Faith and Modernity
Lecture 1
The challenge to traditional religion
Challenges to Traditional religion
• 1 Intellectual
• 2 Experiential
• 3 Socio/economic
The Intellectual Challenge
1 The naturalisation of religion
• The Enlightenment itself was anti-clerical and
Deist rather than outright anti-religious
• but by the early nineteenth century a
corrosive ‘naturalistic’ critique of religion, that
is one which explained religious concepts and
behaviour in a naturalistic way without
recourse to superstition or the supernatural,
had begun to evolve.
Naturalisation of Religion (cont)
• Key contributors were
• David Strauss (The Life of Jesus 1837);
• Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity 1841);
[Man created God, not God who created Man]
• Ernest Renan (La Vie de Jésus 1863)
• Karl Kautsky (The Origins of Christianity 1908).
• The natural interpretation of religious behaviour
(visions; voices etc.) by William James (The Varieties of
Religious Experience 1902) as psychosis; mass
hypnosis; hysteria etc concluded this section.
Intellectual Challenge
2. Scientific discoveries
• Lamarck – evolutionary theory (1800)
• Lyell (geology) – fossils
• Darwin controversy – The Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection (1859)
• Speed of light (Roemer 1676; Michelson 1879)
• Nature of matter – atomic theory
• Relativity - Einstein 1905 – 1916 (atomic clocks experiment
1971)
• Size of/origin of universe = transformed cosmology
[Archbishop Ussher (1650) – world began at nightfall
preceding Sunday 23 October 4004 BC]
• genetics
The outcome was that any concept of a world
which was
• a.) constant;
• b.) created;
• c) designed by a wise and benign creator
• in which
• d.) humanity had a unique position,
was under threat.
The experiential challenge
• Natural Disasters from the Lisbon Earthquake (1755) to the
Indonesian/S.E.Asian tsunami (26 Dec 2004 –230,000 dead)
• The horrors of recent history
• Massive wars; holocaust; genocide; massacre; mass
bombing; nuclear weapons and the apparent
indifference/silence of God
• ‘Why did the Heavens not Darken?’ (Mayer) – Adorno – ‘To
write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. ....it has become
impossible to write poetry today.’ (1949) [way these are
understood, not way they were meant]
• Matthew Arnold ‘Dover Beach’ (written c 1851, pub 1867)
• Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov (Legend of the
Grand Inquisitor) (1880)
• Nietzsche – ‘God is Dead’ – ‘revaluation of all values’
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
• God is dead. God remains dead. And we have
killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall
we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all
murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all
that the world has yet owned has bled to death
under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?
What water is there for us to clean ourselves?
What festivals of atonement, what sacred games
shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of
this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not
become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science,[i.e. The art of poetry]
Section 125,(1882) tr. Walter Kaufmann
3. The socio/economic challenge
People living in the post-industrial revolution
comfort zone of consumerism and medicine have
no ‘need’ of God for a comfortable life.
• Declining religious attendance/vocations;
• separation of church and state;
• declining social influence of churches locally and
nationally
were signs of the diminishing importance of
religion.
• The secularization thesis tied all this up.