Heythrop College, London.
“In magisterial style, and from an encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject matter, Allan Chapman systematically exposes the multiple myths and flagrant falsehoods propagated by the so-called ‘New Atheists’. Chapman convincingly demonstrates how, far from displaying conflict between science and religion, the historical record is shot through with a profound harmony between these two paths to truth, and how Western Christendom provided the fertile soil in which modern science as we know it took root.”
The Revd Dr Rodney D. Holder, Course Director, The Faraday Institute,
St Edmund’s College, Cambridge
“This is a fascinating, timely, and highly accessible study of a vital subject. In a world where the great majority of people are believers no-one can doubt the importance of the subject. And after reading this book, no-one can doubt that the supposed clash of science and religion has been greatly distorted. Slaying the Dragons will enable intelligent people to enter the debate afresh with renewed interest and open minds.”
John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford
“A brilliantly concise history of the relationship between religion and science, and a passionate defence of Christianity. In Slaying the Dragons, Allan Chapman offers a robust and highly readable response to the ‘not-so-New’ Atheism.”
Edmund Newell, Principal of Cumberland Lodge and former Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral
Slaying the Dragons
Destroying Myths in the History of Science and Faith
Allan Chapman
Text copyright © 2013 Allan Chapman
This edition copyright © 2013 Lion Hudson
The right of Allan Chapman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Lion Books
an imprint of
Lion Hudson plc
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road,
Oxford OX2 8DR, England
www.lionhudson.com/lion
ISBN 978 0 7459 5583 4
e-ISBN 978 0 7459 5723 4
First edition 2013
Acknowledgments
Scripture quotations taken from the Authorized Version
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover image: Marcio Silva/iStock
For Rachel
Wife, Scholar, and
Best Friend
Acknowledgments
This book has grown out of many years of lecturing, to audiences of all kinds, on the historical relationship of science with Christianity, and the many questions and comments thrown at me in discussion, including “Is there anything I can read on this?” To all those who have listened, questioned, and commented, my thanks are due. I am also deeply indebted to Paul Clifford and Alison Hull of Lion Hudson for their invaluable guidance and perceptive comments, which have led me to make a great many additions and improvements to my original manuscript, resulting, I hope, in a much better book. But my biggest debt of all is to my wife Rachel, who has been ready with her typing and editorial skills, advice, criticism, and scholarship at every stage of the process, and whose patience has been truly monumental. It is to her that this book is dedicated.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 MYTHS, MONOTHEISM, AND THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN SCIENCE
2 THE ORIGINS OF UNBELIEF
Part 1: Ancients and Early Moderns
THE POPULAR MYTH THAT ATHEISM IS NEW
CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL UNBELIEF
THOMAS HOBBES, MATERIALISM, AND MAN THE MACHINE
ATHEISTS, DEISTS, AND UNBELIEVERS
3 THE ORIGINS OF UNBELIEF
Part 2: Dreams of a Brave New World
ROMANTIC AND REVOLUTIONARY ATHEISM
ROBERT OWEN, GEORGE HOLYOAKE, AND THE VICTORIAN SECULAR ATHEISTS
THE MYTH THAT SIMPLE FAITH WAS DESTROYED BY DARWIN IN 1859
4 THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF ANTI-CHRISTIANITY
Part 1: Two Persistent Myths
THE MYTH OF THE MEDIEVAL “DARK AGE”
THE MYTH OF THE “ENLIGHTENMENT”
5 THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF ANTI-CHRISTIANITY
Part 2: Myths of Changing Circumstances
THE PROBLEM OF ETERNAL DAMNATION
BIBLICAL CRITICISM, “MYTH”, AND EARLY BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY
NATIONALISTIC CHRISTIANITY
THE GROWTH AND POWER OF SCIENCE
6 SOME POPULAR MYTHS ABOUT SCIENCE AND RELIGION
CHRISTIANITY AND SCIENCE IN “CONFLICT”: TWO NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN “ATHEISTS”
ALL CHRISTIANS ARE REALLY BIBLICAL FUNDAMENTALISTS
THE CHURCH HAS ALWAYS PERSECUTED SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS
RELIGION CAUSES THE WORLD’S TROUBLES: ONLY SECULARISM CAN BRING PEACE
7 MONKEYING AROUND WITH HISTORY: THE MYTH OF THE BIG 1860 “OXFORD DEBATE” ON EVOLUTION
8 THE MYTH OF THE YOUNG EARTH AND THE ORIGINS OF EVOLUTIONARY IDEAS
DATING THE CREATION
THE ORIGINS OF LIFE: PRE-DARWINIAN IDEAS OF “EVOLUTION”
9 CHARLES DARWIN: MONKEY, MAN, AND MYTH
10 COUNTERING THE “BIG LIE”
WHY IS NATURE CONGRUENT?
WHY DO HUMANS RESPOND SO POSITIVELY TO BEAUTY AND ELEGANCE?
SCIENCE DESCRIBES EFFECTS, RELIGION TALKS OF CAUSES AND PURPOSES
11 DOES SCIENCE CHALLENGE RELIGION? THE GREAT ATHEIST MYTH
LACK OF NEW SECULARIST IDEAS
WHY HAS RELIGION FAILED TO DIE AWAY?
ARE ATHEISM AND SECULARISM MORE SUPERSTITIOUS THAN CHRISTIANITY?
DOUBTING SCEPTICISM
SEDUCTION BY REDUCTION
12 THE AGE THAT LOST ITS NERVE: THE DILEMMA OF CHRISTENDOM IN THE MODERN WORLD
Part 1: Myths and Mechanisms
THE MYTH OF A SECULAR SOCIETY
FORCED TO ACT: MECHANISM AND EVOLUTIONARY AND NEUROLOGICAL DETERMINISM
THE HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE EXPLANATIONS, AND THEIR EXPLOITATION BY SECULARIST MYTH-MAKERS
13 THE AGE THAT LOST ITS NERVE: THE DILEMMA OF CHRISTENDOM IN THE MODERN WORLD
Part 2: The Myth of Secular Transcendence
THE MYTH OF HUMAN PERFECTIBILITY
THE UNACKNOWLEDGED PILLAGING OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY BY SECULARISTS
BELIEVING IN AN EXTERNAL TRANSCENDENT REALITY
WHY MUST HUMANS BE ALWAYS SAVING SOMETHING?
REINVENTING HEAVEN
14 REDISCOVERING THE COMPASS, OR WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
RECLAIMING CHRISTIAN IDENTITY
HOW “ENLIGHTENED” ARE THE NEW ATHEISTS?
CONCLUSION: SO WHERE DO WE STAND, AND WHAT DO WE DO?
15 POSTSCRIPT: WHY DO SO MANY MODERN INTELLECTUALS WASTE THEIR ENERGY ATTACKING CHRISTIANITY?
WHY GET HOT UNDER THE SECULAR COLLAR?
SURVIVING THE CRUCIFIXION
HISTORY? BUT THE GOSPELS WERE JUST MADE UP – WEREN’T THEY?
FURTHER READING
1
Myths, Monotheism, and the Origins of Western Science
For much of the twentieth century, and especially since the 1960s, the Judeo-Christian faith, and Christianity in particular, have been under increasing assault. This assault has come from several directions: from particular interpretations of scientific progress; from certain styles of radical politics, often based on social science presuppositions; from fashionable philosophers and social pundits; and, by the late 1990s, from the media. And one of the great ironies is that while Great Britain has an established church, the Christian faith has become a thing of ridicule and mockery in many circles. National Health Service Trusts have suspended nurses who would not remove crucifixes hanging around their necks, and bed-and-breakfast hotel proprietors and experienced foster parents are threatened with prosecution because they will not countenance certain practices condemned in parts of the Scriptures or permit them to be performed on their private premises (yet a blind eye is not infrequently turned to the customs and practices of non-Christian religions). Indeed, several law-abiding Christians have mentioned to me that if they should utter the word “Jesus” or “Christ” in any context other than that of a joke or a blasphemous expletive, they feel that they would be exposing themselves to accusations of being fundamentalist, narrow-minded, out-of-date, or stupid.
For do not the fashionable “New Athe
This monumental double-think – a double-think of Orwellian proportions – constitutes one of the biggest myths of the age in which we live: a myth that derives its style of thinking from perversions of scientific thinking, in which the absolutism of Newtonian mechanics is combined with the dogmatic determinism of neo-Marxism, and the directionless moral vacuity of postmodernism.
Indeed, these myths, which form so much of the social geography of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, have become so pervasive across much of Western society that many people regard them as natural and unquestioned aspects of modern thought. I remember in my youth, in the late 1960s, being peddled stories of how the free modern world only came into being when brave souls such as Copernicus, Galileo, and the philosophers of the “Enlightenment” had the courage to “stand up” to the church – and often paid dire penalties. Of how poor Charles Darwin had been vilified for daring to present the scientific fact that we all came from monkeys. But as a natural sceptic as far as intellectual fashions go, who has always had a fascination with the nature of myth-making, I became increasingly inclined to treat these socio-myths with caution. As I shall show more fully in Chapter 11, I have always felt that anti-religious scepticism, as a universally lauded instrument of analysis, must itself be regarded sceptically.
But it was when I became an academic science historian that the mythic status of science’s secular, liberal, and liberated roots became glaringly obvious. This first became obvious in my reading. Then, as I began to teach, deliver public lectures all over Great Britain and America, and broadcast, the avalanche of mythology really hit me. For there is nothing like questions from the floor following a large lecture or a public discussion, where the world and his wife are free to put you on the rack and throw their mental brickbats at you, to reveal the sheer magnitude of the mythology that passes for “the conflict between science and religion”. Comments such as “How can an intelligent person believe all that stuff about God and miracles?”, or “As everyone knows, until the Enlightenment the church held science back”, come to me with monotonous regularity.
And this is what has led me to write this book, for reading apart, pretty well every chapter or sub-chapter between these covers is based on matters that have been raised with me by tutorial students, members of the public following lectures, in private communication, or by people who have engaged me in conversation on train or bus journeys. For the subject of religion and its relationship with science is a topic of growing fascination, to Christians, to secularists, and to puzzled folk who don’t know what to think, who stand in awe of the power of science, but who find atheism cold and dead. Without doubt, the passionate, and often virulent, writings of New Atheists, extending from Richard Dawkins back to Bertrand Russell, have been instrumental in fomenting this interest. And while perhaps not read so widely, or evangelized so forcefully, as those of the “New Atheists”, the claims and statements of numerous Christian fundamentalists (that is, strict biblical literalists, especially in their interpretation of Genesis and their rejection of evolution) during the latter half of the twentieth century have also added fuel to the flames of religious assault on the one hand and defence on the other, resulting in bafflement for large numbers of people.
But as I became more interested in the science and religion scrum – for it rarely rises to the orderliness of a “debate” – in the late 1980s, one thing came to grate on my historian’s sense of fact and context time and time again, namely, the proliferation of myths, confabulations, and downright untruths that flew with ever increasing intensity, especially from the New Atheists, against Christian believers. This urban folk mythology or fairy-tale culture of atheism and secularism is the stuff about which this book is written: it is the monstrous regiment of dragons that have to be slain if ever we are going to see science and Christianity in context. Myths as groundless as the one which vehemently affirms that science could only progress once the gargantuan power of “the church” had been successfully challenged and overthrown; and its partner in secularist mumbo-jumbo which asserts that all true scientists must be atheists, for surely a rational scientist cannot believe in God – an assertion still clung to in the teeth of the stark fact that high-profile Nobel Prize Laureates, Fellows of the Royal Society, British scientific knights and dames, and many scientific professors sincerely practise the Christian faith. Indeed, it is such men and women, of differing degrees of eminence, yet all possessing high-powered scientific qualifications, who constitute the membership of such bodies as Christians in Science and the Society of Ordained Scientists (I have had the honour to lecture to both), or are active in the ordained or lay ministry of the Anglican, Methodist, Roman Catholic, or free churches. Jesuits, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals, Charismatics, Quakers, you name it: you can find highly qualified scientists in their ranks or even in their pulpits. So one pair of myths bites the hard rock of demonstrable evidence early in the story!
Yet I can hear people saying, why are you only talking about Christianity and science? What about other religions? Two factors have to be considered in answering this question. First, the New Atheists are generally careful about which religions they target for the outpouring of their bile. Yes, there is endless ranting against American-based fundamentalist groups, and a constant harping on about the “Monkey Trial” at Dayton, Tennessee, in 1926, with the “by association” flow of ideas intending to imply that Christianity equals anti-evolution, equals biblical fundamentalism, equals anti-science, equals the “Dark Ages”. Yet, at least in legally “multicultural” Great Britain, they are often surprisingly reticent about other religions: scarcely a squeak against Judaism (as opposed to criticisms of the State of Israel), from which Christianity springs, and only rather circuitous generalities against Islam (although, in fairness, Sam Harris and others in America and Michel Ornay in France are more blunt in their opinions of non-Christian faiths). I wonder why this should be so? Could it be analogous to the courage displayed by a well-fed household pussycat relishing play with a cornered mouse, as opposed to the blind terror experienced by the same pampered pussycat when faced with a hungry wolf? Hit one faith, and it obediently apologizes and dutifully goes down; hit another, and it bites back!
But in talking about science as it grew up within the territories of Christian Europe, we have to look plainly and impartially at where that approach to understanding the natural world which we now call “science” actually comes from. For its roots are four-square in the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian cultural tradition. I have long argued, live, in print, and on television, that science as we know it stems from monotheism.
