The Sea of Faith and Don Cupitt. Part I

 

Don Cupitt's perception of the Sea of Faith; What Sea? Beware; you never know when
the tide might sweep back in.

I well remember Don Cupitt's Sea of Faith series when it was first aired on BBC2 TV in 1984. The series has recently been re-aired on BBC4 and so I watched episode one again for the first time since 1984. In fact, as I was able to record it this time I actually viewed it twice more and made notes as I watched. 

I remember at my first viewing in 1984 thinking that Cupitt seemed to have fallen into the well-known trap of the science vs religion dichotomy. This was surprising given that otherwise Don Cupitt seemed so well qualified academically speaking. But no, he had just caved in and simply accepted that the so-called mechanical universe heroically promoted by Christians such as Galileo and Descartes (and eventually Newton, Faraday and Maxwell all of whom were idiosyncratic believers) entailed an entirely secular world which gave any realist notion of God its redundancy notice. 

Well, my second and third watching of the first episode simply reinforced my 1984 opinion of Cupitt's take on the relation of science and God. In his Sea of Faith series Cupitt promotes the idea that God and religion are merely useful mythical, mystical and metaphorical human constructions (or opiates?) which help humanity cope with its loneliness in an otherwise huge and utterly impersonal cosmos. Religion and God, according to Cupitt, have no greater reality than that. As wiki says [Cupitt's] views more closely follow that of an atheist seeking to live a morally good life, separate from any belief in, or need of, a relationship with God. "Atheist" was how I would have described his views in 1984 and I think a lot of people, both religious and non-religious thought the same at the time. The only difference between Cupitt and many other atheists was that Cupitt believed humanity should be free to indulge its imaginative but superstitious religious instincts. 

To me it seems that both Descartes and Galileo were believers who were impressed by the highly organized mechanisms of the universe and like the later Newton saw God's hand in that organization. But Cupitt's interpretation of the findings of science was to my mind and still is, startlingly naive. To Cupitt the discovery of these comprehensive ordered mathematical patterns of nature automatically meant that any sacred meaning they had could be ditched. According to Cupitt, in Galileo's dynamic vision of the universe motion was "built-in" and therefore it was "no longer necessary to appeal to the action of a divine mover who keeps that universe energized". Just as the rain fell on both the just and the unjust the mechanical universe just kept working for everyone without the need for magical ritual or intervention by either God or man. In Cupitt's mind science fully explained (as opposed to merely described) the workings of the world; the latter was a self-sufficient machine without the need for theocratic input. 

Then and now, Cupitt's line of argument seemed to me so utterly stupid as to be beyond belief: As Galileo, Descartes and Newton were aware, although the world could be described in mathematical patterns these patterns were highly contingent and for anyone of a religious turn of mind, they presented a huge mystery which invited further mystical and religious reaction. The world might well behave like a well-oiled machine, but its ultimate origin and maintenance remained as baffling a mystery as ever, and hence we were back to square one on the religious/god question. Cupitt had overlooked the obvious and not only had he underrated the religious reaction of Descartes, Galileo, Newton and the like but also failed to do any justice to these figures: They were either ignored or written off as merely promoting the hollow God of the Philosophers. Guided by his preconceived prejudices Cupitt had unfairly sampled scientific opinion on the subject of God. In its place he was promoting the folk perception of science:  Viz: The cosmos was like a clock and good clocks don't need human management while they are running, therefore why would the cosmos need a god?  Clueless.

***

At the time it would have been easy for me to write-off Cupitt as just another pundit presenting an all too typical hackneyed misrepresentation of science and then forgotten all about him. But as it turned out his reaction to his own passe concepts was to weigh strangely in the scales of my own thinking. A few years after I had watched the series (I had also purchased the book) I was making heavy weather of some of the gnostic-like aspects of contemporary Christian evangelicalism.  To my surprise I found that Cupitt had given me insight into the condition behind these circumstances. It was ironic that Cupitt's reaction to the elegant intellectualisms of science had parallels in contemporary evangelical Christianity: Evangelicalism's own version of the reactionary existential angst triggered by the apparently soulless and profane mechanical world had taken the form of an escape into the high subjectivism of the inner life with its sublime epiphanies. Moreover, Cupitt's stark account of those Godless so-called "natural forces" was to surface again although in negated form among the North American Intelligent Design community (NAID). Many thanks to Don Cupitt for helping me make some sense of these situations, but perhaps not in the way he and the Sea of Faith movement would have applauded!

...to be continued