Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 213th episode of the Atlas Society. Ask. My name is Lawrence Olivo, senior project manager here at the Atlas Society, the leading nonprofit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in creative ways, like animated videos and graphic novels. Today, our CEO Jennifer Grossman has the week off, but I'm excited to have joined me today, Atlas Society founder and senior scholar David Kelly and senior fellow Robert Traczynski. Now, for those of you watching, I want to remind you that you can ask your questions whether you're on Instagram x, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Just go ahead and use the comment section to type in your questions, and we'll get to as many as we can closer to the end of the webinar today. Today the duo is going to be discussing a sort of turn on the political right back towards a, or rather strident religious advocacy. To start things off with that and the greater topic of the greco roman roots of western civilization. I'll pass things over to Rob. Rob, thanks for joining us.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Hi there. Always a pleasure, Lawrence. And I'm going to look forward to this conversation with David, who I know knows a lot about this. So the topic we're talking about here is something I've been noticing recently as a trend on the right, which is the right is this very nebulous term, right. But the conservatives have always been sort of a combination of all. You have your secular, pro free marketers like us, and then you also have the religious right. You have the, the traditionalists, the people for whom they're advocating return to Christianity, especially to a traditional interpretation of Christianity as their fundamental agenda. This is the anti abortion right, and this is the version of the right that's very ascendant right now. And so one thing I've been noticing as a major trend as part of that turn back towards the more religious wing of the right, as the dominant part of the right in general, is the rise of what are called culture war. Christians culture war. Christians are people who are advocating Christianity as an answer to the culture war. So this is the idea that, look, to fight the woke people, to fight the chinese communism, whatever. What we need to turn back to is Christianity. But the specific flavor of it right now that I think is really interesting is that among these prominent sort of culture war christians are people who are not necessarily firmly believing christians themselves. They're not people who came here for the faith. They came here for the culture war. And the most striking example of this, I think, is Ayan. Her. She gained fame about 20 years or so ago as a somalian immigrant, the dutch somalian immigrant who converted from Islam to secularism. And so she was a secularist, she was an atheist. She was pals with a lot of the new atheist crowd at the time, the sort of Christopher Hitchens types. And she was turning towards atheism as a critique of or as an opposite to Islam, which of course, it is. But the striking thing is that in late last year, she made a sort of conversion back from this new atheism to Christianity. And she announced that in a big article, I think it was in the free press.
And in that article, she made the case for why we need Christianity. But the interesting thing is she talks about why we need Christianity as an answer to left wing wokeness, why we need it as an answer to chinese authoritarianism. I think she included russian authoritarianism in there, though I don't see how it's a convincing answer to Putin to say you're a Christian, because that's the cause that he names as the basis for his authoritarianism. But it's the idea that we need it to win the culture war and to defend western civilization, we need to become christians. And the thing that everybody noticed about this article she wrote is that in this long article about why we need Christianity, there's one thing she doesn't mention, which is Christ. Right? She doesn't mention Jesus. She doesn't mention the actual, the actual tenets of the faith and the actual personal religious experience. And that's what culture war, Christianity, sort of. That's what that term sort of captures is this idea of people who aren't there for the Christianity. They're there for the culture war, Christianity as an instrument for the culture war, for defendant, for fighting wokeness, for defending western civilization. And so I wanted to look at, and, you know, in a similar category to Ayan Hersiali, there's her husband, Neil Ferguson, this british historian.
There is a guy named Douglas Murray. The free press seems to be like a center of this sort of thing.
But there's this idea that the central claim of this is that we need Christianity to defend western civilization. And most of them cite a book called dominion, written by a guy who's making the case that all the key values of western civilization that. That we want to defend, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, science and reason and political freedom, all these things are really derived from Christianity. They're dependent on Christianity. Without them, without Christianity, none of them would exist. And so therefore, that's why we need Christianity. Christianity isn't the threat to freedom. It is the thing that we need to defend in order to support freedom. All right.
My perspective on this, of course, not only coming a one time classicist, you know, someone with a background in classical languages and literature, someone who basically spent my college years immersing myself deeply in Aristotle and the other greek philosophers, is how completely wrong this whole timeline is. So I'm going to sketch out very briefly. I'm going to. You'll go over this like, five minutes at a time on a couple points, and then we'll go back and forth with David. But I wanted to talk about why this is such a strange idea, that the western civilization is uniquely dependent on Christianity and the sort of, quote, unquote, the Judeo christian tradition. And my view is, well, before the judeo christian tradition even came along, the west was developing all. All the elements of its distinctive culture coming out of the greco roman tradition. And not only did they come out of the greco roman tradition, but it was the greco roman tradition. The things that made the greco roman tradition distinctive were things that are the opposite of the Judeo christian tradition. So I want to briefly go over a couple things there. So, first of all, one is where did the idea of the west versus the east as a characterization or description? Where did that even come from in the first place? Well, we know where it came from. We know where the very first usage of west versus east as not just as geographic descriptions, but as descriptions of two different cultures, cultures that were clashing, cultures that were distinct from one another, and the west having its own distinct culture, and even some elements of what that culture was like, the west being more rational and the east being more mystical, or the west being more free and the east being more sort of tyrannical or despotic. That whole differentiated west and east. We know exactly where that came from. It came from the greek historian Herodotus. This is his histories. And this actually came out of about 50 years before he wrote this. So this is about 430 BC that he writes the histories. About 50 years earlier, there had been, of course, the battle of Thermopylae, the one in the movie with the. That the Persians are invading, and this 300 Spartans stand in their way and heroically die to slow them down so they can be defeated later on. And so the persian empire from the east had come to invade and take over the greek city states to the west. And that's where the deferration of west versus east began. So one thing I want you to notice is 430, that BC. What does BC mean? Is before Christ this is four centuries before Christ. So how, how is it that Christianity is the basis for the distinctive ideas of western civilization? If the whole idea of west versus east predated that by centuries now, then to put this in perspective, by the way, uh, not only did it predate the christian tradition, because, you know, Christ doesn't come along for another 400 years, it also predates in some ways the Judeo part of the Judeo Christianity tradition. So the, the early, the greek, the Old Testament of the Bible, the stories and the ideas, it was sort of existed in a nascent form in 430 BC. But about that time, what was happening is, you know, the Jews have been exiled to Babylon and they've returned from exile somewhere in the 500s BC. And they had, at that point was, that was the point where they started to write down and to quote a coordinate and to put together in written form a sort of official version of the Old Testament. And so the actual version of the Old Testament that would have, could have had any influence on anybody else would have probably been the Septuagint. And it's called the Septuagint because it's from the greek word for 70. There were supposedly 70 translators that worked on this, on this. This was a version of the Old Testament sort of all put together, all officially collated and translated into greek. That that doesn't exist until about 100 BC. Right. So greek civilization is already in full swing and developing a distinctive culture and a distinctive ideas and a distinctive philosophy by the time that Herodotus is writing, you know, which is three, 4500 years before that. So that's the first thing, is that western civilization predates the judeo christian tradition. It predates the existence of Christ, it predates the Bible and written form sort of coming into the west and being available outside of Israel.
So, but it's not just chronological. So what is it that really kicks off greek civilization as a distinctive thing from eastern or persian civilization? Well, what kicks it off is probably, you know, usually the first greek philosopher usually listed there is a guy named Thales. It's about 585 BC. So again, nearly 600 years before Christ, Thales comes along, 585 BC, one of the first greek sort of scientists and philosophers. And he what makes him distinctive? And the reason we consider the first person in greek philosophy, the person who kicks the whole thing off, is that he's the first person to inquire into the idea of natural causes for events. So, you know, every culture had its mythology. It had stories about how, you know, the earth, the world came to be and things are the way they are, and they act the way they do because of the intervention of gods. And Thales was the first guy to come along and say, wait a minute, they're, you know, proposed an idea that there are natural causes. Now, his philosophy and his physics were kind of strange, and they were not correct. It was like a very, very first primitive stage. His idea was, everything's made out of water. And you can see where he comes from that, you know, water is the one substance we all know that changes form. It changes shape. So if you. If you freeze it, it goes from being liquid to being solid. If you boil it, it goes from being solid, from being liquid to being a gas. So it can be solid, it could be liquid, it could be gas. If it could change into all those things, maybe it can change into everything else. So this is, you can see scientifically, this is a precursor to the idea that, you know, everything you see is made up of some underlying substance, some underlying elements. And, you know, later on, another greek philosopher in that tradition would come up with the idea of there being elements and atoms.
And this is sort of kicking off to modern science. But the important thing about thales isn't that he was right about how things work. The important thing about him is that he was the first person to propose, in essence, that there are natural causes and natural explanations, as opposed to religious or supernatural ones idea. The founding person of the distinctive western tradition was specifically somebody who was proposing natural, as opposed to supernatural explanations for events. So this is a not only a non Judeo Christian, but in a way, something going in the opposite direction from the judeo christian tradition, which is founded on faith, and the idea of faith as the essential route to knowledge and to morality.
The other thing I want to throw in here is that I read a fascinating book a while back by a physicist, italian physicist named Carlo Ravelli, who wrote a book on anaximander. Anaximander comes on like a generation after Thales, as a student of his, a follower, a successor of his, in the same city, same greek city. And he and Carla Ravelli points out that among fascinating things that Axelmander did, he was the first guy to come up with the idea that the earth is by space on all sides, as opposed to being like a flat disk. And we don't know what's under it. There's nothing under it. So the first idea of a sort of a modern, distinctive modern cosmology comes with it. The most important thing about an aximan student of Thales, but he disagreed with him, he differed from him on crucial things. And this is so different from, you had this sort of. The more EAsterN tradition is you have the master and the student, and the student's job is to copy the great work of the maSter. And he says anaximander sort of starts this tradition where the student's job is to go beyond the master, to question the master, to say, great, you've discovered a lot of things. I think I can come up with something better. I think I can even correct my master. You know, many, many years later in the western tradition, it's, I think, da VInci who said, it's a poor student who does not exceed his master. So this idea that, you know, this is your job as a student is not just to repeat a tradition that came before you. It's to innovate and to branch out into question. So that's another crucial element of the distinctive western tradition. So, you know, this is all happening, like I said, in the 500s bc. So more than 500 years before Christ, at a point where the Hebrews are just Babylon, the Old Testament as we know it, the jewish tradition as we know it, has not really come out of Israel yet and had a chance to affect anybody else. So this sort of is what my mind is so astonishing about this claim that the western tradition is the Judeo christian tradition that is based totally on Christianity. And without Christianity, we can't possibly defend it because it was a going concern rising to great heights.
But before the Judeo Christian had a tradition, had a chance at any impact on the west, you had the birth of greek medicine. And I think a really important example of that is the hippocratic school, which is Hippocrates, the legendary founder of the school of medicine in ancient Greece. Around 400 bc, you had a key work at the hippocratic school called on the sacred disease. Now, the sacred disease is, we think it, from modern perspective, we think they're referring to epilepsy. And it was reviewed. It's called the sacred disease because the idea is that, well, people thought that you've been possessed by a God. A God or a spirit had come and possessed you, and that's why you had an epileptic seizure. And the. The book on the sacred disease was basically the hippocratic school arguing that.
What the.
Can you guys hear me?
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Yep, we can hear you.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Now.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: You cut out for just a second there, Rob, but you should be clear now.
[00:16:07] Speaker B: Coming over me here, I think.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: Well, in that.
Well, since Rob is currently experiencing some technical difficulties due to the weather, we're going to hopefully try to get him back so he can finish up his statement. But in the meantime, David, do you kind of want to build off what Rob was doing until we can get him back?
[00:16:36] Speaker C: Yes, absolutely.
Just to pick up on what Rob was talking about with the ancient greek philosophers. I remember the days when I was teaching philosophy, including ancient philosophy, and the first day I introduced them to Thales, and I said, Daley said that everything is made of water, and that's a crazy idea. I told my class, by the end of this session, you're going to realize why it's a brilliant idea, and it's for all the reasons that Rob said.
But Daly's. It was not just that he looked for natural explanations.
He used his rational capacity, rather than mythology or faith or I tradition, to arrive at his theory, primitive as it then was. And, you know, I appreciate what Rob said about an ex amender. I didn't know that, that he was a critic of his own master, which is exactly what. How science proceeds. So I would just add that one of the great, great thinkers in western history was Aristotle, who's in the next generation, or several generations in writing in the 14 hundreds, I'm sorry, the 400s BC. And he was, you know, developed an entire philosophy based on reason and including in ethics, which was. Had long been the province of religious advocates and considered the only possible basis for religion, for ethics, rather.
But he was also a great Scientist.
He's known as a biologist, and I've heard contemporary biologists say he was one of the greats, one of the greats in our field. He studied very empirically.
He spent at least a year, maybe more, on the not Samos lesbia, where he did, you know, intensive research on cuttlefish, of all things, but dissected them, analyzed their both anatomy and physiology. I mean, he was a great thinker, and that was only one of the topics he dealt with. So science was well established in this greek era before Christianity.
Rob, are you back now?
[00:19:21] Speaker A: Looks like he's still having some technical difficulties due to a storm.
[00:19:28] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. For our audience, Rob is in Houston. He's had a number of meteorological difficulties lately.
But let me add a couple other things about the general movement, what Rob called the culture war. Christians, sometimes they're known as the new theists.
But he's quite right that the arguments are not that religion is true, but that it is useful. It is useful socially. This reminds me of an issue that arose in a similar vein about 25 years ago, when many people were saying that religion has positive effects psychologically on individuals, including less anxiety, better health, better relationships, even better sex.
And in the latter case, about sex, I'm hoping that it was based on self reports, not on direct observation by the researchers. In any case, now we're talking about not the religion as a benefit to the individual so much as to the society, but it's still what I would call a pragmatist argument. And by pragmatist, I don't mean practical, I mean the philosophy of pragmatism, which holds that the. Either that the standard of truth is what works, what succeeds, or it doesn't matter what's true. We're only concerned with what succeeds. And in either case, it's.
It just, it avoids the question, how do you define what works in, in America, we have a very strong, have had historically a very strong, what's sometimes called the civic religion, which is not Christianity or Islam or Judaism, but rather with a set of political doctrines that anyone who agrees with is, you know, becomes an american if they're in the country.
And that includes things like.
Includes things like belief in individual rights, principle of individual rights, of limited government, protection of individual rights to life, liberty, property, freedom of discussion, freedom of religion.
And of course, it has its sacred, so called sacred documents, like the declaration in the Constitution, which are not religious documents. They are political documents and moral documents as well. And we have our rituals, but they're sacred. They're not sacred. They are secular rituals, like the 4 July.
I mean, we just had celebrated the 4 July. And here in DC, as in many other places around the country, fireworks went off, people partied.
It was a day of joy and blessings to America, regardless of what anyone's religious views were. And that's what's so great about America.
It's got an open door to people. All you have to do to be an American is to agree to this, quote, unquote, civic religion, which is totally secular.
But going back to the history, I want to make a point here that Rob was probably on the way here, but Christianity emerged under the Roman Empire. First the Roman Republic, and then quickly the empire in the first century AD. And over the years, it has made its peace with any number of quite different, strikingly different political systems. First the Romans, then the medieval feudalist system, then the age of kings, the divine writer of kings in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then with the liberal society that emerged in England, Europe, and then most prominently in America.
And there's, that's. It's not surprising, because there is a theme in Christianity summarized in the famous statement, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and under God, what is God. That is religion. And youre relationship with God is separate from your relationship with the emperor or the king or the legislature, whatever.
I think a good thing about Christianity, and maybe it has had some effect in liberalizing our society.
But the key thing is that is what we think about the enlightenment, the period of roughly the 18th century, because that's. That's a time when America was founded and based on prior writings by scholars like John Locke and many, many others. Blackstone, the legal theorist, and others. Montesquieu on the division of government.
Sorry for any background noise you're hearing. I live on a busy street in Washington, DC.
But the alignment was not anti religious per se. It was anti religion as the only source of ethics and of political authority. Many people during that period remained religious, had religious views, but they were quite disparate. Some were deists thinking God, you know, God's role was only to create the world and then let it run on its own. And after that, you know, and some were atheists. Ethan Allen, the great founding. In the great founding generation, he was a leader in Vermont, wrote a pamphlet, one of the many pamphlets written at the time, and his was called Reason the only oracle of man.
And that was a deliberate. He used the word oracle in Contra as reason was a deliberate point to make, that reason is the way we should settle questions, not divine faith, not political questions. So that's why I think these new theists are just nuts. So, you know, we have to some extent, it's true that America remains overwhelmingly christian, but that that percentage of believers, if you look at the demographics, that has declined over time, but there's still many people who have biases on that. And I would include some of the new theists in that category. And. But I mean, bias and prejudice are nothing new.
You know, we've had immigration for centuries now to America. And, you know, when the Irish first came, after the average potato famine in the 1850s, they, you know, there was prejudice against the Irish. No Irish need apply fleeing, you know, oppression in Russia, Poland and elsewhere. And then it was Asians, actually. They were excluded by the immigration laws of the 1920s. They excluded, but not excluded entirely, but limited. And now it's Hispanics because of the border issues. And. But prejudice is, you know, it's not unique to America. And we have the foundations for a much, much more open. That is our. That's our better nature. Our better, the better angel of our nature is to be open to people coming to this country. And, you know, we've been described as a nation of immigrants, and that's clearly correct and also described as a melting pot. Now, melting pot is kind of not a good metaphor because it doesn't mean we meld or melt together into some unitary collective. It means we live together despite many differences, united only by or primarily by as a country. We're united by this civic religion of our political institutions, our documents, like the Declaration of Independence and our, you know, 4 July and other celebrations of national identity.
So in that respect, I think these. The new theist that Rob began talking about and outlining are.
They're completely off the mark historically.
Let me do a little more on this point from Rob.
If you think about what characterizes a liberal society, its individual rights, it is assigned openness of belief, but apprising of reason and science.
It is bizarre to say that Christianity was the source of that. The source of that was there were many scientists who were christians. Newton, the great Newton, one of the greatest scientists of all times, was certainly a Christian and a believer, as were many others. But they weren't looking. They didn't claim that this was theology. They provided theories about natural causation, and they were using reason, experimental evidence, and conclusions drawn from that evidence to justify their theories. And that's why they have survived, whereas religious disputes go on forever. Because why?
They're not based on reason. They are based on faith. And faith is a conversation stopper. I mean, someone declares that I just believe this, then discussion's over. And in the worst, worst of situations, you lie on the sword instead of the word.
Rob, are you back now?
[00:31:50] Speaker B: If I'm unmuted, yeah, I think I'm back. I think I'm back. And, in fact, for some reason, it keeps going off. Okay, it's on the right camera now, too. Great.
All right, so one thing I want to add on that is a great question in the comments here that I think transitions to what you're talking about right now, which is. Well, first of all, I want to say we talked about the founding fathers and Christianity. You know, there's a reason why all of our public, great public buildings in America built after the American Revolution, why they're all neoclassical structures right here. I'm actually Charlottesville now, which is where the storm's hitting. And if you go a little ways over to Richmond, you see where Thomas Jefferson designed the state capitol for Virginia, he decided. Designed it after a building from Republican Rome, or it's actually slightly later in Republic. He thought it was Republican Rome. That's why he picked it. So the idea of the roman republic, the greek democracies, this was the model that the founding fathers chose for the new republic. So it was clear that they knew what the origin of the distinctively american approach to government and to liberty. They knew what the origin was. They knew it went back to the Greeks and the Romans. That was their. That was their previous historical model for how you create a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Right. A government run by without kings.
But more broadly, I want to bring in this question of religion and faith, because there's a great comment in the note, in the comments field here. Somebody said, do you think the culture war has dumbed down things on both sides of sides that they. People tend to support things just because it's on our side? Well, I think it has absolutely dumbed things down. And one of the things that is dumbed down that I find fascinating about this is, I think, a lot of the culture where christians don't even know the history of Christianity very well, because the history of Christianity is full of. It's actually, there's a vast 2000 year long process of the rapprochement or clash. It's an alternating clashing between the Greco Roman and the Judeo christian tradition and then the co opting of one by the other. Right. So in the early. This is why I wanted to. I didn't think it was clickbait worthy, but I wanted to call this session, what has Jerusalem to do with Athens? Because one of the early church fathers, a guy named Tertullian, wrote a famous thing where he basically said, we should get rid of all classical. This is 200 AD or something like that. The 200s ad. Somewhere in that timeframe in Rome that he was basically speaking to all these Greeks and Romans who has become Christians and saying, look, it's not enough to become a Christian. You also have to get rid of everything from the classical world. What has Jerusalem to do with Athens? He said, so sorry, what has, what has he said? What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? I switched it around.
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Jerusalem is the home of our religion. Get everything from Athens out of here. Stop reading classical literature. Stop arguing about. Start reading. Stop reading Cicero, stop reading the stoics. Get all of that out. We should go just from the stuff that comes from the judeo christian tradition. But at the same time, there were other people who were saying, no, no, no, we have to combine the two. There was this combination that happened now. So one of the things that I think is fascinating about this. So against the culture, we're christians. I'm going to quote no less than authority than the pope. So this is from. I did an article a number of years back with that title, what has Jerusalem to do with Athens? In response to. There's a controversial speech given in 2007, I think it was, by Pope Benedict XVI. And he's a very philosophical guy. He used to teach theology at university, and he gave it. The controversy in the speech was he said some stuff controversial about Islam. But the fascinating part of the speech, from my perspective, is he actually goes on and talks about how the context of, you know, we use persuasion rather than force to spread to fate the faith. And this is, he claims, is a unique virtue of Christianity. Now, he might have given a clue on that to earlier popes who didn't use persuasion and use force, but he was saying, this is something that's essential to Christianity, is you don't spread the faith through force.
And in talking about that, he talked about this, this very idea of this connection between the greek tradition, the classical philosophical tradition, and Christianity. And I'm just going to read one little paragraph from that. He says, this inner rapprochement between biblical faith and greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance, not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history. It is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the east, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around. This convergence, with the subsequent addition, the roman heritage created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.
All right, so there's my authority, citing the. Citing Pope Benedict XVI, who says, basically western civilization, or he's talking about european civilization, is the product of a convergence, as he put it, between the greek philosophical tradition and the Judeo christian tradition. So not even he would say, it's all Christianity. He would say, no, no, no, it's Christianity. That was. He actually used the term Hellenized. Hellenized means, you know, combined with the greek tradition. And that's certainly what you see in people like Newton or people like locke or people like the founding fathers, is that they had an element of Christianity, elements of Christianity, but also combined with. And over, as you get into enlightenment, combined with an increasingly dominant portion of the greco roman tradition, that becomes sort of the senior partner in this. Try to attempt to combine Christianity with the greco roman tradition.
[00:38:03] Speaker A: Okay, David, do you have anything else you want to follow up with, then, before we go to Q and A?
[00:38:09] Speaker C: Yes. Just quickly, we are talking about the conflict and tensions and your historical roles of Christianity versus the Greco Romande. Both Rob and I are secular thinkers following Ayn Rand. We're objectivists, and Ayn Rand herself was an atheist. I just. But I want. I want to make a note here that she had a lot of respect for religion, although she didn't agree with it. And she particularly, you know, did not think that faith was a valid means of knowledge or conviction.
In an early letter to a minister who wrote to her after the fountainhead, this is. Goes back some years, she said, Christianity was the first school of thought that proclaimed the supreme sacredness of the individual.
The first duty of the Christian is the salvation of his own soul. And she took that to be compatible with a form of egoism, which she was, rational egoism, spiritual egoism, which she was all in favor of. And she also, you know, regarded religion in general as a.
Her phrase was a primitive form of philosophy, and she recognized Aquinas as one of the great thinkers in history. So there's. There's a difference, but no hostility.
And in that respect, I want to mention a project that I've been a part of.
We brought together a number of people back in April, from both religious and secular points of view, to talk about the values we have in common, the values that we think can be however specialized each side may provide. Philosophically, there's a lot of just inductive evidence of things like honesty, independence, and many others. We put together a two page list of common values that we've talked through and revised. And one of the things that struck me was that we made it clear that we're not here to debate secular versus religion. We're parking that. What we're here to say is defend the individualism that was always part of american thought and is being challenged and rejected.
Right.
And, you know, I know we didn't get any historical questions, but I think everyone who was there would have agreed, essentially, with Rob's analysis of how Christianity did. Did have a. Did play some role. But the enlightenment was.
The enlightenment was also deeply secular. And that was good. That was helpful to us. So that said, we will probably have more news on our website about this, what we've calling the Philadelphia declaration, because we met in Philadelphia.
But let's.
Lawrence, let's go back to questions.
[00:41:48] Speaker B: Are you muted, Lawrence?
[00:41:51] Speaker A: Yes, I am. Thank you. So sorry. See, there's a few technical hiccups here.
[00:41:55] Speaker B: And there.
[00:41:56] Speaker A: But we got about 16 minutes left. Number of questions have been coming in from Facebook, from YouTube, from Instagram. So sort of going down the list, we'll see how many we can get to you. I answered this first question, Rob, and I'm going down a bit further because a lot of this stuff was covered just during the talk. But there's a question here from Alan Ternal, who asked, weren't greco roman ideas lost during the dark ages? Can we state that the roots of western civilization are based on that?
[00:42:27] Speaker B: Oh, so, yeah, this is the. So the. Yes, the greco roman ideas were largely lost during the dark ages. That you.
The side that said, you know, what has Jerusalem to do with Athens throughout your own classical, your classical poetry and your classical philosophy, and go sola, scripture by scripture alone. By the Bible alone. That did kind of win out. In fact, the key point where it won out is the emperor Justinian in the 500s AD, who closed down the academy. So the academy was Plato's school of philosophy. It was like the longest, most prominent school of greek philosophy in Athens. And in the 500s, he shuts it down because that's pagan. We don't want that anymore. So this is the sort of key dividing line where that gets shut down. But the ideas are preserved in various ways. They're studied furtively, they're copied by monks. And here's the fascinating thing. They get picked up in the arab world. So the Arabs have, you know, this time, have invaded all of North Africa, roughly. You know, shortly after this invade all of North Africa, they find all these texts, they start reading them, and they discover falsafa, which is the arabic word for philosophy, you know, to take it directly from the greek. And so the Arabs get all excited about philosophy. There are these great aristotelian philosophers in Spain under arab control.
We know them as Avicenna and Averroes. And so this is flourishing of muslim science and philosophy under this greek influence. Then what happens is the west of the east or the Arab, the christian and muslim world sort of switch sides of this in this strange historical flip flop that the western world or the christian world, starting around 800 or 900, building steam into the twelve hundreds ad, they rediscover all these classical ideas and classical writings, and the Muslims turn against them. They say, no, no, no. This philosophy, all this philosophical discussion that's getting in the way of the true faith, we have to shut it down. So what the Christians did 500, you know, in 500 ad, say, shut down all this pagan philosophy. That's what the Arabs do starting around 1211 or 1200 or so. And what happens is that as the Europeans reconquer Spain as a bunch of, as the Arabs conquer Constantinople and a bunch of scholars from Constantinople flee to the west, there's this tremendous rediscovery of the classical ideas. And that's what the Renaissance is. It's a rediscovery of the classical ideas by Christian Europe. And that's why you get what I keep calling him, Ratzinger, because that's what Orianna Flachy did. Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, that's what Benedict XVI is talking about when he says this convergence of Christianity with the classical tradition, because that's what happens in the Renaissance, is you have the Christian west rediscovering the greek greco roman tradition and then trying to find a way to make them work together. So that's why I still say the fundamental thing about the west is this greek tradition.
But also I want to talk about the fact that, you know, how important thales is to this, this idea that natural causes, natural as opposed to supernatural causes, and questioning and debate as opposed to obedience to authority. These are the founding ideas of the western tradition. So you know, what it gets combined with and sort of preaches a modus vivendi with Christianity. But you can't find the wet defend the west or western civilization without talking about this idea, without having the fundamental ideas be, you know, reason, not just faith, but reason and not obedience or tradition, but questioning and debate and innovation. And that, I think goes what really fundamentally, philosophically undercuts everything in this case being made by the nationalist conservatives and these sort of culture war christians.
[00:46:38] Speaker A: Okay, David, do you have anything else you want to chime in there or are you good to go? Okay, next question here talks about what the word tongue twister, what precipitated a revitalized or renewed interest in religious advocacy? Is it simply for the culture war? So this kind of gets that. Why is this suddenly come back up in the national conversation again.
[00:47:09] Speaker B: I have a question answer.
Well, the simple answer is going to be there's a couple of polls that came out in the last couple decades showing that there has been a collapse in religious belief in America. Now not, you know, not that we're no longer a majority christian nation, but at the rate we're going, we might by 2050, according to some of the projections I see, by 2050 we might no longer be a majority christian nation.
Now it's not that everyone's come. Atheists. Atheists are still not are still a small minority, but atheists have gone from being less than 5% of the population. Like 3%. I know when I was an atheist growing up, you know, in, as a teenager in rural, semi rural Illinois in the 1980s, you know, people thought you, you bit the head off a bat if you were, if you were a, if you were an atheist. Now, the funny thing is that was, that was Ozzy Osborne who did that, who was a member of the Church of England. Long diversion there, but they thought you were a freak if you were an atheist. Atheists are now like 1012, maybe 15% of the population. The number of people whose beliefs are described as nothing in particular. No particular religious belief. Not that you're an atheist, but that you don't, you're not a Christian, you're not a devotee of any particular sect. That's now about 28, 29% of people. It's. And it's actually larger than the number of evangelical christians. And that's new. That's something that's been new since the 1990s. And I think that's why.
I think the religious right is sort of freaking out. Right? That's. And I think that's why the Reagan coalition, where you had the religious conservatives with us, along with us, secular perfume markers, and we could all work together. Well, that's because we all hated the communists, right? And we all could agree and be shoulder to shoulder against Moscow. We hated the communists, you know, because not only were they atheists, but they were also a totalitarian society. They were, they were against free markets. We could all agree on hating the communists that unified us. But now what's happened is the religious right, you hear them talking about this, saying, look, we tried this Reagan thing of working with the libertarians and, and the free marketers, and the free marketers got their tax cuts, but what did we get? We got gay marriage. Right? So what they see is that America is becoming a less religious nation. And I think this is panic, that this is panic at the idea that, wait a minute, we're losing the culture war for Christianity, you know, so that, that's why I think that you have sort of Trumpism is a symptom of that. It said, yeah, we need somebody to fight this culture war because Christianity is losing. And they think that the panic they're facing, I think their biggest fear is that we will be like Europe. We will become a very secular, dominantly secular nation and still be a free, prosperous nation and thief will still be good. Which would be the ultimate sort of answer. It would give the lie to this idea that we need Christianity of western civilization.
The example I was going to show you, by the way, and this is Lawrence just posted my thing on the case against western civilization is the case against western civilization as a term I prefer. So this. I want to get back to David's thing about this. The enlightenment. You know, the enlightenment as these key, I think I would like to call it enlightenment civilization because that makes it clear what combination of ideas we're talking about, because geographically, it doesn't make sense anymore. So one example I point to David is talking about immigrants who come from all different faiths. But the example I would point to is Japan. Japan, modern day typical today is modern day. Japan has a lot of the elements we would associate with western civilization. It has, you know, their technological, scientific, and industrial powerhouse. They're a free society. They're, you know, they're democracy. They have freedom of speech. They're a very dynamic society that's creating all sorts as created all sorts of culturally influential things and all sorts of new innovations. So they have a lot of ingredients that we would call western, but they're not geographically western, and they're not majority christian. Right. Japan has never been a christian country. So this is why I would say, you know, we have to. I think we should think in terms of western civilization instead of using the term western civilization I've been advocating. And I think David's totally on the right path with what he's doing. We need to talk about enlightenment civilization.
[00:51:29] Speaker C: So I'm gonna add just a note to that in response to the question that what has precipitated revitalized interest in religious advocacy?
I think there's another aspect to the answer that Rob gave, and that is philosophical.
The Enlightenment ended with Immanuel Kant at the end of the 18th century, and then a series of philosophers after that who rejected the themes of reason, the objectivity of science, secular morality, down the line, and that it produced a lot of collectivist ideas, but it undermined widespread convictions. And it was the source of the postmodern movement that we find that we see in this country today, which is played a huge role in the. On the left hand side. But what it has do is what it has done is undermined confidence in having a philosophy as such, a system of belief and to guide a belief about the world you live in, and a set of moral principles that you can act on. And because you think they're right, they're objective, they're true.
The postmodern movement, broadly speaking, which starts really with Kant two centuries ago, more than that undermined all that kind of certainty. And it's perpetuated.
We didn't go collectivist the way Nazi Germany and Soviet Union did, but we went rootless. And so I think the rootless nature is why people are glomming onto political doctrines and being polarized, not able to talk to each other, because they are desperate for something to believe in. And that includes the new theists. And I think they, they want us all to believe in, in Christianity. But that is not the answer.
[00:53:56] Speaker B: I agree, David, especially to the extent to which, you know, in a way, you know, it's not that Christianity isn't coming back. They're not trying to revive Christianity because Christianity is so strong. They're doing it because rational philosophy became so weak. And this is why we need to have this project to sort of revive the Enlightenment and improve the enlightenment. I like to think, think of it as we need Enlightenment 2.0. We need a new version of it, a new release, a new updated release of the Enlightenment. But we need to think in those terms, because that's a very interesting idea that David just said that Kant, Kant meant to undermine, once said, I meant to limit reason in order to make room for faith. So he actually meant to undermine reason in order to bring faith back. But he didn't mean it. He meant it in a more philosophical way. But I think that what you just said, that he undermined confidence in systems, because what you had in the 19th century is people going off of this tangent, that they created these secular philosophical systems of thought, but they were crazy for systems of thought. They were totally ungrounded of reality, and they had catastrophic results in practice. Like communism. Right.
That Marx builds this giant secular system, materialist system of thought, and it's totally divorced from everything that's happening in the world around him. He's describing things completely backward from what's actually happening. You put the system into place, and it's this unprecedented tyranny that kills millions and millions of people. And so I think what happened is that you had this sort of discrediting of secular philosophy, and secular philosophy itself became so skeptical, so fragment big questions by, you get to the middle of the 20th century, and postmodernism is sort of like that direction of philosophy sort of collapsing in a heap and admitting it can't solve any of the big problems. It can't even address them. So I think what has what you. That the real fault here is not, oh, you have these terrible people trying to resurrect Christianity if you want to put it that way. But you had the people who collapsed secular philosophy after the enlightenment. You had these tremendous advances in secular philosophy from ancient Greece, basically, secular philosophy, ancient greek Greece basically invented all the sciences that we have today, all of them were invented in a period of like three or 400 years in ancient Greece that the very strides and beginnings of knowledge, you have the Renaissance, tremendous strides and beginning of knowledge reaching this apex in the Enlightenment. And then you had a bunch of people who took over the, took over the project of secular philosophical reasoning and ran it into the ground for 200 years. And that's basically where we are now. And so no wonder people are saying, well, that didn't work. Let's go back to something earlier, to Christianity, to religious belief, because secular philosophy didn't work. The answer is, let's make secular philosophy work again. Make secular philosophy great again is what, I guess my, the pitch I get on.
[00:57:02] Speaker A: All right, great. And with that, we're coming down sort of the last minute. So I want to thank David, Rob, thank you both for taking the time to do this webinar. Even with any storms or anything else notwithstanding, I think this was really informative. I know we didn't get to everyone's questions in the comments, but if you have these questions, follow us on all of our socials. You can ask these questions there as well. And I do want to thank Lawrence.
[00:57:29] Speaker B: The other day, somebody had a question that they asked at one of our, I think one of our spaces, and I didn't have a good response to it, but I followed up with email with him later and actually found a book, an obscure academic book that perfectly answered the question he had. So, yeah, definitely follow up and send me questions if you wanted, or David. And at least I sometimes won't be able to follow up on these things.
[00:57:52] Speaker C: I must say, there are a number of, you know, I just reading the questions, very learned and thoughtful questions that could be really a whole separate session on this topic, of course.
[00:58:09] Speaker A: So those of you in the audience watching, if you didn't get your question answered, be persistent. Follow up with the scholars. They're around on the Internet and at the atlasesocity.org, so you can get these questions answered. But I do want to thank you all for joining us and watching today. If you liked this or any of our other materials, please consider making a tax deductible donation to the atlasesociety.org. donate now. We will not be here next week. We'll have a webinar in two weeks because next week, we are all traveling to Washington, DC for the annual student conference, Gulch Gulch 2.0 this time around. So if you're a student, we hope to see you there if you've already bought your ticket. For those of you who are watching our webinars each week, we will be back on July 31 with our CEO Jennifer Grossman, to talk with author Holly Swenson about her book stop, drop, grow and glow. So, David, Rob, thanks again for doing this, and we will see everyone next time. Take care, everyone.
[00:59:12] Speaker B: Thanks everyone. Thanks.
