Modern Self-Deification and the Array of Religions
How have the world’s religions accommodated the rise of science and secular humanism?
The ultimate test of the world’s religions is how they were able to accommodate the rise of world-historic, science-driven progress, otherwise known as “modernity.”
There’s a relative sense of modernity that applies to each culture’s golden, cutting-edge period, or its sense of its importance or superiority to earlier cultures. But there’s also an absolute sense that applies mainly to the scientific revolution and its liberal, secular humanist ethos that resulted in the surge of capitalism, democracy, and freedom of thought in the arts.
What, then, were each of the ancient religions’ resources for reconciling themselves to that kind of secular progress? Let’s briefly look at those religions and the dynamics at play.
Daoism
Daoists look to natural efficiencies for their moral inspiration, as they find wisdom in nature’s mindless productivity. Paradoxically, a person could hollow himself or herself out, acting “spontaneously” and thus following nature’s ways rather than the artifices of civilization. Confucianism prizes those artifices and is thus antithetical to Daoism. Similarly, Daoism is largely at odds with modernity’s dualistic conception of people’s relation to wildness and the Faustian opposition to nature.
Confucianism
Confucians argue that we’re obliged to adhere not to the natural order but to social rules that cultivate our character so we can live in harmony with other social beings. Confucianism is proto-modern in formulating a form of secular humanism that parallels Aristotle’s naturalistic virtue ethics. Both Confucians and Aristotelians, however, understate nature’s alienness, so they succumb to the naturalistic fallacy of personifying nature by positing natural functions, purposes, or a need for cosmic harmony between Heaven and Earth. That’s so, even as both philosophies advanced on the more naïve theistic personifications.
Hinduism
The Hindu synthesis is artificially compatible with any conceivable development because that synthesis is driven covertly by Pythagoreanism, the reverence for enumerated hierarchies. A Hindu can allow, for instance, that both theism and atheism are appropriate for different life stages or spiritual strategies. You could use theistic religion in a worthy engagement with the play of Brahman, or you could devote yourself to mystical philosophy and learn to see through such metaphors.
Just as Hindus reconciled mainstream social expectations with the ascetic counterculture, still represented by Jainism and Buddhism, Hindus could reconcile mystical spirituality with secular humanism, and they could do this by positing a hierarchy of stages. Some behaviour is appropriate in one stage of development or for one purpose, while a different behaviour is suitable under different circumstances. This is enumerated, systematic relativism.
Still, there’s a more substantive affinity in the implicit ascetic counterculture that impacted Greek philosophy and thus Christianity and European modernity itself. The ascetic urge to escape from nature is driven at least unconsciously or implicitly by an appreciation of nature’s inhuman, cosmic enormity. The problem Hindus grappled with was the anomalous person’s role in a pantheistic setting. If nature’s wildness or illusion of Samsara is everywhere, how is escape possible?
The ascetics searched for an inward strategy that suited an elite spiritual counterculture, whereas modern secular humanists sought an outward one that applied to average folks. The ascetics disciplined their minds to avoid disappointing themselves with unrealistic cravings and to accept the grim reality of their insignificance on the cosmic scale. Of course, modernists developed sturdy secular institutions for opposing nature’s wildness and extending our cultural range with technology that applies deep scientific knowledge.
Judaism
Like Confucianism, Judaism is proto-modern, but for a different reason. Whereas Confucians were fixated on social harmony, Jews discovered an existential perspective in their satirical takedown of polytheistic empires. Jewish monotheism was an anti-theology for outsiders, for the proverbial joker who sits at the back of the class and mocks all the proceedings. That satirical perspective was born from the Jewish experience of being perennially conquered.
For Jews, mainstream religions were idolatrous, and the true God was — hilariously, satirically, paradoxically — equivalent to nothing. The most powerful deity wasn’t found in any temple, king, or military supremacy, but was invisible, “supernatural,” and beyond all extant beings. God was too great to exist! God had to be poetically and morally necessary, not merely actual or physically demonstrable. Only such a “transcendent” status would dignify Jews’ alienation from polytheistic civilizational norms.
No large leap of logic was needed to transition from that mockery of polytheistic religions to Jews’ immersion in secular endeavours such as banking and the sciences, and to most modern Jews’ explicit secular humanism. There’s even an early record of Jews’ moderate pragmatism and implicit rejection of theism in Job and Ecclesiastes. For centuries before the scientific revolution, Jews eschewed theology and proselytizing.
Jews were tolerant of other religions because they didn’t fear them. This is because monotheism amounts to the outgrowing of theism, so Jews had already undermined the world’s religions in their scriptural critiques. Jews didn’t seek to convert Gentiles to their faith because Judaism was far ahead of its time. Converting the world to Judaism would have amounted to the imposition of secular humanism, and the prescientific world wasn’t ready for that offense against its tribal intuitions and religious delusions. Jews mocked theistic religions, but empathized with people’s need for some reassuring myths to sustain them.
Still, that tension would pass to the Christian offshoot and inform the modernity that grew out of Christendom.
Christianity
Early Christians might have understood Jewish humour since their gospel narrative pressed the satire with their inversion of Greco-Roman heroism. True heroes for the invisible, virtually nonexistent Supreme Being were members of the underclass, like Jesus, who triumphed in their degradation. But the industrious Roman Empire had the last laugh on Jewish monotheism when it incorporated Judeo-Christian satire into its state theology. Thereafter, the Church lost its sense of humour and took its theology literally, making anti-Jewish idols out of Jesus, Mary, the cross, the Bible, the saints, and the popes. Christianity became Romanized, politicized Judaism, and the resulting literalism was largely antithetical to modernity.
True, a personal creator of nature would have ensured that there is an explicable natural order for people to investigate. But the Zoroastrian process theology that Jews and Christians syncretized ended up demonizing the pre-apocalyptic stages of nature’s growth. For instance, there was the tale of the fallen angels who tainted nature and sought to pervert God’s chosen people. Hence, Christians demonized nature, associating protoscience with devil worship and witchcraft.
Modernity grew out of Christendom, but mainly despite the Church’s medieval protests. It could hardly have been otherwise for a religion that lost the plot of monotheism because of the Church’s Pauline bid to be “catholic,” universal, or all things to all people. Zoroastrian progress was about inner refinements and the hope for moral victories, just as Jewish monotheism was a satirical rationale for upholding an existential counterculture that was like the boy David in a world of polytheistic Goliaths. But Christian literalism and idolatry divorced this religion from an authentic spiritual pursuit, twisting the gospel into an obscene excuse for imperialism, patriarchy, slavery, war, torture, and other profane, patently anti-Jesus machinations.
Still, Christianity modernized itself with the Protestant Reformation that incorporated individualism into its long-adulterated mythos. Martin Luther returned to an ethic of Jewish inwardness that condemned the politics of organized religions, and Protestants even found a theological excuse for the capitalist greed for private property. Christians could reconcile themselves to modernity because their religion is essentially one long misfiring joke, a series of gross compromises with barbarism, so that adding one more to the litany would barely be noticed.
Islam
We might have expected a greater sense of humour and a more profound satirical perspective to have emerged from a religion that was supposed to have bypassed Christianity’s confusions and rationalizations and returned to the purity of Jewish monotheism. But Islam instead took itself too seriously and literally, and the reason for that is clear.
Whereas Judaism originates from the perspective of the conquered, Islam began as a rationale for conquerors. Thus, Muslims were closer to Christians, after all, in devising a politically useful religion, one that could exploit even mathematics and science if doing so would strengthen the Muslim world. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, however, and Muslims fell far behind secular cultures in the late-modern period, Muslims grew resentful and demonized earthly progress. Henceforth, Islam would be a religion of slave morality in the Nietzschean sense.
Islam’s aversion to modernity is on full display in the death cult of militant jihad and the Muslim world’s long antagonism towards Israel. The resentment and twisted shame are obvious since Israel is a military superpower that’s mostly reconciled with the modern ethos of secular humanism. (An exception is the small number of right-wing Jewish fundamentalists who happened to have corrupted the Israeli government in Benjamin Netanyahu’s third run as Prime Minister.)
The essence of Islam is submission to a supernatural deity. In practice, Muslims submit to human dictators who use Islam to demagogue the issues of the day. By contrast, modernity is about waging a Promethean revolt against nature, due to the absence or irrelevance of any such deity. In the twenty-first century, Islam is the largest, most virulent religious opponent of modernity.
The modern challenge of science
What exactly is science’s challenge to the world’s religions, such that they’d have to respond by modernizing themselves or resorting to fundamentalist purity tests? It’s not just that science refutes some theological assertions. Science is a force for humanism, and the endpoint of humanist growth is transhuman self-deification. Science has the potential to turn people into gods, whereas the world’s religions muddy the waters by projecting that potential onto a skygod figure.
People have likely longed to be godlike ever since they felt alienated from animals, after the prehistoric cognitive revolutions that “modernized” our genus so that we came to differ from the animals that struggled unknowingly to be naturally selected. People grew advanced enough to artificially select themselves according to cultural standards, the implication being that people as such are godlike. Science makes that alienating progress undeniable by informing us about the cosmos with well-tested theories that can be technologically applied to further empower and liberate us.
The real challenge behind science is the humanist ethos that’s been with us implicitly for tens of thousands of years. We haven’t always thought of ourselves as secular humanists, but sedentary civilization is effectively a Promethean affront to the wildness of our natural maker and the environmental selector of species’ fitness to survive.
The fundamental clash between science and the world’s religions is that theists are confused about where the divine powers lie.
Nature is divinely creative, but only mindlessly and impersonally so. The gods that are fit to be worshipped are what enlightened people can become. Yet theists preoccupy themselves with obfuscations of that transhuman longing, with deluded theologies about “supernatural” gods and miracles. Like science fiction stories, religious myths have always been wholly about ourselves and our relation to our true maker, which is the cosmos.
The supernatural deities are projections of what we wish we could become, and scientific progress makes that humanist longing clear and even realistic. That’s what offends theists who are lost in confusion about themselves and their maker.