One of the more interesting incoherencies in the alleged culture of the modern intellectuals is the use of the term "free thinker" to mean the adherents of an atheistic ideology that denies the possibility of anyone thinking freely. Yesterday I tried to show how the widespread belief in a form of biological determinism negates the required foundations of American liberalism. Tying us, absolutely, our actions, our interactions, our lives, our very experience to organic chemistry negates freedom, and the influence of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in the current crops of those who have been to college is ubiquitous. It is THE default belief about all kinds of stuff, from gender roles, economic class, educational aspiration, the lives and deaths of huge numbers of people. Biological determinism in society has always been accompanied by doppelgangers of racism and sexism. In short, it is impossible to maintain both a belief in Dawkinsian evo-psy and liberalism with any kind of integrity, their intellectual reconciliation is impossible. I think that in the English speaking peoples that liberalism, in the American sense of the word, the legacy of the 19th century reformers, built on the legacy of the 18th century has been the loser. Without a doubt, American liberalism and its counterparts in Britain and even Canada, has been on the downward incline during the same period as the resurgence of Darwinian determinism*.
In Onward, Christian Liberals, Christianity's long tradition of social injustice, an essay published in The American Scholar in 2006, Marilynne Robinson made a far more convincing case for, not only the compatibility of American liberalism with Calvinism, but that historically much of American liberalism was a result of an understanding of Calvinism. When that liberalism was developing in the same places and among the same people involved in both the enormous eruptions of both the First and Second Great Awakenings, it would be hard to contend that the great reform efforts that constitute the social and political manifestations of that liberalism, its actual substance, had nothing to do with each other. I can think of no other thing that happened during that period, encouraging a change of behavior involving self-denial and the Biblical imperatives of doing justice to the widow, the orphan, the poor, the stranger among us that would account for reform movements large enough to make the kind of change that was made. Though I think that other religious groups, the Quakers, in particular, may have had a bit to do with it as well.
I am speaking from the perspective of American liberal Protestantism. As I understand the history of this tradition, it departed in the mid–18th century from the Calvinism its forebears had brought from England when it experienced the potent religious upheaval known as the First Great Awakening. The given of the movement was that people passed into a state of sanctity—and in effect were assured of their salvation—through an intense mystical/emotional experience, often a vision of Christ. The movement swept pre–Revolutionary America and left in its wake Princeton, Dartmouth, the temperance movement, a heightened sense of shared identity, and the model of revivalism as a norm of religious culture. There was criticism and reaction against extremes of enthusiasm, and an important Calvinist aversion to the idea that the fruits of salvation could be had by shaking the tree. And there was a period of quiet, which ended with the onset in the early 19th century of the Second Great Awakening, again based on the belief that salvation was realized in a mystical/emotional experience. It swept the Northeast, sending zealous New Yorkers and New Englanders out into the Territories, and left in its wake the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, any number of fine colleges, a revived temperance movement, Utopianism, Seventh-day Adventists, and Latter-day Saints. And also a literature on the treatment of an affliction they frankly called “religious mania.”
Having read a part of the enormous literature of mystical religion, I can point out you'll find some of the earliest warnings against such a "mania" contained in them. It has frequently been presented as dangerous and damaging to religious progress. That warning probably pre-dates Christianity.
As an ardent Calvinist, Robinson confronts the idea of predestination, presenting it in an entirely different manner than it is usually given. I would probably have to break copyrite law to quote enough of the article to give you an idea of what she says so I will only ask that you read her in full. While I am not, have never been and almost never will be a predestinarian**, she does a far more convincing job of squaring the circle, reconciling predestination with freedom, in a way that the molecular fundamentalists have not done. Something which I believe materialism is incapable of doing. She does a job of showing how much more of an advantage religious belief is for liberalism in that religious liberals don't think they know it all or can know it all or even an impressive part of it all. Molecular fundamentalism is as tied to a primitive and narrow assumption that they have the key to everything as biblical fundamentalism is to a primitive and narrow concept of their favored authority.
Only, whereas the molecular fundamentalist can brush aside as delusions, concepts of justice, of morality, of the inherency of rights and moral obligations, those are massively important and potent parts of The Bible. While there are certainly millions of professed believers in the Bible as divine authority who notably ignore its most important and frequent exhortations to do justice, to feed the poor, to clothe them, to love them, to treat the stranger among us as we treat ourselves, to not do unto others, and to do to others what we would have done to us, they can't simply cut those out of the text. The atheist fundamentalists have been blatantly denying those for more than a hundred-fifty years and there is no convincing explanation I know of which accounts for the reality of them under atheism. Convincing enough to produce evidence that atheists believe it to match the reforms growing out of The Great Awakenings. The stronger tendency among atheists is to ignore or deny their reality.
I have larger hopes that those claiming a belief in The Bible as the word of God seeing the error of their ways and behaving justly than in people whose fundamental holding makes that not only impossible but unnecessary.
* As a large group of scientists and others predicted at the dawn of the immediate predecessor of evo-psy, Sociobiology. A group that included some of the most eminent Darwinists of our time.
** Perhaps, as a moderate believer in universalism, I do believe in a kind of predestination. If everyone is made for salvation, that is predestined, perhaps more predestinarian than the idea that someone can choose to be saved or not, though I'd expect anyone would rather be saved, if their choice isn't hampered by ignorance or mental illness. Atheists are even more strictly predestinarian in that they believe we all are bound inevitably for eternal obliteration, our bodies destined for whatever bleak end that happens to be in fashion among the cosmologists any given month.
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