Humanism or Christianity: Which Can Save Civilization?

In a previous article, I noted how the skeptic Michael Shermer has rebuked former Muslim-turned-atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali for ultimately turning to Christianity. He complained, first, that the evidence for Christ’s resurrection was poor, but showed he hadn’t really come to grips with that evidence. He also claimed that “Enlightenment Humanism” has done more for the world than Christianity.

Shermer is an historian of science. One might expect him to outdo the philosopher Bertrand Russell, physicist Carl Sagan, biologist Richard Dawkins, and psychologist Steven Pinker, who also appealed to history to attack Christianity. He argued:

In my books The Moral Arc and Giving the Devil His Due I show that it isn’t atheism bending the arc of justice and freedom, but Enlightenment humanism — a cosmopolitan worldview that places supreme value on human and civil rights, individual autonomy and bodily integrity, free thought and free speech, the rule of law, and science and reason as the best tools for determining the truth about anything. It incorporates scientific naturalism … if God is a supernatural being outside of space and time and therefore unknowable in any rational or empirical manner, it is not possible for natural creatures like us to understand a supernatural deity.

One must grant that last “insight.” If it is impossible to understand God, then understanding God is, indeed, not possible.

But what you mean by “understand,” Michael? If you mean “know something about,” the whole point of revelation is that an infinite Creator makes Himself known. How impotent would God be if He were unable to drop hints to His creatures about His character? But if you mean “fully comprehend,” of course not. Neither does the bird poking at worms in the garden understand why I peck at my computer.

Founders and the Enlightenment

Theology was traditionally the centerpiece of rational inquiry. Great thinkers like Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, Newton, Kepler, and Pascal explored the universe in the light of God’s “two books” of the Bible and Nature. Even before Christ, some Greek theists saw creation as rational due to the character of its Creator.

Shermer sees his cult as the key to human progress:

Scientific naturalism and Enlightenment humanism made the modern world, and many of the founding fathers of the United States, for example Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and John Adams, were either practicing scientists or were trained in the sciences, and their construction of the Constitution and the principles on which it is based were thoroughly secular and based on the best science and philosophy of the day.

In fact, the founders of modern science were mostly zealous Christians. Like many skeptics, though with less excuse, Shermer seems to forget that the “Enlightenment” followed the Scientific Revolution, not the other way around.

And aside from Paine, more a founding pamphleteer than father of first rank, the others Shermer names were deeply influenced by Christian thought, whether they fully believed it or not. Franklin wrote to the Puritan preacher Samuel Mather, “If I have been, as you seem to think, a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to [the Rev. Cotton Mather’s Essays to Do Good].” John Locke, who deeply influenced the American revolution, was not only a Christian but an apologist.

The Constitution and Secular Science?

The Constitution was “secular” in the sense that it was written for a people who had imbibed the spirit of Jesus’s teaching: “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Christ said His kingdom is “not of this world.” Secular government was, in that sense, Jesus’s idea, and a good one, as Christians like Milton, Bunyan, and Locke had begun to see. George W. Bush was on track when he called Christ his favorite political philosopher.

No, says Shermer, democracy is just science:

It is my hypothesis that in the same way that Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there, so too did the founders discover moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist.

Here he comes close to rediscovering the ancient Christian (and pre-Christian) concept of “natural law,” debaptizing it as an Enlightenment (or his own) discovery.

Moral laws exist! So argued C. S. Lewis in Abolition of Man, in view of many human traditions. Lewis was, Shermer may recall, the most famous Christian apologist of the twentieth century. But the laws Shermer formulates are a pale shadow of the Ten Commandments, still less the Sermon on the Mount, though the healthiest flourish on ground tilled by biblical truth:

(That) democracies are better than autocracies, that market economies are superior to command economies, that torture and the death penalty do not curb crime, that burning women as witches is a fallacious idea, that women are not too weak and emotional to run companies or countries, that blacks do not like being enslaved, and that the Jews do not want to be exterminated.

These values did not appear in a vacuum, nor were they invented by Voltaire or David Hume. Nor is that sort of cultural miracle — new ideals created from nothing, like Aphrodite from sea bubbles — normal. Most of these virtues were nurtured under the tutelage of the Christian Gospel for centuries before the so-called “Enlightenment” dawned.

Christianity and Moral Law

The Bible denounced holocausts against Jews already in Exodus, and celebrated female entrepreneurs in Proverbs. Slavery died in Western Europe during the Middle Ages before being resurrected after the Voyages of Discovery.

Meanwhile, the most successful anti-God movement of modern times, which still views itself as within the Enlightenment tradition, set up totalitarian states, ended free enterprise, instituted vast gulags, and tortured, executed, and enslaved millions. Shermer should recognize that democratic humanism is the minority tradition, the “Mensheviks” (lesser party) compared to the “Bolsheviks” (greater Marxist party of “Enlightenment” tyranny).

And would he be shocked to know that persecution of witches was banned in early Christian centuries, precisely because Christians saw this time-honored, almost universal practice as superstitious? Or that I personally have met believers who either fought such persecution or benefited from Christian campaigns who worked in Peru, Nigeria, and Dai villages in southern China?

Shermer cites Steven Pinker to explain “moral realism”:

If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours … if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind.

“Mutuality” is a concept that goes back as far as humanity. But so does selfishness, because people game the system, and (Galactic Overlords come in small packages) and “power corrupts.” All of us gain power over others in some way, whether as IRS agents, cops, teachers, gangsters, political activists, mailmen, impatient parents, or bratty kids blackmailing their parents.

Yes, the “Golden Rule” is widely known. Shermer writes:

That they are universal principles mean that they apply to all people — Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, pantheists, deists, agnostics, and atheists. Whether or not there is a God — much less the Christian God — is irrelevant. That’s what universal means.

That is not what “universal” means, because God created the universe. The Tao, or moral truth, said Lewis, is universal within the universe God made. We feel it press upon us: not merely that it is nice to be nice, and kind to be kind, or that if we scratch others’ backs, others will scratch ours. One of my students in a communist institute gave a speech this week claiming that “Good deeds will be rewarded,” at least psychologically. The Stoics thought the same. And he clearly felt love was a moral law, not just a trick to feel happy. Marx held another view. “From who, to whom” was the sinister motto of his enlightened disciples.

The moral law hardly undermines Christianity. Indeed, it makes little sense on atheism, in which we are automatons programmed by genes and synapses, evolutionary impulses, tradition, and media influencers. Truth presses on our consciences, showing our sins – including ones Shermer ignores or wishes to justify, though they are destroying America – and calling us to repent.

Enlightenment Humanists seldom liberated slaves. They founded few hospitals or schools. They did not often free women from foot-binding, end human sacrifice, stop the burning of widows, invent written languages, or oppose ideologies that enslave minds.

Christianity Changed the World

Shermer is an ingrate if he fails to credit Christianity for these and many other world-changing reforms. His history is defective if he knows not of them. Enlightenment thinkers often thought well of slavery, and kept mistresses and used them in the ancient way of powerful men. That is not the reformist zeal to change our world. Shermer seems to catch some sight of that truth, as he watches the anti-Christian Left collapse into an orgy of child-mutilation and gender madness, as Christians hold the fort against these lunatics as against priests of Baal who spread previous social contagions.

Ali seems to have caught sight of that bigger picture. Prodded by the woke failures he bemoans among his former colleagues at Scientific American, here’s hoping Dr. Shermer will, too. What’s good in the Enlightenment was a child of Christian civilization. What’s evil in it is a relapse into something more childish, a Bacchic hysteria that wasted the communist bloc, and blocks in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis. We also again face the principalities and powers of Asian despotism and desert fanaticism. “Enlightenment Humanism” is a pale and clumsy ghost, weary of past hauntings, oft-seduced by those vile spirits. The West needs a renewed resurrection fire.

David Marshall, an educator and writer, holds a doctoral degree in Christian thought and Chinese tradition. His most recent book is The Case for Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia.