The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  The 1920s were a decade of remarkable progress in quantum physics: wave-particle duality was discovered, Einstein’s theory of relativity had been empirically confirmed, the uncertainty principle had been demonstrated and Newton’s fixed mechanical universe was exploded once and for all. It was Whitehead’s view, in response to these latest discoveries, that energy was the underlying principle of reality, that it was constantly forming and re-forming; and this had two consequences of particular interest here. First, that this process, flux, becoming—call it what you will—is in fact the only divine entity that exists, that God in effect set the world in motion; he is the flux that brings everything into actuality, but he doesn’t directly govern the form the process takes—there is freedom in the processes by which energy takes its various forms. And second, that the main concern of traditional religions has been to find some order in the flux of process, in an attempt to make sense of what has gone before, in order to anticipate what lies ahead.

  Whitehead’s writing style leaves a lot to be desired, his arguments are not always easy to follow, but it would seem that he advocated a form of post-Nietzschean deism in which there is a God who creates energy but little more, and in which there is certainly no role for Abraham, Isaiah, Jesus or Mohammed. Perhaps because of his poor style, perhaps because deism is too abstract for many would-be believers, his attempt to marry science and religion has never proved very attractive.

  RUSSELL’S FAITH IN KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE

  Russell’s message was very different. In books and essays, Why I Am Not a Christian, The Conquest of Happiness, Satan in the Suburbs, Behaviorism and Values, Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness, The Danger of Creed Wars, Russell faced the problems and opportunities of secular society head-on, in much plainer language than Whitehead seemed capable of. Described by Paul Edwards as “one of the great heretics in morals and religion,” Russell was never a purely technical philosopher. He had, said Edwards, “always been deeply concerned with the fundamental questions to which religions have given their respective answers—questions about man’s place in the universe and the nature of the good life.”16

  Russell’s style was uncompromising and combative. “I think all the great religions of the world—Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism—both untrue and harmful.” After noting that a belief in hell was no longer necessary among Christians (their beliefs were getting “smaller”), he dismissed the reasons people have for believing in God. “What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from an early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.” He thought it doubtful that Christ ever existed, and declared that Christianity was a doctrine that “put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture.” He saw no evidence that religion made people virtuous—in fact, “every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized Churches of the world.”17

  Furthermore, neither experience nor observation had led him to think that believers were either happier or unhappier, on average, than unbelievers.18 “The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms . . . it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. . . . A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage.” All of what he called the great cosmic philosophies showed, he said, a naïve humanism: “[T]he great world, so far as we know it from the philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance and are best corrected by a little astronomy. . . . We are ourselves the ultimate and irrefutable arbiters of value, and in the world of value Nature is only a part. Thus in this world we are greater than Nature.”19

  The First World War “was wholly Christian in origin.” All the politicians involved in it were “applauded as earnest Christians.” He also held that the dangerous features of communism were “reminiscent of the medieval Church. They consist of fanatical acceptance of doctrines embodied in a Sacred Book, unwillingness to examine these doctrines uncritically, and savage persecution of those who reject them.”20

  But Russell wasn’t merely a negative heretic, pointing out the falsehoods and harmful effects of religions. “Knowledge and love are both indefinitely extensible,” he said, “therefore, however good a life may be, a better life can be imagined. Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love, can produce a good life.” Love is more fundamental, “since it will lead intelligent people to seek knowledge, in order to find out how to benefit those whom they love.”

  “In all descriptions of the good life here on earth we must assume a certain basis of animal vitality and animal instinct; without this, life becomes tame and uninteresting. Civilization should be something added to this, not substituted for it; the ascetic saint and the detached sage fail in this respect to be complete human beings. A small number of them may enrich a community; but a world composed of them would die of boredom.” Love at its fullest, he said, “is an indissoluble combination of the two elements, delight and well-wishing. . . . Delight without well-wishing may be cruel; well-wishing without delight easily tends to become cold and a little superior. . . . Delight, in this actual world, is unavoidably selective and prevents us from having the same feelings toward all mankind.”

  He had no doubt that all human behavior springs from desire, and therefore ethical notions can have no importance except as they influence desire. “Outside human desires there is no moral standard.” “The whole effectiveness of any ethical argument lies in the scientific part, i.e., in the proof that one kind of conduct, rather than some other, is a means to an end which is widely desired.”21

  He had several interesting “smaller” ideas along the way—for example, that children should be taught about sex before puberty, “when it is not exciting”; that conscience is a “fallacious” guide, “since it consists of vague reminiscences of precepts heard in early youth, so that it is never wiser than its possessor’s nurse or mother”; and that the Christian idea of conversion was dangerous to the extent that it encouraged the notion that salvation can be suddenly brought about. On the contrary, “there is no short cut to the good life, whether individual or social.” This is why, he believed, personal salvation “cannot serve for the definition of the good life.”22

  To live the good life in the fullest sense, “a man must have a good education, friends, love children (if he desires them), a sufficient income to keep him from want and anxiety, good health and work which is not uninteresting. All these things, in varying degrees, depend upon the community, and are helped or hindered by political events. The good life must be lived in a good society, and is not fully possible otherwise.”23 He wasn’t convinced by Moore’s arguments.

  “It is no use to give men something abstractedly considered ‘good’; we must give them something desired or needed if we are to add to their happiness. Science may learn in time to mold our desires so that they shall not conflict with those of other people to the same extent as they do now; then we shall be able to satisfy a larger proportion of our desires than at present. In that sense, but in that sense only, our desires will then have become ‘better.’ A single desire is no better and no worse, considered in isolation, than any other; but a group of desires is better than another group if all of the first group can be satisfied simultaneously, while in the second group some are inconsistent with others. That is why love is better than hatred.”24

  He agreed with William James that the test of a belief is not its conformity to some “fact,” “since we can never reach the facts concerned; the test is its success in promoting life and the achievement of our desires.” He agreed with Whitehead’s views on matter, that substance is a series of events, but disagreed fundamentally on the question of order and God’s role, or non-role, in that: “There is no reason to deny the apparently piecemeal and higgl
edy-piggledy nature of the world.” Knowledge, to which he attached the highest importance, alongside love, nonetheless is “a natural fact like another, with no mystic significance and no cosmic importance.”25

  He concluded that the main difference between the West and the East, in the realm of religion/philosophy, was that in the East there was no doctrine of original sin. Confucius, for instance, believed that men are born good. This made a profound difference, because it meant that, in the East, men were “more apt to submit to reason.”26

  Would each of these men—all noble and original in their aims—have had more of an impact had not events in Germany in the 1930s claimed more of everyone’s attention?

  16

  Nazi Religions of the Blood

  W

  hen he was a boy of six, Adolf Hitler was for a short time a choirboy at the Benedictine monastery at Lambach in Austria. What he loved most, he said later, was “the solemn splendor of church festivals.” By the time he reached Munich in 1919 as a thirty-year-old ex-soldier, such religious feelings as he still had were far removed from Catholicism. By now Hitler was caught up with the völkisch movement, shaped by such individuals as Paul de Lagarde, who held that Christianity was a bastardization of faith in that both Catholicism and Protestantism were “distortions” of the Bible, brought about mainly by St. Paul, who, Lagarde insisted, had “Judaized” Christianity.1

  Many crude publications circulated in the Vienna of Hitler’s day, one entitled Forward to Christ! Away with Paul! German Religion! Here, too, the argument was that the “poisoner Paul and his Volk” were the “arch-enemies of Jesus,” who “had to be removed from the entrance to the kingdom of God” before “a true German church can open its doors.” The difficulty of Jesus being Jewish was circumvented in various ways, either by making him “Aryan” or, in the case of Theodor Fritsch, an anti-Semitic engineer-turned-publisher, by arguing that Galileans were in fact Gauls, who in turn were German. (He claimed to have demonstrated this philologically.) All of which became a central element in Hitler’s own view of Christianity, but in addition he claimed to see in Jesus a mirror image of himself, “a brave and persecuted struggler against the Jews.”

  Nonetheless, Hitler was not eager for the fledgling Nazi movement to antagonize established religion. Dr. Artur Dinter, a former scientist and dramatist who had lost his young daughter tragically, called for “a German national Church” that would counter modernism, materialism and the Jews, “much as Jesus had done” (his Richtrunen were intended to replace the Ten Commandments). Hitler dismissed him, telling Dinter, who had joined the National Socialists before Hitler himself and held the party’s card no. 5, that he would waste no time on a “religious reformation”; he would steer clear of religious issues “for all time to come.”2

  THE GERMAN THEOLOGICAL RENAISSANCE

  He didn’t stick to his word. When the Nazis did achieve power, their relationship with religion would remain troublesome. In some ways their views were simplistic, in other ways cynical and manipulative. Hitler himself seems to have a had a vague notion of a “sacred universe,” but in purely intellectual terms the Nazis largely ignored the fact that Germany was just then undergoing a renaissance in religious thought.3 It is a fact largely overlooked that, just as the Germans had produced a “golden generation” in physics, philosophy, history and film as the 1920s turned into the 1930s, so in theology there was a parallel cohort of very creative individuals. According to Alister McGrath, writing in 1986, modern German theology has an “inherent brilliance,” but since the Second World War “the equivalent of a theological iron curtain appears to have descended upon Europe, excluding ideas of German origin from the theological fora of the English-speaking world.”4

  This German theological renaissance—comprising Albert Schweitzer, Rudolf Steiner, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Buber and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—and the world’s ignorance about it, are interesting enough phenomena in themselves, but they concern us for three reasons. First, their scholarship gave a more prominent role to Paul in the creation of early Christianity, and this in turn gave a certain credibility to later Nazi claims that Paul had somehow perverted Jesus’s message. Second, several of these men (Barth, Bonhoeffer and Buber in particular) were very brave in standing up to the Nazis and suggest, along with other evidence, that the Nazis’ chief worry in the early stages of the Third Reich was that organized Christianity was the main threat to their authority. The fact that this threat never materialized is outside the scope of this book, but it is a major unanswered conundrum of twentieth-century history and conceivably a terrible indictment of the religious stance. The third issue that concerns us is embodied in the work of Karl Barth.

  Barth (1886–1968) is widely regarded as the greatest Protestant theologian of his century, and possibly the greatest since Luther.5 Born in Basel, where his father Fritz was a minister and professor of New Testament and early church history, Barth studied at Bern, Berlin, Tübingen and Marburg universities. At Berlin he attended the seminars of Adolf von Harnack, professor of church history at Giessen, whose book The Essence of Christianity (1900) tried to go beyond all the historical criticisms of the Bible that had accreted during the nineteenth century. And it was there that Barth first encountered the ideas of liberal theology (mainly the search for the historical Jesus) that he would eventually rebel against. After his studies he returned to Switzerland as a pastor.6

  He came to believe that the “higher criticism” in Germany, although largely responsible for the new scholarly techniques, nevertheless missed the point. The concern with Jesus as a historical figure obscured Jesus as the revealed word of God. Mankind no longer consulted the Bible in the way that its compilers intended it to be read. In the midst of war, Barth re-examined the scriptures and, in particular, in 1916 began a careful examination of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. This proved of great significance for him, and in 1922 he published The Epistle to the Romans, the main message of which was, as Paul himself had said, that God saves only those who “trust not in themselves but solely in God.”7 This led to Barth’s seminal view, what he called “the Godness of God”: that God “is wholly other,” totally different from humans.8

  It was this idea, that God is “wholly other,” that brought him to the attention of other theologians and many of the faithful. In the year he published The Epistle, together with a number of other theologians, including Rudolf Bultmann, he started a journal, Zwischen den Zeiten (Between the Times), which formed the main outlet for what became known as “Crisis Theology” (the “crisis” being the First World War and the “sinfulness,” the great distance from God that it was deemed to be evidence of). Zwischen remained a powerful force until it was closed down in 1933.9

  Barth was therefore responsible for a completely new understanding of God, a God more abstract and, in a sense, less knowable than ever before. It was an idea that probably opened up an even wider gap between believers and unbelievers than had ever existed before, in the sense that Barth’s God was defined by his unknowability (Freud in particular was dismissive). In addition, Barth’s idea of “otherness” was to prove very influential later in the century, when the “Postmodernist Turn” took place and a focus on the “other” (not just in a theological sense) became a central concern (see chapter 26).

  Such was the impact of Barth’s theology, in Germany in particular at first, that by the time the Nazis came to power in 1933 he was a public figure. He then emerged as one of the leaders—if not the leader—of church opposition to the National Socialists, expressed in the Barmen Declaration of 1934.10 In the previous April, the “Evangelical Church of the German Nation” had been created under Nazi influence and had published its guiding principles, which made anti-Semitism a central plank of this new religion and forbade marriage between “Germans and Jews,” concluding: “We want an Evangelical Church that is rooted in our nationhood.”11

  In response, Barth was one of those founding the so
-called Confessional Church, which rejected the attempt to set up a German church, and in particular the Nazi concept of “blood and soil” as a basis for it. In May 1934, representatives of the Confessing Church met at Barmen and delivered their declaration, based on a draft that Barth had prepared, in which they rejected the “false doctrine” that “there could be areas of our life in which we would belong not to Jesus Christ but to other lords.” Barth himself refused to take the oath of unconditional allegiance to Hitler, was dismissed and returned to Basel, where he continued to speak out in support of the Jews.12

  THE NAZI FORM OF CHRISTIANITY

  For a while after taking office, Hitler was careful to offer some comfort to the churches. He confided to Goebbels that the best way to treat them was to “hold back for the present and coolly strangle any attempts at impudence or interference in the affairs of state.” In reality the Führer was contemptuous of the Lutheran clergy, as “insignificant little people. . . . They have neither a religion they can take seriously nor a great position to defend, like Rome.”13

  Hitler recognized the Catholic Church’s institutional force, and even though the Pope had condemned Mussolini’s species of fascism in 1931 as “pagan worship of the state,” the Führer signed a concordat with the Vatican two years later. On the Vatican side, the agreement was chiefly the work of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state and the future Pius XII, who had been nuncio in Munich in the 1920s and had lived in Berlin. Pacelli managed to retain autonomy for the German see and some control over education, at the price of diplomatic recognition for the new regime.I