A Grammar of Freethought 9 – Cohen · Verses Across
Freethought · Atheism
A Grammar of Freethought 9Freethought and God
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Freethought · Atheism
A Grammar of Freethought 9
Freethought and God
CohenEnglish
Why do people believe in God? If one turns to the pleas of professional theologians there is no lack of answers to the question. These answers are both numerous and elaborate, and if quantity and repetition were enough, the Freethinker would find himself hopelessly "snowed under." But on examination all these replies suffer from one defect. They should ante-date the belief, whereas they post-date it. They cannot be the cause of belief for the reason that the belief was here long before the arguments came into existence. Neither singly nor collectively do these so-called reasons correspond to the causes that have ever led a single person, at any time or at any place, to believe in a God. If they already believed, the arguments were enough to provide them with sufficient justification to go on believing. If they did not already believe, the arguments were powerless. And never, by any chance, do they describe the causes that led to the existence of the belief in God, either historically or individually. They are, in truth, no more than excuses for continuing to believe. They are never the causes of belief.
The evidence for the truth of this is at hand in the person of all who believe. Let one consider, on the one hand, the various arguments for the existence of God--the argument from causation, from design, from necessary existence, etc., then put on the other side the age at which men and women began to believe in deity, and their grasp of arguments of the kind mentioned. There is clearly no relation between the two. Leaving on one side the question of culture, it is at once apparent that long before the individual is old enough to appreciate in the slightest degree the nature of the arguments advanced he is already a believer. And if he is not a believer in his early years, he is never one when he reaches maturity, certainly not in a civilized society. And when we turn from the individual Goddite to Goddites in the mass, the assumption that they owe their belief to the philosophical arguments advanced becomes grotesque in its absurdity. To assume that the average Theist, whose philosophy is taken from the daily newspaper and the weekly sermon, derives his conviction from a series of abstruse philosophical arguments is simply ridiculous. Those who are honest to themselves will admit that they were taught the belief long before they were old enough to bring any real criticism to bear upon it. It was the product of their early education, impressed upon them by their parents, and all the "reasons" that are afterwards alleged in justification are only pleas why they should not be disturbed in their belief.
Are we in any better position if we turn from the individual to the race? Is the belief in God similar to, say, the belief in gravitation, which, discovered by a genius, and resting upon considerations which the ordinary person finds too abstruse to thoroughly understand, becomes a part of our education, and is accepted upon well established authority? Again, the facts are dead against such an assumption. It is with the race as with the individual. Science and philosophy do not precede the belief in God and provide the foundation for it, they succeed it and lead to its modification and rejection. We are, in this respect, upon very solid ground. In some form or another the belief in God, or gods, belongs to very early states of human society. Savages have it long before they have the slightest inkling of what we moderns would call a scientific conception of the world. And to assume that the savage, as we know him, began to believe in his gods because of a number of scientific reasons, such as the belief in universal causation, or any of the other profound speculations with which the modern theologian beclouds the issue, is as absurd as to attribute the belief of the Salvation Army preacher to philosophical speculations. Added to which we may note that the savage is a severely practical person. He is not at all interested in metaphysics, and his contributions to the discussions of a philosophical society would be of a very meagre character. His problem is to deal with the concrete difficulties of his everyday life, and when he is able to do this he is content.
But, on the other hand, we know that our own belief in God is descended from his belief. We know that we can trace it back without a break through generations of social culture, until we reach the savage stage of social existence. It is he who, so to speak, discovers God, he establishes it as a part of the social institutions that govern the lives of every member of the group; we find it in our immaturity established as one of those many thought-forms which determine so powerfully our intellectual development. The belief in God meets each newcomer into the social arena. It is impressed upon each in a thousand and one different ways, and it is only when the belief is challenged by an opposing system of thought that philosophical theories are elaborated in its defence.
The possibility of deriving the idea of God from scientific and philosophic thought being ruled out, what remains? The enquiry from being philosophical becomes historical. That is, instead of discussing whether there are sufficient reasons for justifying the belief in God, we are left with the question of determining the causes that led people to ever regard the belief as being solidly based upon fact. It is a question of history, or rather, one may say, of anthropology of the mental history of man. When we read of some poor old woman who has been persecuted for bewitching someone's cattle or children we no longer settle down to discuss whether witchcraft rests upon fact or not; we know it does not, and our sole concern is to discover the conditions, mental and social, which enabled so strange a belief to flourish. The examination of evidence--the legal aspect--thus gives place to the historical, and the historical finally resolves itself into the psychological. For what we are really concerned with in an examination of the idea of God is the discovery and reconstruction of those states of mind which gave the belief birth. And that search is far easier and the results far more conclusive than many imagine.
In outlining this evidence it will only be necessary to present its general features. This for two reasons. First, because a multiplicity of detail is apt to hide from the general reader many of the essential features of the truth; secondly, the fact of a difference of opinion concerning the time order of certain stages in the history of the god-idea is likely to obscure the fact of the unanimity which exists among all those qualified to express an authoritative opinion as to the nature of the conditions that have given the idea birth. The various theories of the sequence of the different phases of the religious idea should no more blind us to the fact that there exists a substantial agreement that the belief in gods has its roots in the fear and ignorance of uncivilized mankind, than the circumstance that there is going on among biologists a discussion as to the machinery of evolution should overshadow the fact that evolution itself is a demonstrated truth which no competent observer questions.
In an earlier chapter we have already indicated the essential conditions which lead to the origin of religious beliefs, and there is no need again to go over that ground. What is necessary at present is to sketch as briefly as is consistent with lucidity those frames of mind to which the belief in God owes its existence.
To realize this no very recondite instrument of research is required. We need nothing more elaborate than the method by which we are hourly in the habit of estimating each other's thoughts, and of gauging one another's motives. When I see a man laugh I assume that he is pleased; when he frowns I assume that he is angry. There is here only an application of the generally accepted maxim that when we see identical results we are warranted in assuming identical causes. In this way we can either argue from causes to effects or from effects to causes. A further statement of the same principle is that when we are dealing with biological facts we may assume that identical structures imply identical functions. The structure of a dead animal will tell us what its functions were when living as certainly as though we had the living animal in front of us. We may relate function to structure or structure to function. And in this we are using nothing more uncommon than the accepted principle of universal causation.
Now, in all thinking there are two factors. There is the animal or human brain, the organ of thought, and there is the material for thought as represented by the existing knowledge of the world. If we had an exact knowledge of the kind of brain that functioned, and the exact quantity and quality of the knowledge existing, the question as to the ideas which would result would be little more than a problem in mathematics. We could make the calculation with the same assurance that an astronomer can estimate the position of a planet a century hence. In the case of primitive mankind we do not possess anything like the exact knowledge one would wish, but we do know enough to say in rather more than a general way the kind of thinking of which our earliest ancestors were capable, and what were its products. We can get at the machinery of the primitive brain, and can estimate its actions, and that without going further than we do when we assume that primitive man was hungry and thirsty, was pleased and angry, loved and feared. And, indeed, it was because he experienced fear and pleasure and love and hate that the gods came into existence.
Of the factors which determine the kind of thinking one does, we know enough to say that there were two things certain of early mankind. We know the kind of thinking of which he was capable, and we have a general notion of the material existing for thinking. Speaking of one of these early ancestors of ours, Professor Arthur Keith says, "Piltdown man saw, heard, felt, thought and dreamt much as we do," that is, there was the same kind of brain at work that is at work now. And that much we could be sure of by going no farther back than the savages of to-day. But as size of brain is not everything, we are warranted in saying that the brain was of a relatively simple type, while the knowledge of the world which existed, and which gives us the material for thinking, was of a very imperfect and elementary character. There was great ignorance, and there was great fear. From these two conditions, ignorance and fear, sprang the gods. Of that there is no doubt whatever. There is scarcely a work which deals with the life of primitive peoples to-day that does not emphasize that fact. Consciously or unconsciously it cannot avoid doing so. Long ago a Latin writer hit on this truth in the well-known saying, "Fear made the gods," and Aristotle expressed the same thing in a more comprehensive form by saying that fear first set man philosophizing. The undeveloped mind troubles little about things so long as they are going smoothly and comfortably. It is when something painful happens that concern is awakened. And all the gods of primitive life bear this primal stamp of fear. That is why religion, with its persistent harking back to the primitive, with its response to the "Call of the Wild" still dwells upon the fear of the Lord as a means of arousing a due sense of piety. The gods fatten on fear as a usurer does upon the folly of his clients, and in both cases the interest demanded far outweighs the value of the services rendered. At a later stage man faces his gods in a different spirit; he loses his fear and examines them; and gods that are not feared are but poor things. They exist mainly as indisputable records of their own deterioration.
Now to primitive man, struggling along in a world of which he was so completely ignorant, the one certain thing was that the world was alive. The wind that roared, the thunder that growled, the disease that left him so mysteriously stricken, were all so many living things. The division of these living forces into good and bad followed naturally from this first conception of their nature. And whatever be the stages of that process the main lines admit of no question, nor is there any question as to the nature of the conditions that brought the gods into existence. On any scientific theory of religion the gods represent no more than the personified ignorance and fear of primitive humanity. However much anthropologists may differ as to whether the god always originates from the ghost or not, whether animism is first and the worship of the ghost secondary or not, there is agreement on that point. Whichever theory we care to embrace, the broad fact is generally admitted that the gods are the products of ignorance and fear. Man fears the gods as children and even animals fear the unknown and the dangerous.
And as the gods are born of conditions such as those outlined, as man reads his own feelings and passions and desires into nature, so we find that the early gods are frankly, obtrusively, man-like. The gods are copies of their worshippers, faithful reflections of those who fear them. This, indeed, remains true to the end. When the stage is reached that the idea of God as a physical counterpart of man becomes repulsive, it is still unable to shake off this anthropomorphic element. To the modern worshipper God must not possess a body, but he must have love, and intelligence--as though the mental qualities of man are less human than the bodily ones! They are as human as arms or legs. And every reason that will justify the rejection of the conception of the universe being ruled over by a being who is like man in his physical aspects is equally conclusive against believing the universe to be ruled over by a being who resembles man in his mental characteristics. The one belief is a survival of the other; and the one would not now be accepted had not the other been believed in beforehand.
I have deliberately refrained from discussing the various arguments put forward to justify the belief in God in order that attention should not be diverted from the main point, which is that the belief in deity owes its existence to the ignorant interpretation of natural happenings by early or uncivilized mankind. Everything here turns logically on the question of origin. If the belief in God began in the way I have outlined, the question of veracity may be dismissed. The question is one of origin only. It is not a question of man first seeing a thing but dimly and then getting a clearer vision as his knowledge becomes more thorough. It is a question of a radical misunderstanding of certain experiences, the vogue of an altogether wrong interpretation, and its displacement by an interpretation of a quite different nature. The god of the savage was in the nature of an inference drawn from the world of the savage. There was the admitted premiss and there was the obvious conclusion. But with us the premiss no longer exists. We deliberately reject it as being altogether unwarrantable. And we cannot reject the premiss while retaining the conclusion. Logically, the god of the savage goes with the world of the savage; it should have no place in the mind of the really civilized human being.
It is for this reason that I am leaving on one side all those semi-metaphysical and pseudo-philosophical arguments that are put forward to justify the belief in God. As I have already said, they are merely excuses for continuing a belief that has no real warranty in fact. No living man or woman believes in God because of any such argument. We have the belief in God with us to-day for the same reason that we have in our bodies a number of rudimentary structures. As the one is reminiscent of an earlier stage of existence so is the other. To use the expressive phrase of Winwood Reade's, we have tailed minds as well as tailed bodies. The belief in God meets each newcomer to the social sphere. It is forced upon them before they are old enough to offer effective resistance in the shape of acquired knowledge that would render its lodgement in the mind impossible. Afterwards, the dice of social power and prestige are loaded in its favour, while the mental inertia of some, and the self-interest of others, give force to the arguments which I have called mere mental subterfuges for perpetuating the belief in God.
Only one other remark need be made. In the beginning the gods exist as the apotheosis of ignorance. The reason the savage had for believing in God was that he did not know the real causes of the phenomena around him. And that remains the reason why people believe in deity to-day. Under whatever guise the belief is presented, analysis brings it ultimately to that. The whole history of the human mind, in relation to the idea of God, shows that so soon as man discovers the natural causes of any phenomenon or group of phenomena the idea of God dies out in connection therewith. God is only conceived as a cause or as an explanation so long as no other cause or explanation is forthcoming. In common speech and in ordinary thought we only bring in the name of God where uncertainty exists, never where knowledge is obtainable. We pray to God to cure a fever, but never to put on again a severed limb. We associate God with the production of a good harvest, but not with a better coal output. We use "God only knows" as the equivalent of our own ignorance, and call on God for help only where our own helplessness is manifest. The idea remains true to itself throughout. Born in ignorance and cradled in fear, it makes its appeal to the same elements to the end. And if it apes the language of philosophy, it does so only as do those who purchase a ready-made pedigree in order to hide the obscurity of their origin.
