To many, the very notion of idolatry seems quaint and out-dated. Yet to monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam idolatry forms the basis of the divine order of their moral universe. Are they simply mistaken? Or is idolatry a sin that is still conceptually relevant to modern thinking?
This article interprets the monotheistic tradition as humankind’s quest to understand, as best we can, the one, true overarching divine order which governs our universe and find our proper relationship to it as limited beings. In this respect, modern science is simply an extension of the monotheistic project, and many early enlightenment scientists were deeply religious and pursued science in the service of God speaking of “the creator’s own stamp upon creation” ( Francis Bacon ) or asserting that “Nature is the book of God written in the language of mathematics” ( Galileo ).
Johannes Kepler even wrote:
“May God make it come to pass that my delightful speculation have…the effect which I strove to obtain in the publication; namely, that the belief in the creation of the world be fortified through this external support, that thought of the creator be recognized in its nature, and that his inexhaustible wisdom shine forth daily more brightly”
Yet, there are many examples of the sin of hubris in the Bible, where time and time again, Jews were drawn to worship golden calves, and other idolatrous practices, in the high places. Indeed, many Muslims regard adoring images of Christ, Mary, and the Saints as a slippery slope towards idolatry.
What draws people, reared to believe in God, towards idolatry time and time again?
I believe the origin of idolatry is twofold:
- A fear of the infinite
- A desire to Self-Worship by Worshiping our Creations
Fear of The Infinite And The Sin of Idolatry
Everyday, we must make decisions to survive and sometimes those decisions must be right. Is this berry edible? How much food should I store in case of a drought? Should I take out a loan to expand my business? Is now a good time to sell those stocks? How should I treat my child’s illness? Are enemy submarines hiding along this shipping route? On occasions, the wrong choice can produce horrifying results, the bankruptcy of a business, the injury or death of a loved one or infant, the collapse of a civilization.
When stakes are high, we must be sure we are right. Yet certainty is impossible in an infinitely large, infinitely complex and infinitely subtle universe. We can only try our best to make decisions based on the highest comprehension we can achieve in the allotted time – and hope it’s good enough. But however much we may hope that our decisions are good enough – this is never guaranteed. We might always miss something out: with dire consequences.
Any attempts to represent the infinite with the finite is a subtle form of idolatry. Our minds constantly tempt us to simplify and try to encapsulate infinity in something relatively simple – or at least comprehensible. Something we can perceive. We then delude ourselves into thinking, that through fully understanding the false idol we use to represent infinity, we fully understand infinity itself.
This idea is both seductive and comforting. But it can also distract and instill a false sense of security and hubristic omniscience. The idol captures the worshipers’ entire attention who become convinced that nothing else is relevant. This blinds them to the rest of the world – including things of critical importance.
Idolatry breeds ignorance – and ignorance can be fatal. This is one of two deadly sins central to idolatry – a refusal to perceive reality or God on His own terms. The idolatrous instead insist that He must simplify Himself to accommodate our limited cognition (which won’t happen).
Our need to avoid this fatal tendency is as relevant today as it was at the time of Abraham, Christ or Muhammad.
We must keep our mind open and prepared for new occurrences that signify important events, even unexpected ones.
Idolatry: Self-Worship by Worshiping Our Creations
We take pride in our creations, often viewing them as extensions of ourselves. The craftsman who creates the false idol, in some subtle way, has an idolatrous sense he has created God. By worshiping our creations, we subtly worship ourselves. If something we have crafted is grand enough to create the universe – how much grander must we be? Of course no one who fashions Holy works will admit this, but deep down they feel an idolatrous pride in them.
Beyond idolatrous pride, there is control. A false sense of molding the powers which mold our universe.
Not everyone fashions idols directly, but when a community worships the idols it creates, that community tacitly commits a kind of self-idolatry.
As the comprehension of idols induces a false sense of idolatrous omniscience, so the crafting of idols induces a false sense of idolatrous omnipotence; a false sense of power.
In truth, humankind cannot fashion, or mold, most of reality. We only control or influence a tiny portion of it. By clearly understanding what we do and don’t control, we can affect what we can control to prepare for what we can’t. Trying to mold what cannot be changed directs resources and effort away from what can. Instead of building a giant statue to bring future rain, it is better to devote our energies to building a warehouse to store grain and prepare for times of drought.
The seductive opportunity to feed our self love through worshiping the idols we create adds to our primal desire for simplicity and total comprehension and strengthens our adoration while blinding us to everything beyond the idol.
The divine order of the universe is what it is. It cannot be remolded by remolding clay idols.
Not All Idols Are Made of Clay
Not all idols are made of clay. Anytime we fixate on, and worship, a portion of creation – especially a man-made one – but ignore the rest, we commit idolatry. This portion can even be a Holy Book. To speak of “The God of The Bible” or “The God of The Quran” is to commit idolatry. It suggests God somehow “belongs” to a particular book. This is an absurd, idolatrous attempt to subject the infinite to the finite, to subject God to the scribblings of men.
Indeed, verses within the Quran itself declare the limitations of the text and warn the reader against taking it as the totality of truth:
“And if all the trees on earth were pens and the oceans were ink, with seven oceans behind it to add to its supply yet would not the words of Allah be exhausted in the writing: For Allah is exulted in power, full of wisdom”
Luqman, 31/27
…that’s a lot more ink than the Quran contains.
Yet if instead of talking about The God of The Bible we speak of The Bible (or Quran) of God, this still doesn’t overcome the problem of focusing on a tiny portion of the infinite while ignoring the rest.
What’s wrong with the rest of creation? Is one Holy Book the only thing that belongs to God? What about all the other books? If God created everything, does not everything belong to Him?
To revere one Holy Book above all else is to implicitly devalue the rest of the universe.
One can also find secular strains of Idolatry…
The Social Sciences, which focus on mankind, intrinsically risk ignoring the physical universe which exists independently of human thought and society. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s book, published in 1966, The Social Construction of Reality, almost suggests that objective reality is entirely created by human thought and interaction. Other social constructivists like Humberto Maturana and Kenneth Gergen assert as many truths on any one topic exist as there are communities to construct them. This view of human society as the sole creator of reality and arbiter of truth dangerously resembles the second form of hubristic idolatry, and runs the same fundamental risk of drawing our attention away from the physical environment and lulling us into falsely believing we can “deliberate” away all our problems as any social consensus will work since no reality exists outside society.
Economics is another social science that believes in the omnipotence of the crowd and “the invisible hand of the market” (represented, interestingly, by a golden bull) which can make us become infinitely rich so long as we frantically compete against each other and only care about ourselves. Consumers are assumed to be omnipotent and infallible. We are paying the price for running the world according to a discipline that ignores everything except human desire with environmental destruction – and possibly a future climate Armageddon.
Still think idolatry is irrelevant today?
The problem is that social sciences fundamentally cannot discriminate between knowledge and belief – knowledge being justified true belief. This is understandable, as belief is the sole motivator of human action, so fields that only study how human ideas relate to human behaviour, fundamentally cannot differentiate between true and false beliefs. It is only by paying attention to the physical consequences of an activity on the non-human environment compared to the believer’s expectations, that truth can be discriminated from falsehood. Yet this is a consideration that many, who work in social science, omit from their theorizing.
The Piety of Science
Attempts by major monotheistic religions to avoid finite distraction and perceive all existence, and our proper place within it, have met with limited success at best and abject failure at worst. Congregations constantly seek refuge from the infinite by fixating upon reassuringly finite prophets, saints, saviours and books with reassuringly human stories of battles, torture, slavery, and men with wings. Perhaps, monotheists are less distracted from the infinite than polytheists, but – let’s face it – monotheistic myths are still pretty distracting.
Monotheism is a step in the right direction…but it still falls short of the mark.
To fully perceive truth, we must abandon all false idols that distract us from the divine order of the universe, and our rightful place within it, dispense with preconceptions that hubristically try to mold God in the image of man and, instead, we must perceive the universal order on its terms and not our own. If we aim to perceive truth, we could do worse than pursue scientific enquiry. Mathematics, in particular, is as close as any intellectual exercise comes to the infinite, as it frequently adds infinite sums of infinitely small quantities. Mathematicians even contemplate different kinds of infinities!
There is much confusion over Atheism. Many atheists do not believe in a universe devoid of order. Indeed, Noether’s Theorem, a theorem that science universally accepts, categorically proves the conservation of energy, momentum and angular momentum imply the order governing our universe is infinite in space, eternal in time (or as old as the universe itself?), and rotationaly invariant.
Many religious people complain science does not answer important moral questions about how to behave, and only describes how things are; not what we should do. This is Hume’s guillotine: that no knowledge concerning natural phenomena can shed light on normative principles. This neglects the fact that science itself is a set of normative principles, a set of beliefs on how we should go about forming our beliefs. This is something that Stefan Molyneaux points out in his book Universally Preferable Behaviour and indeed, by treating words as tool whose true meaning is that which optimizes their traditional function, I’ve argued fairly solidly in The Philosophical Method that preference utilitarianism is the one true morality.
Some also complain that scientism is crassly materialistic, leaving no room for supernatural events. Yet clearly everything which exists can only fall into one of three exhaustive categories:
- That which we can perceive through our senses
- That which affects what we perceive through our senses (this includes things that indirectly affect the things that affect the things we can perceive, and so on and so forth)
- That which neither affects what we see nor affects anything that affects what we see
Science includes the study of both 1) and 2). Science studies the invisible forces that affect materials like gravity or electromagnetism as well as the materials themselves. On a galactic scale, scientific inquiry includes mapping out clouds of dark matter by observing the way they bend the light of galaxies. There are even neutrino detectors to observe a particle that almost (though not quite) fits into category 3).
Thus, if we consider “the supernatural” as everything that is beyond the reach of science, we arrive at the unavoidable logical conclusion that:
The supernatural is only beyond the reach of scientific study to the extent to which it does not affect the natural in any way.
Which would make the supernatural completely irrelevant.
Indeed, the only demand that science makes upon the universe is repeatability. Once something is repeatable, it is scientifically tractable and laws to describe it can be hypothesised and tested.
It is worth remembering that at the time of Kepler, many considered his theory that the tides are caused by action at a distance to be an unscientific appeal to occult forces. Thus:
There is no objective distinction between science and magic. The only distinction is subjective understanding.
Magical phenomena are any phenomena which cannot be understood with our existing knowledge – even at a fundamental level.
THEREFORE
The statement: There is no such thing as magic.
IMPLIES
The statement: Everything we can see or will ever see in the future can be explained using our existing knowledge set.
Which may or may not be true. It’s certainly an ambitious (perhaps hubristic) assertion. However, although scientists might entertain the possibility of magical phenomenon, a magician – an authority in magic – is a contradiction in terms.
A magician is a human being who understands phenomena which cannot be explained by existing human knowledge.
This is an oxymoron.
So, while magical phenomena may exist, magicians, or any other authority figures in magic, do not.
Regarding miracles, since anything repeatable can be incorporated into scientific understanding, only unrepeatable phenomena are beyond science’s reach. So it is the religious foes of “scientism” that are advocating a disordered universe run by a capricious God who makes and breaks rules at a whim.
We appeal to miracles as proof of God’s existence. But why must God break His own laws to prove He exists? Surely the order of the universe itself would be the greater proof of an omnipotent, omniscient being than the arbitrary breaking of that order.
Miracles are incompatible with omniscience and omnipotence. An omniscient, omnipotent being who set up the order of the universe would know everything entailed by its initial creation and thus would never need to tweak it. A miracle implies a correction on the part of the creator: “Whoops! I didn’t see that coming! I better add this little tweak to correct the course of events! It’s ugly and sticks out like a sore thumb, I know, but it’s the best I can do!”
While an omnipotent, omniscient being might leave scope for free will, He would know exactly what choices He had created and left open for inhabitants. If He didn’t want people to be able to act a certain way, He would make it impossible a priori. An omnipotent, omniscient creator, by definition, could do this. Free will is not infinite but is bounded within a finite envelope of possibility which the order of the universe defines. To claim an omniscient, omnipotent being had to “step in” because His creations made “the wrong choice” is a contradiction in terms. If an action is acceptable, you create an order that allows people to perform it, if it is unacceptable, you create an order that prohibits it. An omniscient, omnipotent creator would never need to perform a miracle to stop his creations from doing something His original order allowed: “No wait! Don’t do that!”
Therefore:
Divine intervention implies divine imperfection.
And to believe in miracles is to believe in a less than perfect God.
This is the view of Deism.
So who’s right? Atheists or Deists?
If we stop attempting to mold God in the image of man, deism is only distinguishable from atheism by the belief that the universe was designed by “some kind of intelligence” as opposed to arising from mechanistic processes of cause and effect.
Yet is this distinction significant? Can Deists meaningfully argue with atheists?
“Intelligence” is an ill-defined concept. Do we truly understand where the boundaries lie between the intelligent and the unintelligent? If we reject a God with human-like intelligence, that opens the door for pretty much anything. Intelligence can take a myriad of different forms.
Nor does the atheist position, that the universe arose through mechanistic processes, necessarily exclude deism, for atheists view intelligence itself as a mechanistic process and if intelligence is mechanistic, then some mechanistic processes may possess intelligence.
Interestingly, the google dictionary definition of intelligence as: “The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills” implies an omniscient being is unintelligent as it cannot acquire knowledge by virtue of already being full up! This is an example of the futility of arguing over the existence of an intelligent designer without generally understanding intelligence.
Idolatrous Forms of Atheism
Atheists come in, not one, but three, different varieties:
- Scientists
- Societalists
- Radical Skeptics
I use the word “scientist” very loosely. By “scientist”, I don’t exclusively mean people actively engaged in research but rather anyone who believes inherent universal truths are independent of our subjective, or even inter-subjective, beliefs and are revealed through careful, direct interaction with the universe while observing and recording its precise response, comparing it to responses carefully observed by others, and assessing its significance through quantitative analysis. Scientists implicitly believe, as Galileo did, that the natural order is written in the language of mathematics. A scientist believes we must question the universe on its own terms, with carefully designed experiments, and then listen very carefully to its response. If no conceivable experimental outcome could dissuade our preconceptions, we are shouting at the universe without listening back. Scientists also believe the universe reveals its secrets equally to everyone, there are no special “prophets” or “messengers” privy to otherwise inaccessible knowledge, but all who ask the same question (i.e. runs the same experiment) receive the same response. This principle of repeatability forms the basis of science.
The second group of atheists are “societalists” who believe human society is the sole creator of all knowledge and truth in the universe. While most (though perhaps not all) believe reality exists without society, in the absence of social interpretation they view this as irrelevant, and many reject the possibility of “right” or “wrong” interpretations of reality at a cultural level. If culture and human institutions are the sole arbiters and creators of truth and knowledge, then the institution can never be wrong. And yet many societalists are revolutionaries who reject existing institutions and believe that by creating new ones – they can create any society they want. They believe that society is infinitely malleable to a sufficiently determined will and reject many natural bounds that religions believe should not be trangressed. Many societalists embrace the relativistic view of morality.
Finally, there are radical skeptics. Radical skeptics think everyone is full of BS. They believe there is no natural order, no morality, no values, science is bullshit, religion is bullshit, reason is bullshit, society is bullshit, everything is bullshit. Radical skeptics find liberation in universal cynicism and enjoy gratuitously challenging views and revealing treasured beliefs to be nonsense. The universal belief in BS affords a luxury of intellectual laziness. If everything’s bullshit, there’s no need to waste time or calories to rigorously apply reason. Radical skeptics usually have a little stock of generic tricks they can deploy to rapidly dismiss and “deconstruct” the arguments of others. Skepticism, the demand for evidence and justification in support of claims, is an important protection against falsehoods. However, the wholesale (often intellectually lazy) dismissal of everything, including reasoned arguments, takes skepticism a step too far. Everyone has implicit beliefs they need to make decisions, by rejecting everything that could alter them, the radical skeptic gives his own beliefs an infallible status.
The radical skeptic treats his own beliefs as unassailable while societalists treat the beliefs of society as infallible. Both these views take man or men collectively as the sole creator of knowledge and meaning, totally unaccountable to a wider reality. Only scientists believe we should take all of reality (and not just the minds of men) into account when formulating beliefs. Therefore, radical skepticism and societalism are both (type 2) false idolatrous forms of atheism while scientism – or humanism – is the one true atheism.
John
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