The crossed keys

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Matthew 16:18-19

"There is going to be a lecture, announced in the Times Higher Education supplement, by someone trying to reconcile science and religion in the history of the Royal Society", noted one of my favourite bloggers recently. The lecture, by one Peter Harrison, Andreas Idreos professor of science and religion at the University of Oxford, will rest on a foundation of factoids such as this:

...almost without exception, early modern natural philosophers cherished religious convictions, although these were not invariably orthodox. Some - but by no means all - made the point that they were motivated to pursue scientific inquiry on account of these religious commitments.

P Z Myers remains unimpressed:

It's simply meaningless to declare that people 350 years ago felt that their religion motivated their pursuit of science; it does not support the validity of the religious part. They might as well argue that the people who built Stonehenge 5000 years ago were motivated by their pagan beliefs to study astronomy — the astronomy is cool, but animism is not hallowed by its antiquity.

Read the rest of his post here. Myers limits himself to noting that, far from demonstrating "independent support for the truth of the Christian religion", Harrison's weak argument rests on correlation which, as any fule kno, does not necessarily imply causation.

There's another objection that Myers doesn't raise (at least in this post). Just how devout were educated religious people in those days and why were they so devout? Well, on average, they were probably more devout than most people in modern, secular societies. But why?

If you're looking at this from a history of thought angle, lots of faith-shaking discoveries just weren't known about back then. It's easier to have faith when everyone's brought up to have a pretty good working knowledge of a particular set of sacred texts, but even the most brilliant minds of the age have no idea about important discoveries that contradict or provide alternative explanations for the truths set out in those texts. For example, they didn't known of evidence that:

• the earth is a tiny speck in the middle of an incomprehensible immensity -the universe of Hubble is vastly bigger than that of Newton and immeasurably bigger than the one described in the Bible - the Bible just says "in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth", like, here are the heavens, here's the earth, about the same sort of size, give or take - no mention of the fact that the heavens are on a hugely, mind-bogglingly bigger scale than everything we know on our minuscule pale blue dot
• the Earth's age is not the 6,000-odd years implied by counting generations in the Bible, but around 4.5 billion years old
• life has been around on our planet for about 3.5 billion years, constantly mutating and evolving into new forms, including ourselves, the evidence for supernatural conjuring tricks with clay and ribs remaining elusive
• the accepted Biblical canon didn't just come down from on high with no precedents or related documents - the discovery of such documents as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library places these sacred texts in the context of a related, developing, changing body of religious writings, evolving over time
• some stories in the Bible seem to share roots with earlier legends, told in long-vanished pagan societies - for example the story of the Noachian flood is prefigured in the Sumerian / Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh, written by people who worshipped a pantheon of Gods like An (god of the firmament), Enki (earth goddess), Inanna (goddess of sexual love and fertility) and Ninkasi (goddess of beer)
  

Not knowing about this stuff would tend to make a person a lot less critical of the assertions contained in their holy book.

There was also a far more pressing reason for being more devout, or at least appearing to be so, in past centuries. When religion was a powerful force, it could be very bad for your career, or even your health to disbelieve in the faith endorsed by your rulers. In a Lent post, P Z Myers points out just how unhealthy skepticism can be in a society where the Godly hold power:

On this date [February 17th] in 1600, Giordano Bruno (née Filippo Bruno) was executed for heresy. The Italian philosopher was burned alive at the stake at age 52 for refusing to recant heretical ideas. Born Filippo Bruno in 1548, he entered the Dominican Order at Naples at age 15, adopting the name of Giordano. After being accused of heresy, he fled his Italian convent and traveled throughout Europe (1576 to 1592). During two years in England, Bruno wrote and published six dialogs, including "On the Infinite, the Universe, and Worlds" and "The Ash Wednesday Supper." A Copernican, he rejected Aristotelian dogma and challenged entrenched religious teachings, declaring pantheist views. Some academics today regard him as a path-blazing intellectual, others as a victim of his nonconformity. When Bruno returned to Italy in 1592, he was arrested by the Inquisition. Bruno was imprisoned for seven years in the dungeons of Rome, where he was tortured and isolated before being executed.

This is an extreme example - Galileo, in contrast, merely ended his life under house arrest, but you can see a pattern here. The Church used to be powerful and offending it could be a career-limiting move. This didn't just apply in Italy. In England:

in 1666, the House of Commons introduced a bill against atheism and profaneness. That same year, on 17 October 1666, it was ordered that the committee to which the bill was referred "should be empowered to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness... in particular... the book of Mr. Hobbes called the Leviathan". Hobbes was terrified at the prospect of being labelled a heretic, and proceeded to burn some of his compromising papers.

In 1811, an Oxford student anonymously published a treatise on "The Necessity of Atheism". The college authorities found the content so shocking that they expelled the author (one Percy Bysshe Shelley).

In October 1819 the publisher Richard Carlile, was found guilty of blasphemy and seditious libel and was sentenced to three years in prison. His crime was to have published material which offended the church and state - he printed an edition of Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason (a book critical of the Church of England) and wrote an article which criticised the government for its alleged role in the Peterloo Massacre.

Carlile was also fined £1,500 and when he refused to pay, his Fleet Street offices were raided and his stock was confiscated. Carlile was determined not to be silenced. While he was in prison he continued to write material for The Republican, which was now being published by his wife. Due to the publicity created by Carlile's trial, the circulation of The Republican increased dramatically and was now outselling pro-government newspapers such as The Times.

In December 1819 the government took further action by imposing a 4d. tax on cheap newspapers and stipulating that they could not be sold for less than 7d. As most working people were earning less than 10 shillings a week, this severely reduced the number of people who could afford to buy radical newspapers.

The last trial by jury for atheism in Britain took place as late as 1842, when George Jacob Holyoake was sent to prison for six months for daring to advocate atheism in the hearing of a clergyman.

These are just a few examples of the perils of Atheism before the modern era - no wonder most folk were keen to be seen as believers in the dominant creed of their time. Many, undoubtedly, were true believers, but many others probably just knew what was good for them, paying lip service to the prevailing dogma. In more recent times there were many supporters of the Soviet Communist Party, who followed the party line not through any sense of conviction, but to get, or stay in, a good job, or simply to stay out of the gulags. Authoritarian rule always has a few fanatics at the centre, but there are always many more people who just know which side their bread's buttered and are content to be known as Fascists, Falangists, Ba'athists, Communists, whatever, so long as the authorities will advance them, or at least not persecute them.

In the past, religious faith in the West wasn't only a matter of free choice, any more than it is in today's Iran or Saudi Arabia, where it's still a rational policy to appear pious if you want to get on and not get beaten up.

When Christianity became the dominant creed of the Roman Empire, the Petrine text from Matthew, with Jesus giving St Peter the keys to heaven, was quoted as the basis for Papal authority. The crossed keys are still used as a papal symbol. I think the symbolism's quite apt, myself, although not in the way originally intended. For me, they represent the locking away of knowledge and power by a priestly elite. Or the keys used by the jailers of the human spirit to keep people in their place. Whatever way you look at the keys, they are a symbol of power. And not wanting to be crushed by the power of religion is probably one of the reasons why, until very recently, a lot of people in the West made damn sure they were seen to be pious.