I have been informed and delighted by reading Ivo Vegter’s work since I was a teenager. He is one of the best journalists in this country. But, like everyone, Vegter sometimes gets it wrong, as I believe he did in arguing for ‘decolonising religion’ in South Africa.
In discussing religion, let me be clear that, while I enjoyed a Christian education, I cannot, and will not, pretend that I regularly attend services. What follows is neither a sermon, nor atheist-bashing. That is not my place. I can only speak for myself, of facts and arguments that may help.
Winston Churchill was once described as a ‘pillar of the Church’, to which he responded, ‘No, not that, but perhaps a flying buttress’, or words to that effect. On a much smaller scale I find myself in a similar position, eager to support but under no pretence that I am a bona fide insider of ‘the Church’.
Why do Christianity and religion more broadly deserve a word of support? Because Vegter was so (unusually) unfair.
First, Vegter describes himself as having had a very ugly Christian education, and I share his sense of disdain for anyone who used the Bible to argue that ‘blacks are born to be slaves’. That is shameful, sinful even.
But then Vegter makes no effort to consider even a single person who had a healthy, loving Christian education. Vegter confuses the part he experienced for the whole.
Vegter then goes through a brief list of wicked things done in the name of Christianity, ranging from racial oppression to materialist opportunism to fake protection from Covid-19. The list could go on. Yet, I have not met a single Christian who denies that people have done wicked things (falsely) in the name of Jesus.
Ills of organised religion
At a historical level, Vegter failed to acknowledge the great things done in religion’s name, here and abroad. Again, he mistakes a part of church history for the whole story. By only considering the ills of organised religion, Vegter draws the conclusion that we would all do better without any religion whatsoever.
One problem with such one-sided arguments is that they are easily followed by one-sided rebuttals. I could list Christianity’s good side only and leave it at that, but I’m not sure if that would do anything but lead to acrimony.
In high school I remember debates about religion concluding like this, ‘All Christians are child molesters’ and ‘No, all atheists are Stalin’. That is not helpful, or interesting, or true.
But there are two major dangers that atheists do well to avoid and which are not often discussed. The first is ‘textual determinism’.
One correct interpretation
Textual determinists, often called fanatics, insist that there is one and only one correct interpretation of their sacred text. This interpretation then gets spread by the sword or the gun, or used to justify violence, and all other interpretations are crushed. If you want to know historically ‘what went wrong’ in Dar al Islam, consider this point.
Notice that atheists can be ‘textual determinists’ too. It is easy for an atheist critical of Christianity, for example, to interpret a passage in the Bible to mean ‘blacks are born to be slaves’ and then draw the inference that all Bible-committed Christians must interpret it in the same way. This seems to be what Vegter does, though perhaps I am misinterpreting him. (Interpretation is a tricky business).
In either case, theists and atheists both do well to acknowledge the tradition of divine revelation, in theological terms, or enlightened reinterpretation, in secular terms, by which organised religions have developed over thousands of years.
The alternative is that atheists end up becoming allies to violent religious fanatics by supporting their dangerous insistence that sacred texts are totally literal, never allegorical, metaphorical, or mystically ineffable, and never open to reinterpretation.
Next an atheist might grant that sacred texts are open to interpretation, and then say that is exactly what makes religion ‘inferior’ to, for example, science. This is a common 21st century mistake, in which regard I turn to Hans Vaihinger, perhaps the greatest 19th century German philosopher you never heard of.
A ‘fiction’
Vaihinger grew up Christian but started to have his doubts about whether Noah literally put allthe animals in his ark. Vaihinger considered the age-old supposition that religion is man-made, a ‘fiction’, but no less profoundly moral for all that.
Rather than ruminate, Vaihinger did something astonishingly new. He investigated science to ask whether that might be, in fact, the ‘useful fiction’ that religion is accused of being by atheists.
Vaihinger defined a useful fiction as any set of axioms that are not true because they are contradicted by other observable facts, or because they contradict one another, but are nevertheless a potent means to human flourishing. Amazingly, he found ‘useful fictions’ everywhere in science.
In Physics it was (and remains) quite standard to compute the force, velocity and momentum of a ‘point mass’. But a ‘point mass’ is a body with no dimensions that can also bear forces, a set of words in the English language with no discernible meaning.
Vegter is an enthusiastic student of Adam Smith (so am I!) and so was Vaihinger. For the purpose of economic quantitative analysis, Smith assumed that people are rational, self-interested actors. But Smith himself knew this not to be true, as he argued in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith knew religious people often made great sacrifices out of agape (love), with no prospect of material benefit.
Even though the fundamental assumption – rational selfishness – is not true, it still turns out to be very useful for doing classical economics, another ‘useful fiction’.
Messy problems
Mathematics, you may think, is so clear-cut that it avoids these messy problems. And yet ‘imaginary’ numbers were in play in Vaihinger’s day, defined by the square root of negative one, √(−1), which by definition cannot exist. Do you remember when you learned about ‘imaginary’ numbers? I laughed, and my friend said, ‘Ma’am, I think you’ve lost the plot’.
Riemann zeta functions are almost comically self-contradictory, showing among other things that in a certain sense 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 … = -1/12. This is used in modern physics.
After Vaihinger died, ‘useful fictions’ became even more obvious. Time and space and energy and mass are supposed by contemporary physics to be different versions of the same thing; some Big Bang Theories suppose something came out of nothing; quantum mechanics supposes, roughly, that a thing can both exist and not exist at once.
Kurt Gödel’s ‘incompleteness theorems’ show that mathematics, the language of science, is not complete nor can it be proved consistent. The problem with atheists who say religion is open to interpretation because its texts are ‘illogical’ is that the foundation of science is ‘illogical’ too.
Conceptual framework of science
This is not atheist-bashing, it is an invitation for all to learn more about what defines the conceptual framework of science.
My personal favourite ‘useful fiction’ comes from the American-Polish logician Alfred Tarski (second only to Gödel), who paradoxically proved that 1 = 2. If you have half an hour, here is probably my favourite video on the internet to outline Tarski’s paradox.
But Tarski does not show that numbers are meaningless, much less that ‘anything goes‘. Rather, when you realize what it takes to make 1 = 2, you come out with a better, and more informed, understanding of why 1 = 1 the rest of the time (which is pretty much always). 1 = 1 is both true and very useful; we could do little without it.
The same holds of Vaihinger’s insights about ‘useful fictions’ in the natural and social sciences more generally. Acknowledging the contradictions, the openness to interpretation, and the power games that define scientific revolutions does not require abandoning truth but is the first step to realising the truth of the matter.
The second step is to realise that while the background assumptions of science are often ‘useful fictions’, the concrete claims science makes are, when they get it right, true. Science is literally confused in its ‘first principles’ and true in the particulars.
The atheist should be prepared to concede that, at the very least, the same may be said of sacred texts. The moral imperatives that religion’s best interpreters proclaim are true, not so Mr. Vegter?
Science and religion cover different domains. If you want your marriage spiritually ordained, ‘get thee to a priest’ or if you want your eyes checked, go to an ophthalmologist – not the other way round. Best remember that too.
Most controversial tweet
Vegter’s criticism does not come in a political vacuum. Possibly the most controversial tweet in South African history is Helen Zille’s observation that not everything about colonialism was bad. No one who has considered the history seriously disagrees. And yet almost no prominent persons ‘buttressed’ Zille with any factual support.
Vegter seems to push that attack line an inch deeper in saying that nothing in Christianity vis-à-vis colonialism is any good.
From a historical perspective this is a bad mistake. It would be impossible to understand the greatest achievement of the British Empire, the abolition of slavery in the early 19th century, without appreciating the role of Christians, especially Quakers, in driving abolitionism.
It would be impossible to understand how the Institute of Race Relations rose to becoming the world’s foremost anti-apartheid think tank without attending to its Christian and other religious support.
It would be impossible to understand anti-apartheid reforms within the Afrikaans community without appreciating the role of Christians too.
Intelligible moral claim
Does that make all self-described ‘Christians’ good? No. ‘All self-described Christians’ is just not a group about which any intelligible moral claim can be made.
From a contemporary perspective, tarring all Christians with the same brush is dangerous because it has become all too easy in this country to mistake the part for the whole. One person does a wicked thing, and all people of the same group are blamed.
The sins of one corrupt preacher, or one awful school, or even one organ of the church over a long time are not the sins of all. On that we should agree.
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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay