The Origins of the Modern Critique of Religion

Religion, Ideology and Faith

In this course, Professor Henk de Berg (University of Sheffield) explores the relationships between religion, ideology and faith. In the first lecture, we think about how the emergence of modernity – specifically, the Enlightenment and the rise of philosophical and scientific materialism – impacted on religious belief. In the second lecture, we think about the concept of ideology in the context of Feuerbach’s and Marx’s critiques of religion. In the third lecture, we think about the tension between religion and human autonomy, zooming in on the ideas of Nietzsche and Sartre. Next, we think about the ‘New Atheism’ put forward by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. In the fifth and final lecture, we think about how people of faith might respond to these various critiques of religion.

The Origins of the Modern Critique of Religion

In this lecture, we think about the emergence of modernity and its impact on religion, focusing in particular on: (i) Melford Spiro’s definition of religion as ‘culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings’; (ii) premodern criticisms of religion, such as Xenophanes of Colophon’s critique of people’s anthropomorphic view of the gods; (iii) the 18th century – the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason – as marking the beginning of modernity and of the modern critique of religion; (iv) the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and rationality, and the accompanying rise of the natural sciences; (v) the distinction between theism, which posits that God both created the world and continues to act upon it, and deism, which posits that God created the world but then left it alone, such that henceforth things are simply a matter of human action within the limits set by the laws of nature; (vi) the emergence of philosophical materialism, propagated by Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Baron d’Holbach; (vii) Auguste Comte’s three-stage view of human development, whereby the first two stages (the theological/religious one and the metaphysical/philosophical one) are superseded by the scientific/‘positive’ stage, in which only what can be perceived with the senses is considered real; (viii) Max Weber’s idea of the increasingly rational nature of the modern world view, whereby the world around us loses it mystery (‘the disenchantment of the world’) because everything can now in principle be explained by science, such that religion is becoming obsolete.