(f) CAN WE ALTER PEOPLE’S BELIEFS?
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Phelips, Vivian
Another objection to “speaking out” is that we can never alter people’s beliefs. Many well-known Agnostics still hold this opinion. In his essay, “The Religion of All Sensible Men,” Sir Leslie Stephen expresses this opinion in the following words: “I do not wish to underrate modern progress; but surely there is something grotesque in the hypothesis that the average shopkeeper or artisan of the present day is too clever to believe in the creeds of his forefathers. I fancy that no one has yet ascertained that the brain of to-day is more capacious than the brains of the contemporaries of Cæsar or St. Paul.... Can you pierce his [the intelligent citizen’s] armour of stolid indifference by arguments about the principle of evolution and the survival of the fittest?... The improbability that ancient creeds should simply survive must, therefore, depend upon other conditions than the increase of the average intelligence.... I would not conceal my own views, but neither would I feel anxious to thrust them upon others; and for the very simple reason that conversion appears to me to be an absurdity. You cannot change a man’s thoughts about things as you can change the books in his library.”44 With all due respect to the late Sir Leslie Stephen, I contend that there is one gigantic fallacy underlying this argument. He forgets, or appears to forget, that beliefs are built upon premises, the errors in which one may be able to demonstrate absolutely without having to enter into learned dissertations on the principle of evolution.
He declares that he does not wish to underrate, but he certainly does underrate, modern progress. Surely the average shopkeeper or artisan of the present day is capable of understanding that practically nothing is left of the foundations upon which his forefathers built their beliefs; that they have crumbled away under the influence of a knowledge that was not in the possession of the contemporaries of Cæsar or St. Paul? “The laws of thought,” as Herbert Spencer says, “are everywhere the same, and the ideas of a rational being are, under the conditions in which they occur, rational.”45 It is ignorance, coupled with superstition, that is at the root of all the different beliefs of mankind. Superstition may remain, though even this may be questioned, considering that people brought up from their childhood as Agnostics are wholly devoid of any superstitious or so-called religious instinct. Ignorance can in any case be dispelled, and if this does not actually destroy supernatural beliefs, it will at least modify them. Even the working man will not remain satisfied with a theology which maintains the necessity for a foundation of facts, and yet is unable to prove them. Therefore, confident of the utility, let us unravel all that is clearly false in belief, and disseminate the result of our investigations among our fellows. In this way, men who are in all essentials seeking the same goal may be led to pursue, if not the same path, yet at least convergent paths.
The common sophisms that it is useless to inquire too deeply into beliefs, since you will never arrive at the absolute truth, and that you will never get two men to think alike, account for much of the prevalent indifference. Absolute truth may always remain beyond the ken of man; but that is no reason why he should not go on trying to get as near it as possible, and the first step is the elimination of untruth.