The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

And undermined.

The dissolvent and destructive aspect of science is not less important. The first to present it in high relief were the physical sciences and astronomy. All the ancient superstitions about the trembling of the earth, eclipses, etc., which were a constant occasion of religious exaltation, are destroyed, or nearly so, even among the populace. Geology has overturned with a single stroke the traditions of most religions. Physics has done away with miracles. The same almost may be said of meteorology, which is so recent and has such a brilliant future. God is still to a man of the people too often the sender of rain and good weather, the Indra of the Hindus. A priest told me the other day, in the best faith in the world, that the prayers of his parishioners had brought the country three days of sunshine. In a religious town if rain falls the day of a religious procession, and stops shortly before the time of setting out, the people unhesitatingly believe that a miracle has been performed. Sailors, who depend so entirely on atmospheric perturbations, are more inclined to superstition. The minute the weather can be more or less accurately foretold and guarded against, all these superstitions are doomed. It is thus that fear of thunder is rapidly subsiding at the present day; this fear formed an important factor in the formation of the ancient religions. By inventing the lightning-rod, Franklin did more to destroy superstition than the most active propaganda could have done.

Experiment in miracles.

As M. Renan has remarked, we might even in our day demonstrate scientifically the non-existence of miraculous interference in the affairs of this world and the inefficiency of requests to God to modify the natural course of things; one might, for example, minister to patients according to the same methods, in two adjoining rooms of a hospital; for the one set of patients a priest might pray, and one might see whether the prayer would appreciably modify the means of recovery. The result of this sort of experiment on the existence of a special providence is moreover easy to foretell, and it is doubtful whether any educated priest would lend himself to it.

Religion and physiology and psychology.

The sciences of physiology and psychology have explained to us in a natural way a multitude of phenomena of the nervous system which we were forced until recently to attribute to the marvelous, or to trickery, or to divine influence, or to the devil.

Religion and history.

Finally, history is attacking not only the object of religion, but religions themselves, by displaying all the sinuosities and uncertainties of the thought that constructed them; the primitive contradictions, corrected for better or for worse at some later period, the genesis of the precisest dogmas by the gradual juxtaposition of vague and heterogeneous ideas. Religious criticism, the elements of which will sooner or later find their way into elementary instruction, is the most terrible weapon that could be used against religious dogmatism; it has produced and will produce its effect in Protestant countries, where theology passionately engages the multitude. Religious faith tends to give place to curiosity about religion; we understand more readily the things we do not so absolutely believe, and we can be more disinterestedly interested in the things that no longer fill us with a sacred horror. But the explanation of positive religion seemed destined to be absolutely the opposite of its justification: to write the history of religions is to write a damaging criticism of them. When one endeavours to come to close quarters with their foundation in reality, one finds it retire before one little by little and ultimately disappear like the place where the rainbow rests upon the earth: one believes that one has discovered in religion a bond between heaven and earth, a pledge of alliance and hope; it is an optical illusion which science at once corrects and explains.

Religion undermined by primary instruction.

Primary instruction, which is sometimes made, nowadays, a subject of ridicule, is also an altogether recent institution of which in former times there scarcely existed a trace, and which profoundly modifies all of the terms of every social and religious problem. The modicum of elementary instruction that the modern schoolboy possesses, in especial if one adds some few notions of religious history, would alone suffice to put him on his guard against a great many forms of superstition. Formerly it was the custom for a Roman soldier to embrace the religion of any, and of every country, in which he was stationed for a considerable space of time; on his return home he would set up an altar to the distant gods that he had made his own: Sabazius, Adonis, the goddess of Syria, or Asiatic Bellona, the Jupiter of Baalbec, or the Jupiter of Doliche. To-day our soldiers and mariners bring back from their travels little more than an incredulous tolerance, a gently disrespectful smile in relation to gods in general.