Two hundred years ago, James Mill, Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist, as a young man and through his own efforts at understanding, rejected his belief in religion. His reasons are interesting: his son, John Stuart Mill, in his autobiography tells us that this rejection was not primarily a matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more than intellectual. He continues, "he impressed on me from the first, that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known: that the question, "Who made me?" cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it" and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself, "Who made God?" Rather he argued that religion was "the greatest enemy of morality, first by setting up fictitious excellences, beliefs in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human-kind and causing these to be accepted as genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standards of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful. Think (he used to say) of a being who would make a Hell who would create the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention, that the great majority of them were to be confined to horrible and everlasting torment. Such is the facility with which mankind believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and have nevertheless identified that being with the best conception they were able to form of perfect goodness. Not to the demon which such a Being as they imagined really would be, but to their own idealof excellence. The evil is, that such a belief keeps the ideal wretchedly low; and opposes all thought which has a tendency to raise it higher. And thus morality continues a matter of blind tradition, with no consistent principle, nor even any consistent feeling, to guide it."
Two hundred years after James Mill formed these views, we can reflect on the progress that has been made. During his recent visit to New Zealand, Richard Dawkins told us of the tremendous progress that has been made in the understanding of evolution and our own origins. Developments in cosmology tell us how the earth and stars are formed from cosmic dust. Yet even now there are questions that remain unanswered, our understanding of the answers to ultimate questions in cosmology are still very much in their infancy. We rely on projections backward in time from what we perceive to be the present reality to a time when some say time had no meaning! It may be as well for us to reflect on the great insight proposed by James Mill and continue to reject belief in a supernatural being on moral grounds in preference to arguments based on knowing our origins.
IBM
Iain Middleton is editor of New Zealand Humanist.