Too limited a history

It has become the fashion today to dress up scientists as secular theologians (with an honorary place for Stephen Fry), as if asking them to speak (or themselves taking the initiative) outside their specialism gives them any greater credibility than asking a streetsweeper about the merits of religion.  Oh, but they have these capacious brains, it would be argued, which first of all feeds into their arrogance and secondly renders everyone else as lesser beings who need their guiding light, not unlike priests of old (nowadays humility is all the rage).

When Channel 4 decided to engage Professor Stephen Hawkings in a question-and-(delayed) answer session (it was not live for some reason), they knew there would be fireworks, when they came before one of their gods with the question “Has religion been a force for good in the world?”

They have as well as asked if Hawking would have liked a corkscrew rammed into his eye.  From a man who has been inculcated and socialised in the atmosphere of his fellow sceptics in the academic world, he has been increasingly forthright making unfalsifiable statements on the existence of heaven and God, an estrangement from religion that coincided with his leaving Jane, his wife of several decades, who did (and does) have a strong Christian faith – despite a reconciliation following his second divorce.  So, were he more aware, he would have realised that Channel 4 News were treating him like a performing seal, chucking him something with which to play.

Hawking came out with the usual tropes, Crusades, Inquisition, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as if one can tar all religions everywhere and for all time with the same brush in a couple of sentences (curiously focusing only on the Abrahamic religions).  Not a smidgen of good could Hawking evince seemingly.  I’m sure if Justin Welby or Pope Francis were asked if atheism had been a force for good in the world,” they would have had more considered responses than the rambling rant of Hawking.  At root, religion is about passion, about love and love can do bad things as well as good, as can be seen when Hawking abandoned Jane to go with the woman he ‘loved’.

Anyway, Hawking has the opposite trouble to his biologist atheist friends who focus on the minutiae of life missing the big picture.  He has made his canvas too wide with A Brief History of Time to make any reasoned comment on particular history.  A favourite of historian sceptics is The Thirty Years’ War, though other distinguished historians can demolish that thesis as the conflagration being more about geopolitical (why else would Catholic France invade Catholic Spain and Catholic Germany) and dynastic (the Spanish Habsburgs coming to the rescue of their Germna cousins) reasons than confessional, just as one can do with the Crusades (Franks more interested in setting up principalities in the Levant; Normans keen to add Byzantine Greece to their conquests of Byzantine Italy and the Italian cities vying to increase their share of Mediterranean trade).  Hawkings limited reading of history in terms of the deeds of men and women – rather than the cosmos - is worse than flawed, it is simplistic.

Ultimately, it is a ridiculous question asked by Channel 4 News, as disrespectful to Hawking as it is to those of religious leanings. Christopher Swift, achieving the double of being a sceptic and a cleric, probably had it spot on in such space as would have been available were he alive today when he quipped that we have enough religion to hate but not enough to love.  Such literary elegance is perfect for the soundbite era but escapes those of its generation.