The onslaught against the West’s moral codes Melanie Phillips
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7087/full
This is an edited version of a lecture given at the Holy Land Dialogues in Jerusalem last month.
It has become the orthodoxy in the West that freedom, human rights and reason all derive from secularism and that the greatest threat to all these good things is religion.
I want to suggest that the opposite is true. In the service of this orthodoxy, the West is undermining and destroying the very values which it holds most dear as the defining characteristics of a civilised society.
War is being waged against Western culture from within which is in essence a war against Christianity and its moral origins in the Hebrew Bible. By attacking these Biblical foundations in the name of reason and human rights, the culture warriors of secularism are sawing off the branch on which they sit. The only way to defend Western civilisation is to reaffirm and restore its Biblical foundations. My argument is a development of ideas I first explored in my 2012 book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power.
We are living in an era which extols reason, science and human rights. These are said to be essential for progress, a civilised society and the betterment of humanity. Religion is said to be their antithesis, the source instead of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, oppression and backward-thinking.
Some of this hostility is being driven by the perceived threat from Islamic terrorism and the Islamisation of Western culture. However, this animus against religion has far deeper roots and can be traced back to what is considered the birthplace of Western reason, the 18th-century Enlightenment.
Actually, it goes back specifically to the French Enlightenment. In England and Scotland, the Enlightenment developed reason and political liberty within the framework of Biblical belief. In France, by contrast, anti-clericalism morphed into fundamental hostility to Christianity and to religion itself.
“Ecrasez l’infame,” said Voltaire (crush infamy) — the infamy to which he referred being not just the Church but Christianity, which he wanted to replace with the religion of reason, virtue and liberty, “drawn from the bosom of nature”.
But this Enlightenment did not remove religion so much as pervert it. It took millenarian fantasies, the idea that the perfection of the world was at hand, and it secularised them. Instead of God producing heaven on earth, it would be mankind which would bring that about. Reason would create the perfect society and “progress” was the process by which utopia would be attained.
Kant and Hegel developed the notion that historical process drove towards collective salvation defined in secular terms; and Marx offered a further variant of such a process that inexorably drove towards collective salvation through Communism. “History,” Marx wrote, “is but a continuous transformation of human nature.”
Richard Landes observes that the “scientific” reading of history — the historical dialectic — resembled in some important ways the view of the Bible promoted by the 13th-century monk Joachim of Fiore, who viewed history as a process that promised collective salvation.
Both Communism and Fascism attempted to transform the world to create a perfected society. Both ideologies were deprived of their power with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the discrediting of Stalinism and subsequent fall of the Soviet Union. But the secular belief that man could perfect the world in his own image, and in ways that would brook no dissent, merely mutated in the latter half of the 20th century into what J.E. Talmon termed “cultural totalitarianism”.
In the Sixties, the baby-boomer generation bought heavily into the idea propounded by Herbert Marcuse and other Marxist radicals that the way to transform the West lay not through the seizure of political or economic control but through the transformation of the culture. This has been achieved over the past half century through what has been called a “long march through the institutions”, the infiltration into all the institutions of the culture — the universities, media, professions, politics, civil service, churches — of ideas that would then become the orthodoxy.
So the married family was kicked off its perch. Sexual restraint was abolished. The formerly transgressive became normative. Education could no longer transmit a culture down through the generations but had to teach that the Western nation was innately racist and exploitative.
Subjective trumped objective. There was no longer any absolute truth. Everyone could arbitrate their own truth. That way bigotry and prejudice would be excised from the human heart, the oppressed of the developing world would be freed from their Western oppressors and instead of the Western nation there would be the brotherhood of man.
All this was done in name of freedom, reason and enlightenment and in opposition to religion, the supposed source of oppression, irrationality and obscurantism.
At the heart of it was an onslaught against the moral codes of Christianity. Those moral codes are actually the Mosaic laws of the Hebrew Bible.
Christianity underpins the West. But Christianity rests in turn on the precepts of the Hebrew Bible. Jesus, after all, was a Jew. It is Judaism, the mother-ship of Christianity, which laid down the moral law which placed constraints upon personal behaviour in the interests of others — a revolutionary creed which forms the very foundation of Western morality. Although Christianity embedded those laws into Western society, it is those Mosaic codes themselves which are the real target of the onslaught upon sexual continence, duty and truth.
Consider, for example, what Professor Richard Dawkins wrote in his book The God Delusion:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving, control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Ideologies inescapably destroy reason because they reshape reality, which has to be made to fit the governing idea. Factual evidence or logic are therefore an impediment to ideology, and without those there can be no exercise of reason.
It is a remarkable fact that every secular millenarian ideology that forms today’s orthodoxy and that distorts or denies truth, reality or Western morality is innately hostile to Jewish values, the Jewish people or the State of Israel. Anti-capitalism involves the belief that the Jews are behind capitalism. Anti-Americanism involves that belief plus the belief that the Jews control American foreign policy in their own interests. Egalitarianism involves denying the responsibility for individual behaviour laid down in the Mosaic laws. Multiculturalism denies the superiority of society based on those laws over societies that are not. Environmentalism attacks the account in the Book of Genesis of the formation of the world, in which the “dominion” of mankind over the earth is deemed to be an example of divine imperialism or colonialism which must be destroyed by removing man from his position at the pinnacle of creation and substituting the natural world itself in his place. Scientism, or the belief that materialism is the explanation for everything including the origin of the universe, denies the Biblical belief that the origin of all matter lies beyond matter. And anti-Zionism is of course the denial of the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.
From man-made global warming to Israel, from US foreign policy to the origin of the universe, the West has replaced truth by ideology. Now, the West is itself facing an external enemy from aggressive jihadi Islamism. In the Islamist onslaught, the West is confronting an ideology which hijacks evidence and distorts and falsifies it for its own ends. Yet as I have indicated, the West has been doing precisely the same thing.
The correspondences between Western “progressives” and the Islamists are really quite remarkable. Both are attempting to create utopias to redeem past sins; both permit no dissent from the one revealed truth; both demonise and seek to suppress their opponents; both project their own bad behaviour onto others; both are consumed by paranoid conspiracy theories.
What is even less understood is that the onslaught upon the values of the Hebrew Bible is actually an attack on the sources of Western reason itself. Far from religion being the enemy of reason and science, the Hebrew Bible is actually its foundation stone.
The popular belief is that that the roots of science lie in ancient Greece. In fact, Greek thinking was inimical to a rational view of the universe. The Greeks, whose universe was an endless cycle of progress and decay and which transformed heavenly bodies into actual gods, explained the natural world by abstract general principles; Socrates thought empirical observation a waste of time, and Plato advised his students to “leave the starry heavens alone”.
For the development of science, monotheism was essential. As the Oxford professor of mathematics John Lennox puts it: “At the heart of all science lies the conviction that the universe is orderly.” This absolutely fundamental insight came not from the Greeks but thousands of years previously in the Hebrew Bible, with its proposition that the universe was governed by a single God rather than the whims of many gods.
Science grew from the novel idea that the universe was rational; and that belief was given to us by Genesis, which set out the revolutionary proposition that the Universe had a rational Creator. Without such a purposeful intelligence behind it, the universe could not have been rational; and so there would have been no place for reason in the world because there would have been no truths or natural laws for reason to uncover.
This is why many scientists from the earliest times onwards have been Christians and Jews. It is why Francis Bacon said God had provided us with two books — the book of Nature and the Bible — and that to be properly educated one must study both. It is why Isaac Newton believed the Biblical account of creation had to be read and understood; why Descartes justified his search for natural “laws” on the grounds that they must exist because God was perfect and so “acts in a manner as constant and immutable as possible” except for the rare exception of miracles; why the German astronomer Johannes Kepler believed that the goal of science was to discover within the natural world “the rational order which has been imposed on it by God”; and why Galileo Galilei said that “the laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics”.
As C.S. Lewis wrote: “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.” John Lennox writes that faith always played a foundational role in science for precisely this reason. “Dawkins is simply wrong,” he says. “Faith is simply inseparable from the scientific endeavour. Gödel’s Second Theorem gives further evidence for this: you cannot even do mathematics without faith in its consistency—and it has to be faith because the consistency of mathematics cannot be proved.”
The philosopher Professor John Haldane points out the similarities between the religious and scientific approaches: “Thus science is faith-like in resting upon ‘creedal’ presuppositions, and inasmuch as these relate to the order and intelligibility of the universe they also resemble the content of a theistic conception of the universe as an ordered creation. Furthermore, it seems that the theist carries the scientific impulse further by pressing on with the question of how perceived order is possible, seeking the most fundamental descriptions-cum-explanations of the existence and nature of the universe.”
Islam is a different matter again. Although it is the third great monotheistic and Abrahamic faith, its concept of reason departs radically from that of the Hebrew Bible and Christianity. It presents Allah not as the creator of a universe that runs according to its own natural laws, but as an active God who intrudes on the world as he deems appropriate. Natural laws are thus deemed blasphemous as they deny Allah’s freedom to act.
So Islam does not teach that the universe runs along lines laid down by God at creation but assumes that the world is sustained by his will on a continuing basis. And insofar as they subscribed to ancient Greek thought, Muslims historically accepted the Greek belief in a complete universe rather than investigating it. As a result of progressing no further than Aristotle, medieval Islamic scholars advanced only in certain areas such as astronomy and medicine which did not require any general theoretical basis.
Christianity embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth because it taught that reason was a supreme gift from God and the means progressively to increase understanding of God and Scripture. Augustine held that reason was indispensable to faith: it both preceded reason “to purify the heart and make it fit to receive and endure the great light of reason”; and that because reason itself persuaded us of this, it followed that reason must also precede faith.
Nevertheless, Christianity is rather more vulnerable to the attack against religion than its Judaic parent. And that is arguably because of the intrinsic differences between their respective claims to rationality.
Judaism, the true fount of Western rationalism through its assertion of an orderly universe, can lay reasonable claim to being the most rational of all religions. Unlike Christianity, Judaism is all about this world, not the next, and is firmly grounded in man’s deeds, in historical memory and in the here and now.
It is not concerned with proving the existence of God. As Eliezer Berkovits has observed, the foundation of Judaism is not that God is, but that he cares about mankind and the world. That concern is made known through the encounter between man and God. The Hebrew Bible is not a textbook of philosophy or metaphysics, but a record of man’s encounter with God. Jews are not taught “this is what we believe”; they are taught “this is what happened to us”. They are not taught dogma but remembered collective experience. Faith and experience are thus indissolubly linked.
At Sinai, the children of Israel are described as seeing and hearing the revelation of God’s commandments. The Biblical account does not purport to show or describe God, but describes a participatory event that happened. So the big question is whether this encounter did actually happen. Those who don’t believe God exists say it could not have done; but Judaism always proceeds on the basis that what the evidence suggests is most likely to have occurred.
Berkovits observes that according to the logic of Immanuel Kant himself the non-existence of God cannot be proved any more than can his existence. And the encounter with God was witnessed by the prophets of Israel, men of unimpeachable integrity and courage; more important, the entire Jewish nation experienced this encounter through the Exodus, the revelation at Sinai and the journey through the wilderness. The experience of that sustained encounter was so seismic that it defined the existence of the Jewish people and caused it never to surrender to other cultures despite unparalleled attempts ever since to eradicate it. The evidence would seem therefore to support the idea that what was said to have happened was more likely than not to have actually happened.
This is not an attempt to demonstrate the truths of Judaism. It is rather an attempt to show that Judaism is above all a religion of reason which makes it less difficult to reconcile with the modern age. Indeed, Talmudic exegesis is all about reasoning to a highly advanced level to understand better the words of the Hebrew Bible and the relationship of God to man. Moreover, the Bible’s enigmatic and poetic text makes little sense if read literally; Genesis is filled with contradictions which demand sophisticated analysis and make a literalist interpretation absurd and indeed anti-religious.
In the 12th century, Maimonides was the classic exponent of the idea that metaphysical truths could only be grasped through the exercise of reason. He held that religion was the highest rung of metaphysical knowledge. Human perfection consisted in “the attainment of rational virtue . . . the conception of ideas which lead to correct opinions of metaphysical matters”. So as Eliezer Berkovits has noted, for Maimonides only someone who had mastered all the disciplines of human knowledge such as logic, mathematics and natural science could attain the knowledge of God. Concentrating the intellect in this way was the highest form of spirituality. Even living according to the law was secondary to the intellectual service of God through contemplation. That is why, even though doing good works and promoting the “repair of the world” are stressed in Judaism as moral imperatives, the very highest calling in Judaism is learning.
Nor has there ever been a problem reconciling Judaism with science. As a non-believer, zoologist Professor Andrew Parker, the lead researcher at London’s Natural History Museum, was astounded by what he found when he studied in detail the first page of Genesis. For he realised that whoever had written it had set out with uncanny accuracy the precise order of events in the development of the universe, facts which those unknown authors thousands of years ago could not possibly have known.
There is indeed a striking correspondence between these medieval Jewish sages and the conclusions being reached by the physicists, mathematicians and other scientists of today. Maimonides scorned the idea of an anthropomorphic God. He also demolished the argument that belief in God was irrational by stating that since God stood outside the natural world, his existence by definition could not be proved by means belonging to the natural world. The reality of our senses, he argued, was dependent upon the world beyond our senses — but also that the world beyond was not to be grasped by means of our thought processes. It was possible to demonstrate with certainty that the world had a first cause, but impossible to comprehend the nature of this first cause. This was not so much reconciling faith and reason as showing that philosophy and reason were part of faith itself.
According to the Catholic theologian and Cardinal Henri de Lubac, the God of the Hebrew Bible liberated humanity from being the plaything of the gods or passive victims of fate, as they were in classical or eastern antiquity, to become masters of their destiny and bend history in a humane direction. But what Biblical man perceived as liberation, proponents of atheistic humanism perceived as bondage. For secularists, human “greatness” required the rejection of God as a programme to remake the world. De Lubac concluded: “It is not true, as it is sometimes said, that man cannot organise the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organise it against man.”
This all shows the truth of the saying by G.K. Chesterton: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
The point is that people have a predilection to believe. They search constantly for something beyond themselves, for a meaning to their lives, for answers to the “why” questions on which science and materialism and secularism have nothing to say. The marginalisation of Biblical religion has created a vacuum which has been filled by real superstitious numb-jumbo and magical thinking. It has also created an opportunity for radical Islamists who understand very well the spiritual hole at the heart of the West. They also understand that without religious belief to underpin its values, a society is nothing. Which is why they have targeted the West for cultural colonialist takeover.
As Winston Churchill observed, in reflecting on the threat posed by the Islamic world: “. . . were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome”.
Western civilisation today will only be rescued if it reaffirms its religious roots. That means reaffirming not just Christianity but its roots in turn in the Hebrew Bible.
Many church leaders flinch from delivering a robust religious message because they think it is simply impossible to counter the evidence of materialism with the unprovable mysteries of religious faith. I think that is the wrong way to approach this. As I have suggested, our secular age has not renounced spirituality. It has renounced Christianity; and that has sent what is an unending spiritual quest down unhealthy and absurd cul-de-sacs.
To use this approach, which is most likely to penetrate and undermine the secularists’ own defences, the Christian churches have to explicitly reconnect to and reaffirm their roots in the Hebrew Bible. They have to reaffirm their links to Judaism, their parent religion, which many churches have preferred to push aside.
You only have to look at the differences between Britain and Europe on the one hand and America on the other to see this is in practice. In Britain and Europe, where the churches have lost their connection with Judaism and the Hebrew Bible — and are also hostile to Jewish peoplehood in the State of Israel — the pews are empty, Christianity is dying and their civilisation with it. In America, the great central heartland is filled with scripturally faithful evangelical churches which are bursting with energy and form a bulwark in the titanic fight going on there against secular ideologies. Those churches have an uphill struggle; but at least they are taking the fight to the enemy. Because without that connection with Judaism, Christianity is nothing. And without Christianity, the West will become something very different indeed.
The key to the defence of the West lies in the religion that underpins it. And the key to enlisting the army that will defend it lies in the roots of that religion. All that’s needed is the will to see it.
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