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| James Ussher, Bishop of Armagh (who calculated dates in the Bible) |
We will be in Ireland for Christmas this year, so it will probably be a Catholic event. By one of those quirks of history The Church of Ireland is Protestant while the older Roman Catholic church uses more modern buildings. Catholics were second class citizens in Ireland for centuries and were not allowed to build their own churches. Now the boot is on the other foot and, in the South at least, Roman Catholicism is in the ascendancy.
That is not to say that the Catholic church does not have its problems. While the Anglican church seems to have plenty of applicants for the priesthood – particularly since they have started accepting women – the Catholic church has been beset by sexual scandals and is having difficulty attracting men to become priests, particularly as they are still expected to embrace celibacy in an increasingly sex-obsessed age.
We now know that for years Catholic priests satisfied their sexual urges by exploiting children they had power over and could enforce silence from. Victims of exploitation, however, will not keep quiet any more. Neither will loyal Catholics turn a blind eye to the ‘housekeepers’ who helped priests satisfy their all-too human needs. It is no longer a case of ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ but ‘hate the sin, expose the sinner’.
Anglicans today are having problems getting people into their congregations while Catholics find it difficult to find men (exclusively) who are prepared to lead their services. It might make sense to combine the two churches but common sense and religion are not comfortable bedfellows and the tendency as religion declines in importance is for the greater fracturing of churches rather than greater unity.
Faith, of course, is not based on reason. The very word implies accepting something which cannot be demonstrated. I have a friend who is trying (unsuccessfully) to turn me into a Jehovah’s Witness. His faith leads him to believe that the Bible is literally true and that one day we will live in a world of plenty rather than the one we are stuck with, which is beset by war, famine and climate change.
There was not always this huge gap between science and religion. Men like the monk Gregor Mendel and the parish priest Gilbert White used their thinking time and powers of observation to make great scientific discoveries. Even Charles Darwin was set for a career in the church until evolution got in the way. Together with the geologist Lyell, he showed that the world was much older than the Bible said it was.
Another priest, the Irish Protestant Archbishop James Ussher, calculated the age of the earth in the seventeenth century and showed that God had created the world at around six o’clock in the evening of the 24th October 4004 BC. I hate sneering at the past, by the way. Ussher’s was at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge at the time and was the Charles Darwin of his day, even if his exactitude seems charming but unrealistic now.
However, you can still find people who believe that the world is just six thousand years old, rather than the four to five billion which the scientific evidence shows it to be. There is little point in arguing with them. Belief like this is not based on scientific measurement but on acceptance and no more amount of logic will shake it. And churches built on blind faith gain more converts than those that accept science.
I think it is a shame that science and religion are now considered enemies rather than allies. Samuel Coleridge Taylor, who was himself a preacher in the newly created Unitarian Church, said that intelligence was being able to hold two different ideas in your head at the same time. He also gave us the concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’, the knowledge that something is false but also that it holds a truth inside it.
We know when we go to see a play that the person on the stage is an actor who lives in Hampstead or Hackney (more likely these days) who has a mortgage to pay and possibly a family to support. He or she is portraying the Prince of Denmark or the Empress of Egypt and we accept that fact and are transported into another world by the power of Shakespeare’s words and by the actor’s performance of them.
Something similar is needed for us to embrace religion. I enjoy singing hymns, reading the Bible and taking communion at church services, not because I believe that the belief system embraced by Christianity is true but because it is good. This is a way to lead to lead your life that is worthwhile, not an accurate version of how the world – and the universe – was created thousands, millions or billions of years ago.
So, I will continue to cling to a doubtful, sceptical kind of religious belief, not one which provides all the answers. Science does not provide a reason to get out of bed in the morning, it merely answers factual questions. While I do not want to ignore or reject the answers given by science, neither do I want to base my life on them. So, I will stick with the sensible church rather than one based on faith alone.
May you have a joyful and - maybe just a slightly religious - Christmas this year.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
