REJOINDER TO MR. VAN DEN HAAG
615
the measure of its power and prudence, it would abolish religious lib–
erty, the freedom of the press, divorce, and lay education." Could so
many liberties be lost without losing others? You cannot safeguard
religious doctrines from dangerous criticism without controlling
more
than religious belief, without invading other domains of thought to
keep freedom of inquiry in check. No, the only way to make the Church
an ally of freedom is to keep it permanently weak among a multitude
of freely competing religious faiths.
Your argument rests upon a too easy identification of "faith" with
"myth" and of both with superstition. When I say I have faith in
medical science, I do not mean that I am confident that medicine will
ever abolish all disease and death but that it will heal more people
more often than religious piety, absent prayer, or alternative remedies.
When I say I have faith in intelligence or democracy, I do not mean
that a society organized on these principles will be one without violence
or without inequality but only that there is a much better prospect of
substantially diminishing the extent of violence and inequality in social
life than would be the case if Church authority and myth or any other
known alternatives were to become the operating principles. In other
words, my "faith" functions as a regulative principle not as a secularized
eschatology. You interpret my faith as if it were a demand for the
impossible or for total salvation. By definition that makes it a secular
eschatology which you equate with a celestial eschatology, and then
add to the absurdity by proclaiming that the latter is less absurd than
the former, as if there were a reasonable way of choosing between
absurdities. Your procedure here is equivalent to those who interpret
the principle of induction as if it were a guarantee that we will some
day know everything, and then equate faith in the principle of induction
with faith in the existence of God.
You insist that you are talking psychology, not logic:··
b~
I find
your psychology too crude. It is one thing to say that most human
beings cannot build their life on the illusionless methods and results of
intelligence alone, that in ('rder to sustain courage and hope in certain
critical periods they need some compensatory or consolatory beliefs. It
is quite another to acsert that only a celestial myth interpreted by a
secular Church can supply the need. There is an infinite variety of
private myths from among which they can choose. Their very number,
and personal character, are usually sufficient to protect us from their
vagaries. In this sense, Protestantism as a doctrine which makes religion
a private matter is much more appropriate to a democratic culture–
because in principle it makes even atheism a legitimate "religious" be-
