withallyourmind.net

Barton Swaim, at First Things, recently responded here to a recent essay by Steven Weinberg in which he asserted that a decrease in religious certitude in the West has led to markedly increased scientific knowledge. Weinberg contrasts this with the situation in the Islamic world where religious certitude is still quite high. Weinberg stated:

Even though American atheists might have trouble winning elections, Americans are fairly tolerant of us unbelievers. My many good friends in Texas who are professed Christians do not even try to convert me. This might be taken as evidence that they don’t really mind if I spend eternity in Hell, but I prefer to think (and Baptists and Presbyterians have admitted it to me) that they are not all that certain about Hell and Heaven. I have often heard the remark (once from an American priest) that it is not so important what one believes; the important thing is how we treat each other. Of course, I applaud this sentiment, but imagine trying to explain “not important what one believes” to Luther or Calvin or St. Paul. Remarks like this show a massive retreat of Christianity from the ground it once occupied, a retreat that can be attributed to no new revelation, but only to a loss of certitude.

Much of the weakening of religious certitude in the Christian West can be laid at the door of science; even people whose religion might incline them to hostility to the pretensions of science generally understand that they have to rely on science rather than religion to get things done. But this has not happened to anything like the same extent in the world of Islam.

Swaim’s central point in response to Weinberg is that Weinberg is mistaken that there has been a great decline in religious certitude in the West. It is not that there is now an overwhelming sense of certitude throughout present day Christianity, it is just that there has never been among the majority who have been called “Christians”. Swaim states:

What strikes me about this passage is Weinberg’s breezy assumption that, until very recently, everybody or almost everybody who considered themselves Christians adhered to the doctrines of Christianity with total or nearly total conviction. This assumption is common among highly intelligent people, like Weinberg…

Of course, they were nothing of the sort. From its birth, the Christian Church has counted among its members people possessing vastly different levels of certainty and fervor. The writers of the New Testament themselves were already chiding Christians whose commitment to the risen Savior was less than wholehearted… So it has always been.

Swaim then takes a brief look back at various periods of Christian history, including the 17th and 18th centuries - times when one might think there was a vast amount of Christian certitude. This was not the case. Swaim argues:

Believing that a fully divine Jesus Christ had risen and now lived—assenting to that claim with heart and mind—was neither easier nor more difficult in 1640 than it is in 2007. Jesus himself was nowhere to be seen in 1640, and the only witnesses to the truth of his claims were found in ancient manuscripts, the veracity of which were easily doubted.

Swaim concludes his response disagreeing with Weinberg’s assertion that secularization is somehow causally related to the advancement of science. Swaim maintains secularization has little to do with inward beliefs and more to do with outward practice, commerce, and urbanization. Among his concluding thoughts:

Its driving forces are commerce and urbanization, not scientific “proofs” for the nonexistence of God or the unreliability of the Bible or even discoveries about the nature of the material world. These last factors, whatever their merits, have been around for thousands of years and as antagonists of religious faith are neither stronger nor weaker than they ever were. The number of “Christians” in the West, defining that term loosely, has obviously and dramatically dropped off in the last half-century. Still, I find it difficult to believe that the number of people who now believe in, say, the bodily resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ is substantially fewer than was the case two hundred or five hundred or a thousand years ago. And even in Western Europe, where Western secularization has reached its furthest point, people disbelieve not because they’ve consciously rejected Christianity but because they know scarcely anything about it.

The point here is not that secularization is unimportant or that it hasn’t had profound (and in recent decades woeful) consequences for Western societies. The point, rather, is that Steven Weinberg and people like him are committing a grave error in historical interpretation when they posit a causal relationship between secularization and the advance of modern science.