Sometimes even more remarkable than historical events are historical non-events. The 20th century is a case in point. Immense events took place during it, events to make us marvel-and shudder. But from one perspective-that of human spirituality-the most extraordinary thing about the 20th century has been the failure of God to die. The collapse of mass religious belief, especially among the educated and prosperous, had been widely and confidently predicted. It has not taken place. Somehow, God survived- flourished even. At the end of the 20th century, the idea of a personal, living God is as lively and real as ever, in the minds and hearts of countless millions of people throughout our planet.
This curious non-event is worth examining. Until quite modern times, it is impossible to point to any society anywhere, however primitive or advanced, where belief in a god or gods-of some kind-was not general and, as a rule, universal. Atheism was remarkably late in making its appearance in human societies. There was, to be sure, talk of atheists in the 16th century. Sir Walter Raleigh and his circle of scientific friends were accused of atheism in the 1580s. But their ideas turned out to be no more than a repudiation of the Christian Trinity. Raleigh certainly believed in a divine providence: his History of the World is impregnated with the notion of a benign, determining hand in history. The world view of Sir Francis Bacon, another man suspected of atheism, turns out to be similar.
It is a remarkable fact that the first well known European figure who not only proclaimed himself a genuine atheist in life, but died an atheist, was David Hume, the great Scottish historian and philosopher. Hume's death in 1776, as an unrepentant atheist, aroused awed comment on both sides of the Atlantic. Benjamin Franklin thought it a portent-rightly so. Dr Samuel Johnson could not be convinced of the seriousness of Hume's atheism-"He lies, Sir," he told Boswell. Johnson found it difficult to believe the assurance of Boswell, who had visited Hume on his deathbed, that the philosopher felt no pain at the thought of complete extinction.
But in the quarter century that followed, events moved fast. Five years after Hume died, Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason in which he seemed to deal a mortal blow to traditional metaphysics. Metaphysics, as taught in the schools for the best part of a millennium, had been the means by which most Christian intellectuals, especially the clergy, had demonstrated belief in God to be a reasonable proposition, as well as an emotional conviction. Even more destructive of belief, especially among educated people, was the work of Friedrich Hegel. Hegel was not exactly a non-believer himself, though he certainly came close to it in his revolutionary youth. In his maturity, when he was professor of philosophy at Berlin University, and conscious of the beginnings of the 19th century religious revival which swept through Europe in the years after 1815, he found it convenient to assert his religious orthodoxy. But his work as a whole pointed in quite a different direction. Hegel presented the entire history of humanity as an inexorable progression from lower to higher forms, from ignorance to knowledge, from unreason to reason. In this process religion had its place: an important place, indeed, because in its higher manifestations, such as monotheism and then Christianity, it established and then disseminated important aspects of knowledge. But it was no more than part of the continuing process and, having fulfiled its role, would yield to higher forms of consciousness.
The assumptions behind Hegel's philosophy took a tremendous hold on the western mind. They penetrated every aspect of intellectual life, from the physical sciences to the burgeoning social sciences such as philology, economics, sociology and history, and even to biblical studies. Almost every radical thinker in the 19th century was a Hegelian of sorts. Marxism would have been inconceivable without Hegel's notion of progression. In economic terms, Marx presented human progress as an advance from primitive to feudal to bourgeois to communist societies. Just as pagan forms of belief were projections of the way in which the means of production were organised in tribal communities, so Christianity was a function of capitalism. When capitalism disappeared, Christianity-and Judaism, its fount of origin-would disappear too. The very notion of a personal God would vanish from the minds of men and women, except as a historical curiosity, like the weird crocodile and dog-gods of ancient Egypt.
The notion that belief in God was a mere phase in human development was reinforced by the hammer-blows of scientific discovery. First came the total recasting of the world's geology, in the 1820s and 1830s. The traditional chronology and historicity of the Old Testament were fatally undermined, or so it seemed. This demolition of the Book of Genesis was a more potent source of disbelief in Victorian times than the Darwinian Revolution which followed, in the 1840s and 1850s. Indeed Charles Darwin himself professed belief and was at pains to emphasise that his work had no direct bearing on arguments for or against the existence of God. Nonetheless his work was used by the atheists, now organised and vocal, to assault belief frontally. His most articulate and forceful follower, TH Huxley, virtually declared intellectual war on Christianity at the 1860 Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science-and was widely held to have got the better of Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, on that exciting occasion. Thereafter it became almost a commonplace, in intellectual circles, to assume that religious belief was a receding force in human spirituality, and this applied whether you valued it or despised it. Ernest Renan's Vie de J?sus (1863) betrayed a sentimental attachment to Christ's ideas but presented him as a purely historical and human figure. Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other hand, declared the death of God to be not merely a fact but a liberation for humanity.
Probably the most accurate presentation of the prevailing sentiment, on both sides of the Atlantic, was provided by Matthew Arnold's haunting poem, Dover Beach (1867), which stressed the almost unbearable sadness among sensitive and righteous men which the loss of faith occasioned. "The Sea of Faith," Arnold writes,
Was once too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
This slowly became, and has remained, Arnold's best known and most quoted poem, because so many intelligent and sensitive people exactly shared its awareness of the decline of faith, and regretted the loss of certitude. But Arnold's forecast has been belied by the events of the 20th century. The sea has not vanished, leaving a naked shingle. The withdrawal has halted. Church attendance may have fallen in Europe and there are many more agnostics than in Arnold's time, but equally there are many more believers. It is impossible to say whether the percentage of believers in the world is higher now than it was in the second half of the 19th century, partly because it is so difficult to define what we mean by belief among western populations, let alone among Asian and African ones. But clearly, the event which Arnold thought would in time be completed, and which he tried to depict metaphorically, has not occurred. We still live in a world where the great majority continue to hanker for a supreme being above and outside themselves.
I was much struck by a newspaper story I read in 1979, and I have often thought about it since. During the early summer of that year, near Luxor in Upper Egypt, the local police found the bones of a 35-year-old Canadian woman who had disappeared two years before without trace. It appeared that, while wandering alone over an ancient burial site nearly 4,000 years old, she had stumbled into a deep labyrinth of abandoned archaeological diggings, 16 feet deep. Unable to climb up its crumbling sides of earth and sand, she had died a lonely and horrible death from hunger and thirst. She had with her a picture postcard, and on it she described what had happened. She knew, she said, that escape was impossible and rescue almost hopeless, and concluded: "I am preparing myself for death." She did not say to which, if any, of the formidable secular philosophies of her time she had turned in her last days and hours; or whether, like most ordinary people of all ages and races throughout history, she had placed her trust in a deity. But she knew that death was coming to her and that she must prepare for it. The instinct to prepare for death, to anticipate it and in some way to confront it, is absolutely fundamental in mankind. I believe the woman felt she was to meet, if not her maker, then someone or something, and that she must get ready for this encounter. It is significant that, only a few hundred yards from where this heart-sickening little tragedy occurred, the theologians of ancient Egypt, around 2000 BC, had first clarified the concept of individual death and judgement-a concept which, however confusedly, was in the stricken woman's mind, is with us still, and is likely to remain with us, indeed, as long as the human race endures.
Why has belief in God-or at least in something beyond us-endured in the 20th century? There seem to be two main reasons. First, it seems as though science, which once upset the certitudes of so many Victorian believers, has lost its power to shake faith. Scientific knowledge has marched on in the 20th century, faster and more formidably than ever. Yet, as Darwin himself first pointed out, what science tells us does not necessarily have any relevance to what we feel in our minds and hearts about God. The physical and the metaphysical can be seen to exist on different planes. The great scientific discoveries and engineering events of the 20th century are primarily statements not about God but about man, and the state of his knowledge. But when Albert Einstein first published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915, which turned Newton's straight lines into curves, and presented space-time as a continuum rather than separate dimensions, and when the General Theory was verified in 1919, there was no convulsion in the religious world, no attempt to challenge or deny the change in our view of cosmology. It is as though the world of religion had long since learned to absorb all the shocks of science. When human beings split the atom and then created nuclear energy; when they built rockets and landed on the moon, and sent other rockets to distant space; when they discovered the double helix and began to decode the genetic basis of creation, and learned to splice genes and make entirely new living substances-when all these dramatic events took place, human belief or disbelief in a prime mover or a divine creation remained unaffected. It is significant that the great majority of those who work in the scientific world-perhaps as many as 80 per cent-profess some kind of religious belief.
It is, therefore, a notable fact about the 20th century that, during it, science and religion ceased to be enemies. In some modest ways they became friends. Looking back on them, the great rows between the clergy and the scientists in the 19th century seem childish. Hard to say, now, who cut a more absurd figure in 1860, Bishop Wilberforce or Professor Huxley. The great evolutionary and geological discoveries of the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s and 1850s upset the traditional religious chronologies. So what? These chronologies were gimcrack schemes worked out by pious men who took the biblical patriarch-lists literally or, rather, assumed they were as comprehensive as they claimed. Such clues were useless as prescriptive history, as is obvious to all now. But it does not mean that the patriarch-lists are mere myth, any more than the king-lists of Ancient Egypt.
In fact, the science of modern archaeology and historical philology actually provides verification of the most ancient biblical texts. Whereas, from the time of Spinoza, throughout the 19th century and almost up to the second world war, systematic criticism of the Old Testament texts tended to destroy their historicity, and to reduce the Pentateuch, in particular, to mere myth or tribal legend, the trend over the last half century has been in quite the opposite direction. The Flood, for instance, has been restored to history. Archaeological discovery now provides a firm historical background to the patriarchal society described in the Book of Genesis. Such names as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, far from being later eponyms, attached to collective groups or tribes or nations, were in fact common in the Ancient Near East during the first half of the second millennium BC. The French excavations at the ancient palace of Mari, and still more the American excavations at Yorgan Tepe (ancient Nuzu), 100 miles north of Kirkuk in Iraq, have produced an enormous number of cuneiform documents-over 20,000 clay tablets dating from the 15th century BC, in Nuzu alone-which illuminate the background to the patriarchal narratives. Many of these tablets are from private archives, recording exactly the kind of legal transactions so puzzling to us in the patriarchal stories. The proposal for the adoption of Eliezir as heir-presumptive to Abraham, the latter's negotiations with Sarah, the transfer of a birthright from Esau to Jacob, the binding power of a deathbed blessing and disposition of property, Rachel's theft of her father's teraphim or household gods and Jacob's tortuous legal relations with Laban-all of these were in accordance with standard legal practice as illustrated repeatedly in the Mari and Nuzu tablets.
Thus science, having once appeared to destroy the historicity of the Bible, now seems more likely, on the whole, to corroborate it. Most of the cities mentioned in the Old Testament, for instance, have now been identified and their remains explored. Of course, none of this proves that God exists, only that the ancient people of the Hebrews believed he did. However, another science, astrophysics, does have an inherent tendency to bring us closer to the creator- or a creator. The universe is so vast that information from its distant corners, albeit travelling at the speed of light, may take millions of years to reach us. In theory, then, it is possible for us to study very ancient history in distant stars. All we need, in fact, is the physical instrumentation to look far enough. What we do know confirms the biblical notion of a specific moment of creation. Some years ago, I remember listening to a talk about the Big Bang which set the entire universe in motion. I suddenly realised that this was the first chapter of Genesis, told in scientific terminology. The day on which we will be able to see, by study of distant space, the actual moment of first creation may not be far distant. It is a matter of money rather than technology. We have the physical means, even now, of erecting a giant telescope on the moon, which for a variety of reasons could function far more effectively than on earth. Images from such a telescope, radioed back to earth, could distinctly show us two people tossing a coin in the streets of New York or London, and could tell us whether it landed heads or tails. The same telescope, directed into the far peripheries of the universe, could take us so far back in time as to approach the moment of creation itself.
At that stage we would know how the universe came into being. Of course, that does not automatically tell us who did it. But it was a famous maxim of Dorothy Sayers' fictional detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, that "If you know how, you know who." What applies to murder investigations does not necessarily apply to cosmogony. But if we can see the moment of creation, how long will it be before we can apprehend the creator too?
Of course, this is speculation and I do not put too much stress on the ability of science to teach us theology. All the same, it would have astonished Bishop Wilberforce to see science suddenly emerge as theology's strong right arm, even in theory. But why not? Medieaval intellectuals like St Thomas Aquinas did not see them as enemies-on the contrary, he called theology "the Queen of the Sciences." Aristotle would have taken the same view: to know about God was the highest of all forms of knowledge, and it was only natural for all the sciences, humble and sublime, to pursue that end. So what might be called the friendly neutrality, or the benevolent objectivity, of science in the 20th century is one reason why God has stayed in men's minds.
The second reason for the evidence of belief is the actual events of our dreadful century and the lack of compelling alternatives. The evil done in our times is beyond computation and almost beyond the imaginations of our forebears. There is nothing in the history of the world to compare with the scale of destruction of the two world wars, with the indiscriminate slaughter from the bombing of European and Japanese cities-even before the use of the A-bomb -and with the colossal cruelty of the Nazi death camps and Soviet gulag. More than 150m people have been killed by state violence in our century. One might expect most people to ask: how can God allow such things? Or, how can there be a God if such complete moral anarchy reigns? Yet experience shows that only a tiny minority ask these questions. Most people react to the horrors of war by turning to God for protection and comfort.
Critics of religion point out that in both world wars, Catholic and Protestant chaplains administered to the troops on both sides, bade them fight courageously in a righteous cause, and prayed with them for victory. In the US and Britain on the one hand, in Germany on the other, the churches were packed with worshippers praying for mutually incompatible views of justice. How, the critics ask, could God preside over this moral confusion? But such arguments cut no ice with most people. It is worth remembering that, during the American civil war, the Protestant churches (the Catholic authorities did their best to stay out of the controversy) were in the forefront in backing the cause of states' rights on the one hand, and emancipation on the other, that they were among the most vehement in urging both sides to fight to the finish, and that, without them, the war would have been less ferocious and would have ended sooner. All that may be so, but it is an undeniable historical fact that most of the churches concerned emerged stronger from the war. The Southern churches, in particular, having separated themselves from their Northern brethren, and acquired separate identities, entered on a long period of growth and militancy-characteristics which endure to this day. America's bible belt, the heartland of Protestant fundamentalism in the US, is in many ways the product of the civil war. Some of America's most God-fearing institutions-universities, churches, charities, missionary and revivalist centres-are the products of that fearful conflict.
So it has been in the 20th century. Its horrors were instrumental in turning men and women towards God rather than against him. Most people saw the wars as themselves the products of Godlessness, materialism and sin, and their perpetrators as those who had banished God from their hearts. And it is undeniable that the two greatest institutional tyrannies of the century-indeed, of all time-the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Union, were Godless constructs: modern paganism in the first case and openly proclaimed atheist materialism in the second. The death camps and the slave camps were products not of God but of anti-God. Hitler was brought up a Roman Catholic and Stalin was once a Russian Orthodox apprentice monk, but it is hard to imagine any two men in history who were more bereft of basic Christian instincts or more systematically committed to the destruction of Christian values.
The outstanding collective example of the way in which the horrors of the 20th century promoted organised religion and belief in God has been Poland. Poland is a morally ambivalent country in some ways. It has been both a persecutor of Jews and a refuge for them. Like the Jews, it has been an egregious victim and, in a paradoxical way, it has flourished as a result of the experience. Wedged between the pagan and the atheist colossi, occupied by both, plundered and ravaged by both and, above all, religiously persecuted by both-for both saw the Catholic church as the very essence of the Polish spirit of resistance-God-fearing and God-praising Poland emerged stronger from this searing experience. The Polish church is now the strongest Christian church in Europe, perhaps in the world. Even on weekdays, in the early hours of the morning, churches in Poland are thronged with worshippers and communicants. There are more priests and seminarians, more monks, friars and nuns, than ever before. No one saw more clearly than the Poles that their religious faith, their belief in God, and their adherence to his commands was the best defence-usually their only defence-to the Nazi and communist attempts to crush them out of existence. Hence, in the postwar period, it was Poland which began the process of undermining, then overthrowing, the communist tyranny in eastern Europe. It was Poland which made available to the Catholic church thousands of priests, missionaries, teachers, theologians and evangelists to strengthen the Christian faith throughout the world. Finally, it was Poland which produced the greatest of the 20th century popes, John Paul II, who has treated the entire globe as his parish and has carried the Christian message, as he sees it, to every corner of all five continents. You may or may not agree with what John Paul II teaches in some areas. But it cannot be denied, even by his critics, that he presents Roman Catholic Christianity, pure and undefiled, in its most uncompromising and rigorous form, that he makes no concessions whatever to the 20th century and its hedonism, and that despite this-almost certainly because of this, too-he is listened to and heeded by hundreds of millions throughout the world. That unwillingness to compromise in the face of evil springs directly from the Polish experience, and that in turn is the fruit of a 20th century which set out to banish God and ended by confirming him in many hearts.
