The Great Agnostic (8 page)

The Beckwith Memorial Theater was a true Gilded Age monument to the broad cultural scope of the American
freethought movement. What distinguished the pantheon was its combination of Americans and foreigners; men and women; political thinkers, agnostics, and artists; the honored dead and the controversial living—the last group including Ingersoll himself. The heretical and lusty poems of Whitman, who had died in 1892, were still considered scandalous trash by much of the reading public and by orthodox literary critics. Ingersoll, in an 1892 eulogy for Whitman reprinted around the country, had predicted that the poet “will be understood yet, and that for which he was condemned—his frankness, his candor—will add to the glory and greatness of his fame” (see
Appendix A
).
16
Both Ingersoll and the Beckwith Theater represented not a majority of Americans but one important strand in the cultural fabric of a period in which many citizens, ranging from freethinking ranchers to civic leaders, valued intellectual curiosity more than they feared the unknown consequences of free inquiry.

On the eve of the dedication speech, the local newspaper perfectly captured the combination of ambivalence and respect with which Ingersoll was viewed by his contemporaries. In a burst of boosterish hyperbole, the
Dowagiac Times
expressed delight at the prospect of listening to “the greatest reasoner, advocate, poet and orator the world has ever known and all at home.” The paper took
care to point out that “few among us agree with him in politics, religion, and all minor points” but that “every good man and woman agrees in the supreme right to disagree. We would not wish to live in a world where honest discussion was a lost art.”
17
There was no chance of that with Bob Ingersoll coming to town.

The church still faithfully guards the dangerous tree of knowledge, and has exerted in all ages her utmost power to keep mankind from eating the fruit thereof.

—RGI, “The Gods”

The primary secular argument against the validity of religious belief, whether advanced in philosophical or scientific terms, has always been grounded in the premise that knowledge based on observation of the natural world, however faulty or incomplete initial conclusions may prove upon further observation, is inherently superior to faith based on mythic events that contradict the verifiable laws of nature. This was as true in the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth, but Robert Ingersoll's generation had an inestimable advantage over the religious heretics of the Enlightenment. By the second half of the nineteenth century, freethinkers could point to the technological fruits of once-theoretical science as evidence of progress
that greatly benefited the human species in ways that ordinary people could see and understand. All of Ingersoll's lectures were infused with the conviction that scientists and inventors had done much more for the welfare of human beings than preachers of any creed. On the frontispiece of the first edition of his collected works, a blasphemous cartoon embodies this theme. In one row of Latin crosses, marked with the slogan “
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
,” people are being put to death; in another row, labeled “
FOR THE USE OF MAN
,” the crosses are actually telephone polls connected by wires.

Unlike the telephone, many nineteenth-century technological advances contradicted the injunctions of writings once—and quite recently in a historical sense—held sacred by nearly all. “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,” the Lord told the disobedient Eve—but ether and chloroform were being used to ease the suffering of women in childbirth in all of the world's most advanced nations. Fiery preachers might still say that it violated God's plan for women to be freed from the promised anguish attached to childbearing, just as many of their clerical predecessors had said, at the beginning of the century, that vaccination against smallpox usurped the divine prerogative—but few people were listening if they had the means to pay a doctor skilled in the use of the effective new painkillers. Of even greater importance than contradictions
between a literal reading of scripture and the use of specific medical advances like anesthesia was the general advance in understanding of the natural world. The idea that infectious diseases were caused by invisible organisms called bacteria, for example, was originally considered as dubious and unproven as Darwin's theory of evolution. From the 1860s through the 1890s, however, the pioneering research and experiments of Louis Pasteur in France and bacteriologist Robert Koch in Germany began to be widely known among educated specialists around the world, including the United States. Leading American surgeons began to use aseptic routines, pioneered by England's Joseph Lister, and even the more progressive general practitioners, in cities and rural areas, came to realize that they could prevent many common diseases simply by washing their hands and keeping themselves and their patients as clean as possible. As understanding of the natural causes of fatal illnesses grew, supernatural explanations for certain kinds of human suffering became unnecessary. This was the fertile environment in which Ingersoll preached the gospel of science as the major source of human progress and religious superstition as its enemy—a force through which “the heart hardens and the brain softens.” To those who insisted that superstition, whether channeled through folk tales or formal religious institutions, was harmless, Ingersoll replied that
belief in the supernatural wastes human energies by diverting them into the search for a nonexistent, miraculous protection. “Credulity, ceremony, worship, sacrifice and prayer take the place of honest work, of investigation, of intellectual effort, of observation, of experience. Progress becomes impossible.”
1

While it was difficult for any cleric other than an unreconstructed Calvinist (and strict Calvinism had, after all, been losing ground in America since the end of the seventeenth century) to convince the public that new drugs to ease pain were ungodly, Darwin's theory of evolution was another matter altogether. Evolution did—as it still does—pose a direct challenge not only to the creation story of Genesis but, for many, to the basic belief that man is a being created by God in the divine image. And evolution—unlike, say, the discovery of the role of bacteria in transmitting disease—had no immediate, easily understandable practical benefits to offer the human species. Moreover, there could be no visible scientific demonstrations—unlike, say, Pasteur's famous experiments in the 1860s and 1870s that produced a safer milk supply and a method of inoculation to protect sheep from anthrax—to prove that humans were descended from lower animals. Backward-looking clerics like the Reverend Thomas A. Eliot could simply dismiss fossils offered as evidence to support Darwin's theory by pointing out
that no living human had ever actually seen one animal turning into another.
*

In 1876, when Ingersoll was beginning his career as a national speaker, Thomas Henry Huxley visited the United States for the first time. He delivered three lectures about evolution to standing-room-only audiences in New York City, and, although his speeches were described thoroughly and fairly in the news columns, the editorial pages of the
New York Times
reflected the profound unease aroused by Darwin's theory among well-educated business leaders, scholars, and politicians, many of whom were no more willing than their poorer, less educated contemporaries to abandon their view of themselves as special, divinely infused beings. The
Times
's editorial writers, having heard Huxley's argument, insisted that the theory of evolution by means of natural selection not only should but must be modified by scientists so that it posed no challenge to belief in a divine creator. This was possible, the editorial suggested, because geological discoveries indicating that the earth was older than the time frame in Genesis had in fact demonstrated “a striking general coincidence between the Mosaic narrative and modern
geological theories. And Biblical scholars have changed many of our former interpretations of these records.”
2
The obvious hole in the argument is that the biblical scholars, not the geologists, were the ones who had modified their views in a tortuous effort to prove that there was no real contradiction between the story of Genesis and contemporary geological conclusions. Huxley had compared Darwin's theory to Copernicus's heliocentric theory of the solar system, but the
Times
dismissed the analogy as evidence of “how far [astray] theory will lead a clear brain.”
3

In this anxious intellectual climate, with new scientific concepts impinging on humanity's cherished sense of itself as the summa of creation, Ingersoll began speaking out on behalf of Darwin's theory. The scientific basis of the theory was understood by only a tiny proportion of highly educated Americans, but the potential threat to religious faith was perceived even by those who did not understand the science. Ingersoll's contribution to the debate was to speak directly to the wounded self-image of those who believed that if humans were deprived of their divine provenance, they were therefore nothing—that a creature descended from beings who had struggled out of a primal ooze could not possibly consider himself only a little lower than the angels. “I believe that man came up from lower animals,” Ingersoll declared in 1877, only six
years after Darwin, in
The Descent of Man,
had directly addressed the religion-shattering implications of the general theory he had outlined in
On the Origin of Species
in 1859. “When I first heard of that doctrine I did not like it,” Ingersoll acknowledged, adding that he became convinced of the validity of evolutionary thought only after careful reading. Then Ingersoll straightforwardly addressed the fear that any admission of descent from lesser animals nullified the achievements of human beings:

After all I had rather belong to a race that started from the skull-less vertebrates in the dim Laurentian seas, vertebrates wiggling without knowing why they wiggled, swimming without knowing where they were going, but that in some way began to develop, and began to get a little higher and a little higher in the scale of existence; that they came up by degrees through millions of ages through all the animal world, though all that crawls and swims and floats and climbs and creeps, and finally produced the gentleman in the dug-out; and then from this man, getting a little grander, and each one calling every one who made a little advance an infidel or an atheist—for in the history of this world the man who is ahead has always been called a heretic—I would rather come from a race that started from that skull-less vertebrate, and
came up and up and up and finally produced Shakespeare, the man who found the human intellect dwelling in a hut, touched it with the wand of his genius and it became a palace domed and pinnacled. … I would rather belong to that race that commenced a skull-less vertebrate and produced Shakespeare, a race that has before it an infinite future, with an angel of progress leaning from the far horizon, beckoning men forward, upward and onward forever—I had rather belong to such a race, commencing there, producing this, and with that hope, than to have sprung from a perfect pair upon which the Lord has lost money every moment from that day to this.
4

Ingersoll's message had a special resonance precisely because he admitted to having sustained an initial shock at the idea that instead of being the great singular creature who commands all lower beings in the divinely ordained hierarchy of nature, a human being was only a part of nature. What Ingersoll told his audiences was that they too could get over the short-lived trauma of the loss of human exceptionalism—that being a part of nature, if one was a man or woman of reason, provided not only a sufficient but an excellent reason to live. This optimistic message, well suited to Americans, whose most distinctive
national trait was their belief in progress, was that the human species is even more remarkable if descended from beings who emerged from more primitive organisms.
Look at how far we have come, not where we came from,
Ingersoll told his fellow Americans.
Look forward to what we may become.
His optimism directly contradicted the despairing fatalism of the orthodox clergymen who preached that man would lose all dignity if evolution were ever to be widely accepted. This point of view was well expressed in an “Apostate's Creed,” written by an anonymous author and published in a major Christian periodical. If the evolutionists triumphed, the author predicted, a new creed would have to read: “I believe in the wholly impersonal absolute, the wholly uncatholic church, the disunion of saints, the survival of the fittest, the persistency of force, the dispersion of the body, and in death everlasting.”
5
Nonsense, said Ingersoll, declaring cheerfully and blasphemously, “Religion has not civilized man—man has civilized religion. God improves as man advances.”

Furthermore, acceptance of the natural origins and evolution of man was integrally linked with the effort to alleviate suffering long attributed to supernatural causes. “The moment it is admitted that all phenomena are within the domain of the natural, the necessity for a priest has disappeared,” Ingersoll argued. “Religion breathes the air of the supernatural. … As long as plagues and pestilences
could be stopped by prayer, the priest was useful. The moment the physician found a cure, the priest became an extravagance.”
6
That science had not yet found ways to effectively treat, much less cure, diseases like cancer did not render them supernatural mysteries but simply meant that human understanding of nature was incomplete.

One of Ingersoll's most valuable contributions to the emerging, enlivened dialogue between representatives of science and religion was his refusal to take refuge, as liberal Protestant clerics did, in the conviction that only strict biblical literalism posed a formidable barrier to the reconciliation of religion and faith. Ingersoll gave no more credence to William Paley's argument that the existence of a watch implied the existence of an infallible watchmaker—the forerunner of today's “intelligent design” argument—than he did to the story of the six days of creation in Genesis. Like most agnostics and atheists before and after him, Ingersoll went straight to the theodicy problem to refute design—intelligent or unintelligent.