Mitres and Miracles
On October 15th, 1947, at the Convocation of Bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Lang, mildly rebuked the Bishop of Birmingham, Dr. Barnes, for the views he expressed on miracles in his book The Rise of Christianity The Sunday Pictorial published extracts from the book, and at the end of the series the archbishop appointed Dr. Blunt, Bishop of Bradford, to reply. Both bishops confined themselves to the authenticity of the gospels and the miracles.
This side of the religious question is of little interest to the Socialist, who ignores them for the same reason that he ignores so-called Lourdes cures and Mons angels. They are contrary to nature, and he cannot know all the circumstances of the happening and the telling. In particular the telling.
Nevertheless, miracles are of vital importance to the ecclesiastic. Dr. Lang admitted as much in his first protest.
While Dr. Garbett said “Acceptance of modern and scientific theories with regard to religion would leave the church only with the memory of a ‘good and courageous man,’ who failed in his mission and whose body remained within the tomb.” Other bishops joined in the general condemnation, and Dr. Barnes was left in a minority of one. Needless to say they were all concerned, with or without miracles, in making religion acceptable to the credulous.
In spite of his objections to the literal acceptance of miracles, Dr. Barnes still believes in the greatest of all miracles: the creation of the world, universe or cosmos by a personal god. His explanation of the manner in which miracles came to be believed is probably true. But in retaining the creation miracle and a spiritual domain he gave away his case to Dr. Blunt. He says: “In the discussion of alleged miracles, much nonsense would be avoided by the ardent controversialists if they remembered the first rule of experimental religious psychology: spiritual truths must be spiritually discerned.” Which in plain English is a confession that religion is just a world of make-believe.
After Dr. Barnes’ concessions to spiritual power, miracles, like casting out devils, or turning water into wine, are only small fry, comparable with the spiritualist manifestations of today. And a god who could create the cosmos would take them in his stride. But Dr. Blunt said this in a round-about way. He says that man can modify the rigid working out of cause and effect, and then asks if God cannot do as much? He quotes Dr. Barnes’ statement, “That spiritual qualities do not use material media,” and then declares “This statement is falsified every time that a boy kisses his girl, or a friend grasps a friend’s hand.”
Kissing a girl and shaking a friend’s hand, according to Dr. Blunt, are spiritual impulses causing physical effects. They are actually physical attractions evoking emotional responses; something not confined to man, but common to the whole biological world. Dr. Barnes’ second point: “Spiritual causes do not produce material effects,” is, he says, “falsified whenever a cricketer catches a falling ball, and so interferes with the law of gravity.” But the law of gravity persists whether the ball rests on the player’s hand, his head, or the ground. The player himself stays on the ground in accordance with the law; and when he catches the ball its weight is added to his own, and player and ball remain under the earth’s power of attraction. Even in its flight the ball was subject to that power. Had the ball rendered the player unconscious by falling on his head, it would have been just as true to say that the law of gravity had interfered with the life force.
Next, Dr. Blunt appealed to science, in the person of Sir Oliver Lodge, who for some years had been engrossed with psychical research under the guidance of spiritualist mediums. He is introduced with a flourish: “So it was that so eminent a scientist as Sir Oliver Lodge, lecturing to a body of clergy warned them ’not to give up the idea of miracle, just when science is preparing to concede it ’.”
On the strength of this, Dr. Blunt makes a more general statement, for which he supplies no evidence: “For fifty years science has been more and more conceding the limited scope of merely physical causation, and has been more and more admitting the power of spiritual forces in the processes of the Universe. Indeed the scientific question nowadays is not whether matter is absolute, but whether there is such a thing as ‘matter’ at all.”
When scientists popularise their ideas, especially among the clergy, they should explain what they mean by matter. As it is stated above it may mean any one of three things: an essential matter underlying all phenomena—the philosophers’ bugbear; matter in the form of atoms in motion; or just matter.
Matter and force are merely two names for one and the same thing. And this, in spite of the claim by a scientist, that a recent experiment could only be explained on the assumption that a minute quantity of matter had been converted into energy and lost. Which, in the telling, proves nothing except that it is just as easy to lose things in a laboratory as anywhere else.
The older materialistic theory was that matter in the shape of atoms in motion was responsible for everything in nature. It held the field until some hundred years ago. Its adherents were unsatisfied, they wanted to know of what did the atom consist, if force or energy was only motion of the atoms. A question that has intrigued philosophers and even scientists, and still confuses the ecclesiastical mind; as instanced by all the bishops in this controversy who insist on the influence of mind over matter. So this alleged disappearance of matter from the scene is of no help to either side in the controversy.
Throughout the middle ages philosophers thought of matter as the substance of the universe: the reality behind its manifold appearances. But neither the modern philosopher, nor the scientist has yet discovered this supposed reality, because however deeply they penetrate they still find only phenomena.
The atom idea was put forward in Ancient Greece. It served as the basis for theories and experiments throughout the middle ages. And eventually all modern chemistry was based on it. Yet the modern scientist found that its hardness was not due to solidity. That it was in fact made up of electrons, which he described as mere points of force moving at incredible speeds. He tried to separate these points of force with a process called “splitting the atom.” The measure of success achieved was plainly revealed to the world at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
What a tribute to the wages system ! It drags the best efforts out of men in the service of the ruling-class. The scientist will give of his utmost to get into the four-figure wage class. All his discoveries add wealth and power to the ruling-class on the one hand, and on the other, greater insecurity and more highly concentrated labour for the rest of his class. The clergy, too, are wage workers. Badly paid in the lower ranks, but always striving for one of the high-up jobs; where they can juggle with spiritual metaphysics like “experimental religious psychology ”; and get big money by means of dignified eulogies on the sacred rights of private property, the essence of capitalist ethics, and a vital necessity for himself and the class he serves.
In spite of all the recent discoveries on the nature and structure of the atom, industrial scientists carry on with their table of elements, with its relative atomic weights, and it still works. They are continually discovering laws of substance of which man can take advantage in the struggle for existence. Most scientists, however, turn away from investigations into the nature of existence. It doesn’t pay. While labour-saving processes and atom bombs do.
The tendency on the part of the clergy to merge what they call the spiritual into human thought and mental work is the result of their inability to show, even the probability of a separate spiritual existence, so they are driven back on the mind, and some day they will discover that the mind is merely the function of a physical organ. An instance of this tendency occurred during a broadcast debate on “Belief and Unbelief,” when a prominent churchman made the absurd contention that it was an “example of the influence of mind over matter whenever he took off his hat.” Quite forgetting, in his innocence, that it was material nature, in the shape of rain, cold, etc., that made him wear a hat at all; while over-exertion on a warm day would necessitate its removal to mop his perspiring brow.
Before the clergy talk of mind influencing matter, they must first establish it as a fact that mind is something different from matter, and secondly, that it is independent of matter. It needs no scientist to tell us that there is nothing in nature that is anything in and by itself. Everything within our knowledge is a combination of many things, each of them parts of the universe, and all interdependent, related, and subject to incessant change by that relationship. In that respect the mind is no different from anything else.
Some light on this subject of “mind versus matter” was reported in the Daily Worker (8/4/47). Bertrand Russell had said “that modern physics make materialism very unplausible.” In reply to him J. B. S. Haldane said: “To my mind modern physics makes materialism far more probable than it seemed a generation ago. If the smallest bits of matter are not mere inert particles, but buzzing with activity, it is much easier to suppose that life and mind could arise from what we call dead matter. Materialists think that the gap between non-living matter and human beings is not absolute, and has in fact been bridged by evolution.”
There are, of course, no gaps in evolution; only in our knowledge of it. But the closing of the gap in our knowledge of evolution has broken down one of the main defences of the Church: the mystery of the ego, or soul, has been solved by the discovery that this is nothing but the primary sense of feeling; a quality possessed by the lowest and simplest organisms. In man this primary sense is reinforced by the development of the other four senses, as a result of the hereditary genes, and emerges as a persistent awareness of self early in life.
Mind is merely a function of the brain, just as digestion is a function of the stomach. A condition appertaining to certain dispositions of a special kind of matter evolved in the universal processes of infinite change and, therefore, like everything else, short of the universe itself, limited in its duration. Moreover, it has been scientifically established that man, during his embryonic stage, passes through all forms that have characterised his own evolution from nature’s “culture” upwards.
If spiritual merely means love, friendship or the higher feelings between men in social life, the clergy have indeed abandoned all their defences. Doctors Lang and Blunt are the diehards of a fantastic belief that a spiritual god of infinite power, who created an infinite universe and a class-divided human society, expects men to stifle the greed, hatred and conflict that such a system breeds, in order that they may inherit a state of eternal spiritual bliss. Many people, besides socialists, have already jettisoned these absurd notions. The clergy, under the pressure of scientific knowledge, the indifference of the vast majority, and a growing sense of their weakness, are being steadily forced to abandon these superstitions. They may be well-intentioned, they certainly preach charitableness and brotherly love; but the evil results that flow naturally from the conflict of interests in a class-ridden social system overwhelm their ever weakening efforts.
Brotherly feelings are only possible among those who, having discarded all forms of superstition, realise and affirm that the means of life are the common inheritance of the human race as a whole. Real comradeship is only possible with those who organise consciously to abolish this class-dominated system of capitalism, and to establish a system in which the wellbeing of the people as a whole, is the chief concern of the whole of the people.
F.F.