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On the Gods and Other Essays

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"On the Gods and Other Essays" collected from works by Robert Green Ingersoll is a few assorted essays, bound and priced to provide funds to preserve the Ingersoll birthplace as a museum in the town of Dresden, in western New York State.
The essay which will attract everyone's attention is the first, "On the Gods". This is just as well, because reading it reveals that Ingersoll is a lightweight in almost every regard except for his reputation as an orator which, since he worked before Edison invented the phonograph, we cannot fully appreciate. If a work is really weak, or really strong, it usually shows up on the first page, and this is no exception. The very first line says "Each nation has created a god, and that god has always resembled his creators." In simple-minded terms, it is false, because first, some nations, such as ancient Greece and Rome, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, India, and the Scandinavian peoples created many gods. (To be sure, a few pages later, Ingersoll amplifies his statement, accounting for the crowded pantheons of gods and the borrowing from one nation to the next. But the whole style is intentionally polemical, taking no notice of having made sensationalistic statements.) And, some nations, such as Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and England never created A god, but borrowed first the pagan gods, then the Christian God from missionaries. Third, by the time Ingersoll spoke these words, the idea in European philosophical and theological circles was old hat, having been the principle thesis of Ludwig Feuerbach's important 1841 work, "The Nature of Christianity". To be sure, American seminaries were about 100 years behind the new style of research being done in Germany, but they have more than caught up. Today, Feuerbach's thesis is the standard anthropological understanding of the origins of religion. Ingersoll similarly borrows ideas about the formation of ideas from the English empiricists, Locke and Hume, which were over 100 years old when Ingersoll spoke.

Ingersoll's general method is to take some literary, metaphorical statement in the Bible or other religious text and interpret literally, giving the impression that there are people who believe the literal statements. I will not deny that in some places, there may be people who believe the first chapter of Genesis is literally true, but that is not what is taught in most seminaries, and it is probably not what most clerics listening to Ingersoll actually believed. (Note, again, I said most. There will certainly be exceptions, and finding a few does not vitiate my point. The foundation of liberal Protestant theology which vitiated much of what Ingersoll said began with Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1822 - 23.)

Probably the worst misrepresentation in this essay is when Ingersoll says "...religion hates science, faith detests reason, and theology is the sworn enemy of theology..." For most of the history of Christianity, this was patently false. Today, religion and science co-exist quite nicely, thank you. Faith is not the enemy of reason. Martin Luther, in his "Table talk" for example, was quite respectful of Aristotle (the inventor of Logic). And, from roughly 200 CE to 1800 CE, the most important philosophers were also the most innovative theologians. And even in the 19th century, Hegel and Kierkegaard represented a philosophical interpretation of Christianity. (Make that a probable for Hegel, as I am not as familiar with him as with most other philosophers.) The touted Renaissance antipathy of the church to science is as much due to a change in an understanding of how science is to be done as a conflict between faith and observation. Theologians, especially those like Jonathan Edwards, generally had no problem accepting the "book of the world" along with the scripture.

There are people who really enjoy reading this, as it appears to them to be a validation of their choosing to not follow any religious faith. The sad thing is that this is such a weak reed of misunderstanding on which to base a feeling that "there are people on my side." It they took but one good course on religion, they would see that most of what Ingersoll said was buncombe, inflated to appear plausible to those who did not have the access to information which would show Ingersoll wrong.

So, the book has some value as a report on the kind of misrepresentation which was and can be done on the statements of faith. Considering the price, you may prefer finding Ingersoll's texts on the Internet.