In Our Time - The Age of Doubt

Episode Date: March 9, 2000

Melvyn Bragg examines the spread of religious doubt over the last three centuries. Nietzsche proclaimed that God was Dead in 1882, Hegel in fact beat him to it apprising his Berlin students of God’s demise as early as 1827. By the end of the 19th century echoes of the death of God can be heard everywhere: in the revolutionary politics of Lenin, in the poetry of Tennyson and the psychoanalysis of Freud. The march of Science seemed to challenge the authority of the Bible at every turn and by the twentieth century almost all the great writers, artists and intellectuals had abandoned the certainty of their belief in God.So who or what was responsible for this sudden spread of religious doubt? If God could truly be said to be dead then who fired the first shot? Have we educated ourselves out of Christ only to embrace the bleaker creed of Mamon? Is God a human construct or did God construct us? Is there an argument from design, or was the Big Bang morally pointless, without what we could call a mind at all? Did Darwin and natural selection rebut the idea of a divine purpose? With A N Wilson, novelist, biographer, journalist and author of God’s Funeral; Victoria Glendinning, author, journalist and biographer of Anthony Trollope and Jonathan Swift.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Nietzsche famously proclaimed that God was dead in 1882. Hegel, in fact, beat him to it, apprising his Berlin students of God's demise as early as 1827. By the end of the 19th century,

echoes of the death of God can be heard everywhere. In the revolutionary politics of Lenin, in the poetry of Tennyson, in the psychoanalysis of Freud, German biblical scholarship, the March of Science, seemed to challenge the authority of the Bible at every turn,

and by the 20th century, almost all the great writers, artists, and intellectuals had abandoned the certainty of their belief in God. So who, or what was responsible for this sudden spread of religious doubt? If God could truly be said to be dead,

who fired the first shot? With me to discuss the emergence of religious uncertainty is the novelist and biographer A.N. Wilson, author of God's funeral. We're also joined by by Victoria Glenn Dilling, novelist and biographer of, among others, Anthony Trollope and Jonathan Swift.

Andrew Wilson, in your book you cite the philosopher David Hume and Edward Gibbon, author of the history of the decline of fall of the Roman Empire, as the leading influences in the rise of atheism. You say, these authors had planted time bombs to explode in the faces of the Victorians. Can you tell us how Gibbon did that, first of all, in his fall of the Roman Empire? Well, I could try. I think that one of the clever things about Gibbon of course that he never professes unbelief,

and indeed when somebody accused him of not being a Christian believer, he published a long vindication, claiming that he was, at the very least, a deist and a believer in God. But what Gibbon does is managed to make you think that Christianity is base and ridiculous. There's a marvellous passage at the end of his ludicrous description of St. Simeon Stylides, who spent his life living on top of a column,

and says if you compare, I'm paraphrasing Gibbon's beautiful prose, but if you compare the life of this buffoon with the dignified and philosophical life of Cicero and his contemporaries 500 years before, you see the effects which Christianity has had on human civilization. And it hasn't been a good effect, Gibbon leaves you to suppose,

he doesn't need to spell that out. But he also undermines by this elegant mockery the early Christian fathers, their doctrines. Well, he makes you realize, which is true, in my opinion, how utterly contemptible and ridiculous the social-called early Christians were, for the most part, and how foolish they were in their attitudes to most of the things that we would regard as civilised. I think many people... But isn't that taking them too abruptly out of context?

Well, no, the point was that they were anarchists who were opposed to everything that was deemed civilised in their own day, and I think many people, by the time of the 18th century, who didn't know any history, of course, assumed that the early Christians were all people like themselves. They thought that although they might not have lawn sleeves, and powdered weeks. They were very much like the bishops of the Anglican Church in the 18th century, i.e. chaps like us. Well, they John were weren't, and Gibbon

shows this in page after page. And I think shows, for example, their total contempt for marriage, for the family, for the ordinary decent institutions of society. The Christians tried to, and in many cases succeeded in undermining

all these things. And I think that this was very troubling to decent, intelligent people when they came to read Gibbon. As I say, it was a bit like a time bomb because Gibbon had his followers in his lifetime, but the reading public grew so much towards the end of the 18th century and in the early years of the 19th century, so that Gibbon became much, much more popular, really a generation after he'd written his book. Just on the subject of Gibbonne-Glanding,

are you surprised that a history can have the sort of effect that Andrew is ascribing to it? Well, I'm not sure that, I mean, maybe God began to be sort of terminally unwell then, but I don't think he was very well for quite a long time before. And I noticed with Dean Swift when I was learning about Jonathan Swift, and I read his sermons, he never talked about the afterlife, he never talked about heaven, reward and punishment. He talked about how we should behave to our neighbours in this world, i.e. very sophisticated people would have had a kind of nominal Christianity

as a form of social cohesion and social control, and it makes life better and easier for everybody. But whether they really believed in a kind of transcendental God, I am not sure. Can I come back to the point, do you think that Andrew's contention that Gibbon, in writing this history, the client of all of the Roman Empire, had an influence on his contemporaries and in later generations, on disturbing their faith? Yes, but I think he also took.

twitched a chord that was already there. Because at the same time, what you get is this extraordinary double thing, that the 19th century is the great age of missionaries, it's the great age of evangelicalism, the sort of ridiculousness of suddenly the Pope is infallible in 1869, at the same time as a sort of growing interest in science, not only really among educated people, but things like mechanics institutes and workers' educational authority

and young urban men in the cities and the new urban men in the cities and the new industrialised cities were learning about science and chemistry when people were deep and harrow was still in Greek and Latin. Yes. Your second pillar, Andrew, is David Hume. And you quote Hume from the dialogues. Yes.

On the very notion of causation, you say, for aught we know, a priori, matter may contain the source or spring of order originally within itself, as well as the mind does. And you use this as one of the key sentences in Hume which brought about the funeral of God. Yes, which was when Hume wrote this book

called the dialogues concerning natural religion. He wrote it as a private document. He never dared to publish it in his lifetime. And indeed, when it was published, it was published on a tiny little press and it was probably only read by a few hundred people. It was in the generation following that it became popular and was widely disseminated and read. And its basic idea was total skepticism about everything. The underlining Anarchy of Hume, if you wish to put it that way,

is that we can't be sure of anything at all. And this, as you remember, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that reading Hume awoke him out of his dogmatic slumber. From Hume, because of Kant and the enormous influence that Kant and his follower Hagell had on European thought in general,

from Hume comes the quest in European thought for certainty about something. that to me is really why he's such an important thinker because for Hume we can't be sure that the sun's going to come up tomorrow morning you can't be sure if you switch on an electric kettle that it will boil you can't be sure of anything he disputed the notion of science and scientific inquiry just as much as he did of metaphysical and religious inquiry

and that's why I believe in the course of the 19th century because human beings crave certainty about so many areas of life they invented the idea that there is such a thing as scientific certainty. And one of the reasons that Hume was so influential on, for example, thinking like Darwin, whom he wouldn't necessarily supposed to be a metaphysician to start with, was that Darwin was looking for some area of human or animal activity by which we could be certain. Because Hume didn't take it as a fact that we just said that the mind itself was a model. Absolutely not. Why should there be one mind behind the universe? Why should

the universe be seen as a single entity? Why can't it just be a whole lot of completely... But the interesting thing about both Gibbon and Hume is that they didn't seem to be, as it were, I wouldn't say they didn't give a dam, but they took this on board in an intellectual way. And what I think came out of your book very interestingly was how for a lot of people, decent, ordinary believing folk, it really was a bereavement, a sense of loss. I was particularly sort of touched by Philip Goss, who was a geologist who understood the meaning of the fossil record. And yet was a passionate believer in the creation. myth who said perhaps

perhaps God put all these fossils in the rock to give the world the appearance of ageing, which sort of agonisingly touching well that was the scientific principle taken to the point of lunacy. Yeah. But can I just take up this business again about the influence that people have from your

reading of Jonathan Swift and so on? It just fascinates me and we talk about these scholars only a few hundred things published and yet actually the influence that thinkers of had over the last 200 years has been extraordinary, even though they've only published to a few people's time, they've actually radicalised. Now, can you just give us some, can you give

any follow-through from the studies you've done? Well, I think it's very interesting how it filters through into, say, popular fiction even, in that a lot of people who would never have read these European philosophers would have read Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Robert Ellesmere, which is about

a terrible crisis of faith, how Trollope's sister, not many people know this, so Cesar wrote this novel called Cholitan, which was about this young man agonizing about his Anglo-Catholic faith. A lot of the agonizers either move backwards into agnosticism or forwards, if you like to put it that way, into Anglo-Catholicism or Roman Catholicism.

You talk about Kant, and we've already said that Hume awoke Kant from his dogma. And he talked about two positions on God, to start with, the eminentist position and the transcendental position. Can you just describe those a little and then tell us what conclusion he came to? Because through Kant, Hume became extraordinarily influential. Yes, well, I'm probably going to simplify to the point of distortion here. But, I mean, basically, if you believe that God is imminent, either in the world or in yourself, you believe that he can be inferred and found, let's say, through meditation,

but that he isn't necessarily an external reality. The transcendent God, or indeed transcendent truth of any kind, is something which is outside our own perceptions. Now, this is entering a terribly difficult philosophical area because how can we be sure that anything outside our own perceptions is there? This is the point of hume awakening Kant from his dogma. And basically speaking, Kant, who is regarded as what's philosophers or an idealist, never in my opinion was either an empiricist,

somebody who based his idea of truth entirely on experience, or an idealist, somebody who believes that we impose, reality, we invent reality, that truth is a human construct. He was constantly wrestling with these two irreconcilable but necessary polarities. What you get with Hedle is a concentration entirely

on the idealist point of view, namely, that reality itself is never something that we're going to be able to acquire unless you accept the idea that the human mind isn't a camera, it's something that makes the world up, basically. Yes. Before we moved, Dr. Hegel, can I just bring the Kant argument across to you, Victoria, or anything?

At the end of his life, he wrote, God is not a being outside of me, but merely a thought in me. God is the morally practical, self-legislative reason. Does that ring any bells with your reading of the way that God has perceived in Victorian literature? To a certain extent in that a very strong Victorian idea is the idea of duty. And I think perhaps Kant, the trickle down from Kant is that, our sense of right and wrong, if you like, is God. If we feel laws, there must be a law giver.

Well, exactly. Another very good point you make is that it's religious experience that gives rise to theology rather than vice versa. And that the actuality that people had felt religious experience has to be dealt with somehow. And one of the most interesting things to me about the trickle-down effect is what people did to substitute for a literal belief in a transcendent God, which included weird things like spiritualism

where you've got very respectable, prominent intellectuals such as F.D. Morris going to these weird seances and table turnings. And you see that going right through into our own day. The substitutions include sort of hero worship, which is the sort of Nietzsche and Carlisle situation, and hero worship in our own day. Even of figures like Princess Diana or, in your own case, the Queen of Denmark.

Yes, I certainly worship the Queen of Denmark. But that's another movie. But when you're talking about these very, very Victorian, as I would think, notions such as spiritualism, such as Catholic visions, the actual appearance on this earth of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette and other people joined the last century, and she appeared to an Anglican to Father Ignatius in the Welsh mountains, these which felt at the time like wonderful religious counterblasts of science

are, of course, like poor Philip Garth and his fossils, They're in fact pseudoscientific experiences. What the religious people are saying is, no, we entirely accept, very oddly, we entirely accept the scientific view, but here is an imperial factual evidence of religion, whereas in the past, I think someone like St. Thomas O'Twainers would say, well, don't be so silly. There's never going to be an imperial factual definition of faith.

Faith is the belief in things unseen. Can I just take almost take a time out from this historical romp, just to talk about the idea which Victoria raised, of there being, let us say, a need for experience which hitherto has been called religious. Is that in itself some sort of validation of religion, do you think? Victoria, thanks. Well, I don't know.

Andrew is very interesting about this, because it seems to slip with you between the lines of your intellectual argument. You talk about how, and I agree with you, how human beings are natural adorers, and that human race can get rid of Christianity, but it can't lose its capacity for worship. And you have a wonderful phrase how the Jim Crack shrines contained truths. And what do we mean by this?

Well, I mean, I think that all the great religions of the world contain deep truths both about ourselves and about the nature of things. Otherwise, they couldn't possibly have survived and indeed nurtured not many virtuous lives, but great intellects. I mentioned Thomas Aquinas, but the whole history of Christianity is a history of intellectuals

far greater than any of us sitting around this table. And we're not saying they were fools who hadn't read Darwin's origin of species or something of that kind and therefore were stuck in the dark ages. They were tapping into something which is very deep about human nature itself. So what conclusions do you draw from,

not only from the intellectuals, but from non-intellectual. That's why I love William James, because at the end of the 19th century, when people were saying, well, you know, science or biblical tricism, whatever it is, has blown religion out of the water. He says, hold on a bit.

Not only are all these great people, Saint or Justin, etc., who have defended religion, but also your average man and woman, for the most part, at some stage in his life, has had an experience which we might deem to be religious. And these experiences, if you're an imperial philosopher, have to be taken account.

of. We are religious beings. And when you get rid of religion, you don't necessarily get rid of the need to adore and worship and then you have hero worship leading to national socialism and all sorts of undesirable things very often. But let's come back to this from Cantwe go to Hegel.

And Hegel seemed to establish the idea that history, time, religion were all human constructs. And as it were, we didn't need a god to put those in place. He writes in such a vague, woolly way that it's very hard to know sometimes what Hidal means, but one of the most

important of his ideas, which is very easy to grasp, is that at different ages, I mean the famous phrase, the Zeitgeist, we think and feel and respond to things in particular ways inevitably. We're now in the 21st century, we can't, however much we might

like to, go around thinking in the way the Victorian thought or the way that the 18th century thought. And what he believed was that in the time of his own lifetime, the world had changed and the modern had come into being, you had the French Revolution and everything else. And this had materially and completely changed the way that we look at the world.

And it had made God himself seem like a human construct. But nonetheless, of course, Hedel took a tremendously mystical and, as we would think, rather religious view of the movement of time. But no belief becomes a living belief until lots and lots of people believe it. I mean, in the early days, to say, of evolution theory, it would have been sort of held dear by a very few people. Now, we were discussing a little bit how things move along. Now it would be apart from long-lasting battles,

especially in the United States, between creationists and evolutionists. Now, that would be part of the common psyche. Yes, my belief actually is that Darwinism itself, I'm not saying whether I believe it or not, but I think if we were having this discussion in 20 years' time, people would look back and say, wasn't it strange in those days when everybody thought that Richard Dawkins?

Or not about that, about something else, you don't know. because we can now see that it wasn't necessarily true, or something else, as you said, just as now we have, Freud is, I mean, he was taken to be a completely accurate scientific picture of human nature, and our people have the dravest doubts about Freud. Can I come to another point, though, we've talked about, just skimmed the surface of various individual thinkers,

but might it have been the forces of industrialisation in Victorian times, Marx's idea about the economy making everything, the Angles' observation that the workers are not religious and do not attend church, talking about English workers in 1844, might it not have been those groundswell of forces which were more responsible for the indifference, growing indifference to God,

or as responsible as anything that trickled down from the top? Yes, I think there are always two things going on at once. I mean, with the new cities growing up and the rings and rings of new industrial suburbs round the old cities. It was in fact the greatest era of church building probably since the medieval time. Every new suburb, every new street corner had its church.

Yes, but Victoria, who went? Exactly, they weren't going, the respectful middle class this way. We know from abundant records checked by the Victorians of the behaviour and customs and beliefs of the working class that, with very few exceptions in Calvinistic Methodism in some places and Roman Catholicism in others,

the working class, as Engels noticed, didn't go to church. Far from religion being the opium of the people, it just meant nothing at all. Reed Mayhew is the chance of the cost among us and the street sellers in London. They didn't even know what went on in St. Paul's Cathedral. What's interesting is the people will also always find an opium in that nowadays prosperity is the opium of the people.

Well, if you have enough... This is the great paradox of my story, really, the death of God or the death of religion, whichever you think it is, century, people were too tired and too ill and too persecuted as industrial trolls to have any time at all for the sort of discussion we're having now. And now, most of us are too prosperous to worry about it. Whereas I think, well, when your friend, William Wordsworth, up in the fells, was close to God with his mountains and his sky and his legs, and probably agricultural workers are more

likely have been religious and people just ground down by the sheer misery, horror and tiringness of industrial life. And I think that's such a big subject that, I mean, it almost makes one weep to think of it, but the idea of having a religious discussion with people like that is almost ridiculous.

But that is the very ground where Wesley and evangelical Christianity found its roots. Yes, and we like to say, oh yes, Wesley stopped as having a revolution in this country and the working classes were all madly religious, really. The truth is that only a tiny proportion of people believed or went to church or had any interest in religion then or now.

As you went up to the Lake District, Andrew, of which I'm very grateful, we'll stick that. With John Ruskin, who was worried, made anxious by geologists. And when we think of science undermining religion today, we don't reach out first for geology. And yet that was a very... It was a great worry. He wrote to his friend, Dr. Ackland, those dreadful hammer. he thought that they were hammering away at every verse of the Bible. Rastrian had been brought up to be an absolute,

died-in-the-wall conservative, he eventually little by his mother. And they read, verse by verse, they read the Bible aloud to another when they got to the end of the revelation of St. John, the divinely went back to read the book of Genesis all the way through his life, not just his childhood. And I think he, more or less, until he was about 30, believed it all in the way that perhaps somebody in the Baptist, Southern Baptists, might believe it now.

Then, little by little, partly through his passion, for geology, partly through simply reading and thinking, he did lose his faith. But he then went on further, which is why Rastrian is one of my great heroes, to see that, as we've said already, human beings can't live without faith. And he began to understand in his own idiosyncratic in a slightly mad way what faith is, I think, and he managed to explain it in wonderful ways. And he managed, the reason I like him,

not only did he hang on in a slightly batty way to some form of faith it of course isn't Christianity, but he managed to undermine people's faith in science. And he was one of the great crusaders against Darwin. Something else that undermine people's faith in science. Again, back to fiction, was books like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which gave the great sort of stereotype of the mad, bad, evil scientist. And that touched something in the psyche of the terrified readership, which they didn't know was there, and it still does.

But the thing about Ruskin seems to me that it reminds us how, you talked about how he read the Bible with his mother, how very much this story we are telling this morning is a Protestant story, because for Roman Catholics, the Bible was not something that had to be read all the time. In fact, he was rather discouraged, I believe. It was on the index when they were. So what we're discussing is a crisis in a kind of rather mild sect.

Well, that's true to a certain extent, but the unbelief was sweeping across Europe in a huge way, and the Protestant biblical astrologer got in. into the mind of Ernest Renaud, for example, and his life of Jesus, La Vie de Jesus, was one of the greatest bestsellers of all time, and did lead to a tremendous crisis of faith among Catholics. Andrew says at the beginning of his book,

this is a story of bereavement, as much as adventure. Do you see the bereavement in Victorian culture, Victoria? Yes, I do, and I think it's one of the hardest things for us to empathize, this real terror of having the ground taken away from under your feet. And I think we haven't got quite anything like it now. I think the loss of the father figure structure can be seen in a sort of very ghostly echo in the Conservative with a small sea clinging to the family values and that kind of thing because it all was part of the parcel.

I think what they find very difficult, which are an exceptional people could do. I'm thinking of Keats now. He said that human task was what he called negative capability. that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainty and doubt and mystery without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. That's a very rare quality to have, and I think most of us, I mean, I certainly share the Victorian aching sense of loss for the disappearance of God, and I mean for many people, too numerous to name.

It did mean the loss of everything. It meant loss of careers and so on these brave clergymen giving up their livings. And when you think of George Eliot translating Strauss's life of Jesus, which undermined faith with tears streaming down her cheeks. And when she reached his debunking scenes of the crucifix, she couldn't bear it. I mean, she sobbed in front of her relief of the scene of the passion. Can I just bring it a few minutes to today?

There's still the question that Christians, religious Christians, ask, is that, well, science and solve the how questions, but not the why questions. Why are we here? why are we like this. And those questions are interesting and not easily swept aside, Andrew Wilson. I wouldn't wish to sweet them aside,

but what I think is dangerous for Christians is for them to think that they are in the possession of the same kind of hard scientific truths which, for one, and John Rustin for another, would think were impossible. And the trouble with Christianity is it held on to quite falsifiable and false historical claims. It claimed that Jesus started the church

and institutes of the sacraments and so on. And you can demonstrate that this is highly improbable at the very least. What's your reaction to, it can answer the science, can answer the how but not the why questions? Richard Dawkins, for instance, says, well, there need be no why questions. Well, I quite agree with him about that. Well, I think that you talked about hard science. I think science has been shown as to be unhard, almost as theology, in that theories are overturned with regularity.

And I think what may happen, we said we don't know what will seem ridiculous, a hundred years on, that science and metaphysics may come to be much more close, maybe almost the same thing when we know enough, as they were hundreds and hundreds years ago when we knew absolutely nothing, and then it was condemned as magical thinking. But we don't know anything. That's the other illusion about science. Most of us can't really understand what scientists are talking about.

I don't. When Lord Tennis and Sirbottam I, an infant crying in the night, an infant crying for the light and with no language but a cry, that's what we are. And the idea that we've understood Stephen Hawkins' book, or indeed anything at all, is a complete illusion. I agree with that. We take science on trust, just as people use to take religion on trust. And for all we know, it's a load of bologna, I suspect much of it is.

So you would say that were the Christian religion to put aside its insistence on its story? Yes, as a historical reason. historical reality. Then inside that, or apart from that, you tell me which, there is something of value and perhaps of permanent value. Well, it's

hardly for little me to judge the whole Christian tradition, but I would say yes, very definitely so. The idea that by sort of denying self you find life is a deep truth about human nature and it's embodied in the whole Christian story. But as soon as you start saying

there really was a woman who had a baby without the usual procedures before it or a man who rose from the dead in a literal historical sense, then it seems to me you've lost almost everybody nowadays, because people don't believe that took place. Finally, Victoria Glennon, Andrew said earlier that coming back to this discussion in 20 or 30 years' time, we might have a completely different perspective on Darwin.

Do you think we would still come back to this discussion and have the same questions to ask about the God question? Well, it might be phrased differently, but I think we will, because I think the size of our brains aren't going to get any bigger, and our understanding of the universe is going to go on changing. I like very much the quote you had from Gertrater in your book. Let us reserve those things which are unfathomable for reverence and quietude. Well, thank you very much, Victoria Glendinning and Andrew Wilson,

and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.