On Tuesday, my column on decolonising religion caused some controversy. Gabriel Crouse wrote a thoughtful rebuttal. Here is my reply.
Earlier this week, I wrote an opinion column in which I wondered why so many black South Africans, having been the victims of colonial and Apartheid oppressors who were Christian and justified their actions by reference to the Bible, continue to accept Christianity.
This caused a great deal of discussion, with 281 comments to date and counting. Many people were quite offended by the light in which my question cast their religion.
The editors of the Daily Friend, which is published by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), published an editorial reiterating that my view is not necessarily the view of the Institute, but that tolerating disagreements and giving a platform to open debate is a matter of free speech, which is a core principle of the classical liberalism that the IRR promotes.
Gabriel Crouse, an analyst at the IRR whose philosophy degree makes him very eloquent on matters such as these, believes that I got it wrong, and that South Africa needs (good) religion.
I should be clear that although the discussion in the comments quickly devolved to an argument between Christianity and atheism, in which I was variously called a devil worshipper, a Marxist, and a Russian, the point of my article was not simply to make a case against religion in general.
I really am interested to know why the religion that in South Africa and around the world has been used to justify the subjugation of entire peoples, and continues to be used to fleece the gullible and the desperate, is not also a target of the decolonialisation activists.
I hope I was clear that I’m no great fan of the decolonialisation movement in general. I think more could probably be done to be objectively inclusive of scientists and thinkers that made contributions to knowledge from outside the Western world, and to recognise women and minorities who were sidelined into obscurity while the white men who worked with them won Nobel Prizes. I do not, however, believe there is merit in the ‘other ways of knowing’ mantra of the critical theory movement, especially not when applied to the hard sciences.
Ignoring the positives
Crouse critiques my column for showcasing the negative aspects of Christianity, but ignoring the positives. Of course it is true that not everything about religion is bad.
However, the point of my column was specifically to question why black people do not resent the fact that the dominant church in South Africa during Apartheid, the Dutch Reformed Church or NG Kerk (which I attended as a child), offered theological cover for the system of Apartheid until as late as 1986.
That some people had lovely Christian educations is not really relevant to this fact. Neither is the fact that not all Christians subscribed to the idea that black people were Sons of Ham, cursed to be hewers of wood and carriers of water.
Indeed, there were a number of churches that came to strongly oppose Apartheid, which united under the South African Council of Churches banner in 1968. That was 20 years after the start of Apartheid, however, and the quasi-official church of the country remained the NG Kerk. People like Beyers Naudé were the exception, not the rule.
Because the SACC was majority black in its leadership, it considered itself to be ‘the legitimate voice of the people of God’. But then, so did the NG Kerk.
My question was why black people had accepted that they were ‘the people of God’ in the first place, given their demeaning treatment at the hands of white people who preached religious justification for Apartheid.
Textual determinism
Crouse goes on to discuss ‘textual determinism’, which is the idea that there is only one correct interpretation of a given passage of scripture. This takes us into slippery terrain.
In the particular case of the examples I gave, it suggests that one could interpret the curse on the Sons of Ham differently, and that some believers do so.
However, my point was that the NG Kerk did not do so, and did use it to justify the subjugation of black people, just like they interpreted other parts of the Bible to suggest that Afrikaners were the ‘chosen people’ of God.
They even made their own holy covenant with God if only he would help them defeat the Zulus in battle. That covenant, among those who still hold it in high regard, is considered a ‘triumph for Western civilisation and Christianity in Africa’. Moreover, it is credited with the ‘spiritual liberation of the Zulu’. It takes a twisted morality to consider the slaughter of the Zulu at Voortrekker hands a good thing for the Zulu.
On the broader point, Crouse is right that I would argue that textual indeterminism puts religion on an unsatisfactory epistemological basis. It permits religious apologists to squirm their way out of virtually anything that appears to cast their belief in a bad light.
There is quite a lot that they might want to squirm their way out of. Against the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’, for example, the God of the Bible is perfectly fine with killing witches, killing homosexuals, killing fortune tellers and mediums, killing kids who strike or curse their parents, killing everyone except Noah and his family, killing adulterers, killing women for sex outside marriage, killing blasphemers, killing the sons of sinners, killing the first-born of Egypt, killing false prophets, killing those who desecrate the Sabbath, killing non-believers, killing entire towns for harbouring just one person who prays to another God, and killing untold old people, women, and children during wars.
In the Second Book of Kings, a group of children jeered at Elisha, who promptly cursed them, upon which 42 of them were torn apart by two she-bears. In the First Book of Samuel, God himself kills 50 000 men just for taking a peek inside the Ark of the Covenant. In the Second Book of Samuel, a man tried to steady the Ark because it was about to tip over, and God struck him dead in thanks.
The Bible condones the kidnap and rape of women, on multiple occasions, especially in war. Elsewhere, it requires a rapist to marry the victim and pay a fine to her father. And when a rape victim does not scream loudly enough to prevent the crime, she is to be put to death.
The Bible condones slavery, including sex slavery, as well as actual human sacrifice.
When you bring this up, you’ll be told oh, but that is the Old Testament, and when Jesus came, everything changed. All that changed, however, was the relationship between believers and God. God himself did not change, and is still the same God of the Old Testament.
In the New Testament, Jesus himself reaffirms the old laws, even making some of them stricter. Cities that refuse to admit or listen to the disciples were threatened with destruction worse than that visited upon Sodom and Gomorrah. Jesus berates the Pharisees for not killing disobedient children. Jesus says that he did not come to bring peace, but to sow division.
There’s a boatload of re-interpretation to be done to wish all this stuff away.
Belief in miracles
Then there is all the miraculous stuff, none of which is supported by any evidence. Believers will ask where the Big Bang came from, and will not take ‘I don’t know’ for an answer. Instead, they invent a being that supposedly existed for all eternity, has infinite power (but doesn’t use it to protect the innocent from evil), knows everything, and is everywhere at once. And those believers never seem to experience any cognitive dissonance over explaining a mystery by appealing to a far greater mystery.
They point to minor points of uncertainty in, for example, evolutionary theory, but do not even blink at the preposterous idea that Joseph’s fianceé really got pregnant without having slept with someone, or the idea that Noah’s Ark could house a breeding pair of all animals on the planet. The penguins surely walked a long way.
Of course, it wasn’t unusual for pre-civilised societies to believe in magic, but we know a little more about how the world really works, by now.
No true Christian…
Another common trope is that this church, or that church, or organised religion in general, is not true Christianity. Catholics denounce Protestants, and vice versa. Protestant denominations denounce each other. Each claim that they have the monopoly on truth. As, of course, do other religions, like Judaism, Hinduism and Islam. They cannot all be right, and there is no sound empirical basis for selecting which of them, if any, is correct.
Crouse himself makes that point when he says one cannot make any intelligible moral claim about ‘all self-described Christians’.
That sounds like an easy out, however. One expects that kind of logic from, say, a political party, when it says corruption is only a matter of a few bad apples.
Of course there are good, moral Christians. Of course religion has had many positive effects in the course of human history. It is at least arguable, however, that it has done just as much evil, and has more often been exploited to justify the despotic power of kings, to suppress the masses, or to justify bigotry and intolerance.
‘Useful fictions’
Crouse takes a diversion into science, when he discusses ‘useful fictions’. In one way, this lets believers off the hook for believing truly impossible things. In another, he is quite wrong, however.
As a first example, he cites the simplifying assumptions made in science in order to make complex problems manageable. The thing is, none of these assumptions are ever presented as truth.
Physicists know that objects don’t act as a point mass with no dimensions. By making such a simplifying assumption, however, one can calculate their behaviour to some degree of approximation.
If the approximation is not sufficiently exact for your purpose, such as when calculating the movement of an aeroplane or a rocket in space, then many of these simplifications have to be abandoned, and you do have to take into account mass distribution, wind resistance, relativity, and any number of other factors that affect the thing you’re trying to study.
His next example is that of complex numbers, which have a ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ component. It stands to reason that imaginary numbers cannot be real, does it not?
It turns out, however, that this is just a matter of terminology. The origin of complex numbers has to do with the problem of finding roots of quadratic equations. Some had obvious roots on what was called the real number line, but some did not. When one tries to calculate those roots, one ends up with a square root of a negative number.
René Descartes was the first to describe the square root of -1 as an imaginary number. A century later, however, Friedrich Gauss tried to clear up the mystery: ‘That this subject [imaginary numbers] has hitherto been surrounded by mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question.’
Once you understand them, they make perfect sense, and they can be visualised. They’re not just arbitrary inventions.
His next example involves the claim that ‘in a certain sense 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 … = -1/12’. To prove this, however, one has to make a curious and entirely non-intuitive assumption, which is that the infinite series 1 – 1 + 1 – 1 + 1 … = ½.
As a matter of fact, the sum of that series is either 1 or 0, depending on whether you stop counting at an odd or even number of terms. It is always either 1 or 0. Its sum is therefore indeterminate, or divergent.
The idea that the infinite sum is somehow equal to the average of those two may be useful in certain very abstractly theoretical ways – and the physics which Crouse says it is used for is string theory, which is entirely abstract and theoretical – but that does not mean any mathematician will tell you the sum of an infinite series of positive numbers is not infinite.
Paradoxes
The case of quantum states and their collapse is something that can be modelled, but it has never been explained. As Richard Feynman once said: ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’
That leaves quantum superposition as a useful theoretical construct, but no physicist will claim it to be truth. In fact, the holy grail of physics is to derive a theory that can reconcile classical mechanics and relativity theory with quantum physics. It isn’t so much a ‘useful fiction’ as an unknown.
Let’s skip to the Banach-Tarski paradox, which claims that one can decompose a given volume, say a sphere, into a set of sub-volumes, and then recombine those into two volumes that are exactly congruent to the original volume.
This seems entirely counter-intuitive. It is very well explained in the video to which Crouse links.
It soon becomes clear that the paradox arises out of our inadequate conceptual grasp of the concept of infinity. There’s nothing that says the paradox is real, or useful, or a fiction. We simply don’t know yet. A lot of higher-level abstract mathematics goes way beyond anything we can imagine in the real world. What these explorations give us are tools that we can use, or starting points from which we can reason, to help us better understand reality.
There is, in fact, a resolution to the paradox, but I’ll admit it falls some way out of my own mathematical wheelhouse.
Equivalence of science and religion
Crouse then reaches a conclusion I cannot go along with. He argues that because we base scientific principles upon certain axioms or simplifications, which may or may not be true in the real world, and still produce apparently true representations of reality, we can apply the same logic to religion. It is based on certain inventions, of questionable truth, but produces moral imperatives that, Crouse says, the atheist must concede are true.
I’ll accept the admission that religion is based on foundations of questionable truth. I consider them to be entirely false.
I cannot accept that the moral prescripts of religion are true, in general. Some of them are controversial, and many are not at all acceptable as universal truths.
More importantly, the nature of the inventions of religion are not at all like the axioms of mathematics, or the simplifying assumptions of physics.
The concept of an anthropomorphic being that is eternal, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent is more like a universal cheat code. In maths, one tries to minimise the number of axioms needed to prove results. The concept of God, by contrast, maximises your set of assumptions. You could derive literally anything from it, and as we saw with all the scriptural interpretation stuff, people routinely do.
In fact, this problem makes it impossible to distinguish ‘good’ religion from ‘bad’ religion. Something that appears bad may just be ‘part of God’s ineffable plan’, and something that appears good may, by some interpretation of the ancient scriptures, be evil. When there is no reliable way for different people to reach the same interpretation, who’s to say what is good and bad?
In science one always tries to prove or disprove one’s assumptions and changes those assumptions when warranted. In religion the concept of God is not merely a ‘useful fiction’ but is held up as absolute and eternal truth.
You can’t just argue that, well, religion contains some decent moral prescripts, therefore its ‘useful fiction’ is justified.
The source of morality
The same moral prescripts can be derived entirely without supposing the existence of a deity. Simply reasoning from a humanistic perspective, and figuring out which set of behaviours are most likely to lead to a peaceful and prosperous society that maximises individual and mutual happiness leads to many of the same moral precepts.
There’s nothing mystical about not killing, not raping, not stealing, and doing unto your neighbours as you would have them do unto you.
I do agree with Crouse that the sins of the few should not be visited upon the many. There are many genuinely good religious people, and many religious people and organisations that do genuinely good things.
I don’t believe that religion is a prerequisite for moral behaviour, however. There are also many non-religious people who are charitable and kind and loving and devoted to peace and prosperity.
So none of this answers my question of why people who have been subjugated so cruelly by Bible-wielding colonists remain willing to accept that imported religion as their own.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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