Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll served in the Civil War in command of
the 11th Illinois Cavalry Regiment, which saw action in the Battle of
Shiloh. He was an agnostic:
"I do not say there is no God. I do not know. As I told you before,
I have travelled but little—only in this world." (Colonel Robert G.
Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, edited by Roger E. Greeley, p. 38).
He was unafraid:
"I do not fear death any more than I fear sleep."
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, p. 48).
. . .though undoubtedly he has found cause to modify that position
since then.
Prior to his death in 1899 he travelled widely across the country
speaking against the Christian faith. His ammunition was mainly those familiar
'Bible contradictions' heard from atheists, liberals, and modern-day
Catholics. Are these conundrums insoluble?
These are, it is alleged, mutually contradictory statements found in
scripture which cannot simultaneously be true. Thus, at least one of
these statements must be false; therefore scripture incorporates false
statements. These 'Bible contradictions' are advanced by liberals and
some present-day Catholics to discredit the Bible and discourage reliance upon it, by
atheists to discredit the Christian faith. Are they for real, or is substantially less
delivered than was advertised?
These are, not contradictions, but assertions and circumstances found
in the Bible deemed laughable or problematic by atheists, liberals, and some Catholics of the
present day:
"Christ
never wrote a solitary word of the New Testament —
not one word. There is an account that he once stooped and wrote something
in the sand, but that has not been preserved.
He never told anybody to write a word. He never said, 'Matthew, remember this. Mark, do not forget to put that down. Luke, be sure in your gospel you have this. John, do not forget it.'
Not one word. And it has always seemed to me that a being coming from another world, with a message of infinite importance to mankind, should at least have verified that message by his own signature. Is it not wonderful that not one word was written by Christ?
Is it not strange that he gave no orders to have his words preserved
— words upon which hung the salvation of the world?"
(Colonel Robert
G. Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, Page 3.)
According to Colonel Ingersoll, the New Testament is demonstrably fake because
it's written in Greek, whereas the apostles can have known only Hebrew
(never mind that the vernacular language of that time and place was
Aramaic, not Hebrew):
"We have, I say, a Christian system, and that system is founded upon what they are pleased to call the
'New Testament.' Who wrote the New Testament? I do not know. Who does know? Nobody. We have found many manuscripts containing portions of the New Testament. Some of these manuscripts leave out five or six books—many of them. Others more; others less. No two of these manuscripts agree. Nobody knows who wrote these manuscripts. They are all written in Greek. The disciples of Christ, so far as we know, knew only Hebrew. Nobody ever saw so far as we know, one of the original Hebrew manuscripts."
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, What We Must Do to be
Saved).
The New Testament was indeed written by Jewish authors, with the possible
exception of Luke. Hmmm... what other first century literature is written in Greek by Jewish authors?
Josephus' histories and Philo Judaeus' voluminous writings: basically,
the Jewish literature extant from the first century. An apocryphal work
without which there is no 'Biblical' flat-earthism, 'The Book of
Enoch,' was conserved by the Ethiopian Church, yet its original
language is Greek. What was taught at Gamaliel's school, where Paul
studied?
"But was Grecian Wisdom proscribed? Did not Rab Judah say
that Samuel stated in the name of R. Simeon b. Gamaliel: '[The
words] Mine eye affected my soul because of all the daughters of my
city [could very well be applied to the] thousand youths who were in
my father's house; five hundred of them learned Torah and the other
five hundred learned Grecian Wisdom, and out of all of them there
remain only I here and the son of my father's brother in Asia'?— It
may, however, be said that the family of R. Gamaliel was an
exception, as they had associations with the Government. . ." (Babylonian
Talmud, Tractate Baba Kamma, 83a.).
Tell me again what is so strange about a book written in Greek by a Hebrew author?
Flat Earth
This 'Bible Difficulty' is so strenuously insisted upon by atheists,
liberals and modern Catholics as to merit its own category:
"In the dear old religious days the earth was flat—a
little dishing, if anything—and just above it was Jehovah's house,
and just below was where the Devil lived. God and his angels
inhabited the third floor, the Devil and his imps the basement, and
the human race the second floor." (Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The
Best of Robert Ingersoll, p. 66).
The Bible, they allege, teaches that the earth is flat. The proof for this consists in the
use of idioms such as 'ends of the earth' which are still widely used in
the present day by speakers who certainly do not believe the earth is
flat:
According to Colonel Ingersoll, the Bible itself positively states that the
earth was flat. Unfortunately, no one has yet been able to discover where
this occurs, nevertheless they are sure of it! Colonel Ingersoll accuses, not only the medieval church,
but the Bible itself of flat-earthism, with how much merit we have seen.
The Bible refers, for instance, to the 'deeps.' What does this mean?
Perhaps the reader might think of the depths of the sea. This is perfectly
sensible; but what does it have to do with any flat earth? At this point,
the 'Book of Enoch' comes to the rescue, or perhaps 'Enuma Elish' or some
such, providing a Rosetta Stone, a table of equivalences such that the
Bible language can be translated to some never-never land construct, where
the 'deeps' are something no one has ever seen or interacted with, or
possibly could. If you just say, 'but I thought we were talking about the
Bible,' that's the end of it:
"The ancient Hebrews believed that this earth was the center of the universe,
and that the sun, moon and stars were specks in the sky.
"With this the Bible agrees.
"They thought the earth was flat, with four corners; that the sky, the
firmament, was solid -- the floor of Jehovah's house.
"The Bible teaches the same.
"They imagined that the sun journeyed about the earth, and that by stopping
the sun the day could be lengthened.
"The Bible agrees with this."
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, 'About the Holy Bible,' II.).
Some of the time Colonel Ingersoll seems to have a realistic appreciation of
Copernicus' achievement. Copernicus introduced heliocentrism versus the
geocentric Ptolemaic system. This caused controversy, though both systems teach a rotund
earth. Some of the time he falls in with the internet atheists you encounter nowadays, who have not one clue in the world, and
praise the great explorers for their defiance of 'the Church,' which supposedly taught that the earth was flat:
"I believe it was Magellan who said, 'the church says the
earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have
more confidence even in a shadow than in the church.' On the
prow of his ship were disobedience, defiance, scorn and success."
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, Lectures of Robert Ingersoll, Lecture
on Individuality, An Arraignment of the Church).
The Catholic Church
championed Ptolemy's system of astronomy, even after it had outlived its
usefulness, because she had fallen in love with the pagan philosopher
Aristotle, one of the architects of Ptolemy's geocentric
astronomy. 'The Church' did not ever tell Magellan "the earth is
flat," because their beloved Aristotle taught that it was round. Thomas
Aquinas, in the Middle Ages, had synthesized a Grand Theory of
Everything, joining such elements of Biblical salvation as could survive
translation into Aristotelian psychology with Aristotle's physics and
astronomy. The church was so attached to this grand synthesis they could
not let go, even when the Protestants objected to its distortions of
salvation doctrine, and the astronomers objected to its outmoded
geocentric astronomy. As it happens, Ptolemy's system features a round
earth:
Colonel Ingersoll states positively, as fact, that in the Middle Ages,
the Catholic Church condemned, as heretics, any who did not believe the
earth was flat:
“He [Cosmas] also declared that the earth was flat. This he proved by many passages from the Bible. Among other reasons for believing the earth to be flat, he brought forward the following: We are told in the New Testament that Christ shall come again in glory and power, and all the world shall see him. Now, if the world is round, how are the people on the other side going to see Christ when he comes? That settled the question, and the church not only endorsed the book, but declared that whoever believed less or more than stated by Cosmas, was a heretic.”
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The
Ghosts, 1878. )
It's easy enough to think that Ingersoll must have been a shameless liar to suggest that the medieval church ever condemned,
as heretics, persons who believed the earth was round. This would mean
they must have persecuted their own fair-haired son, Thomas Aquinas, who
combined Ptolemaic astronomy with Bible revelation into, it was hoped, a
harmonious whole. Thomas takes it for granted that the earth is round:
"Sciences are differentiated according to the
various means through which knowledge is obtained. For the astronomer
and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for
instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e.
abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself."
(Thomas
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 1, First Article, Reply to
Objection 2).
But Colonel Ingersoll did not himself invent the notion that
Magellan and Columbus discovered that the earth was round, no one
previously having suspected such a thing. This goes back to John William Draper,
whose motives are disputed. It used to be widely taught in American
schools. It's totally false. But mastering Ptolemaic astronomy is
genuinely difficult. Comprehending the subject matter was probably simply
beyond the good Colonel. He very well may have believed it himself.
Ingersoll did jump in with both
feet, though. Whatever can be said about the jumble Colonel Ingersoll
makes of ancient astronomy, history it isn't. Unfortunately, the ready
availability of this material on the internet has immortalized it; the
youngsters encountering for the first time the information that Ferdinand Magellan
discovered the earth is round, or rediscovered this, it may be, after long centuries during which the Catholic
Church taught it was flat, are impressed, as no literate person can be.
“What was the next blow that this church received? The discovery of
America. The Holy Ghost who inspired men to write the Bible did not
know of the existence of this continent, never dreamed of the
Western Hemisphere. The Bible left out half the world. The Holy
Ghost did not know that the earth is round. He did not dream that
the earth is round. He believed it was flat, although he made it
himself. At that time heaven was just beyond the clouds. It was
there the gods lived, there the angels were, and it was against that
heaven that Jacob's ladder leaned when the angels went up and down.
It was to that heaven that Christ ascended after his resurrection. .
. At last they found that the earth is round. It was
circumnavigated by Magellan. In 1519 that brave man set sail. The
church told him: 'The earth is flat, my friend; don't go, you may
fall off the edge.' Magellan said: 'I have seen the shadow of the
earth upon the moon, and I have more confidence in the shadow than I
have in the church.' The ship went round. The earth was
circumnavigated. Science passed its hand above it and beneath it,
and where was the old heaven and where was the hell? Vanished
forever! And they dwell now only in the religion of superstition.”
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll,
Orthodoxy, A Lecture. )
Part of what's going on here is that they're conflating
the controversy between Copernicus' heliocentrism and then then-widely
accepted geocentric Ptolemaic system of astronomy, with imagined
controversies over flat-earthism. Both Ptolemy's astronomy and Copernicus' are systems of
scientific astronomy with high predictive value. Neither system proposes a
flat earth. Neither Columbus nor Magellan contributed much to the debate
on the merits of the Copernican system versus the Ptolemaic. This is more
understandable when you realize Columbus sailed in 1492, while Copernicus'
magnum opus, De Revolutionibus, was not published until 1543. Ferdinand
Magellan, who did not himself complete the circumnavigation of the globe,
having been killed in the Philippines, nevertheless demonstrated its
feasibility, and surviving members of the crew did achieve the feat.
This feat does indeed demonstrate that the earth is a globe, or if
not a globe, perhaps a cylinder. Part of what went awry here is
perhaps the assumption that a scientific revolution must proceed by
sweeping away baseless superstitition and replacing enforced assent to
absurdities with open-eyed facing of the facts. But Copernicus did not
exactly do that. Your daily experience does not tell you that the solar
system is heliocentric. It doesn't even tell you that the earth is
round! There are clues, bread crumbs scattered about;
Copernicus' system was a better fit with the phases
of Venus than had been the Ptolemaic system. It would appear there is no
rewriting of history too bold for the atheists to venture. Meanwhile,
heliocentrism vs. geocentrism is a little bit recondite, and people
tend to get confused when they try to remember which it is they are
supposed to be defending, or how they know that the winning side is the correct
one.
This controversy about the motion of the earth is an old one;
the question of heliocetrism was raised in antiquity, but for a variety of
reasons did not become the dominant view. Pythagoras was possibly a
heliocentrist; it depends on how the reader interprets his 'central
fire,' which some interpreters take to be the sun, while others
suggest the visible sun reflects the central fire:
"All the others say that the Earth is at rest.
But Philolaus the Pythagorean says that it revolves round the fire in an oblique circle, in like manner as the Sun and Moon."
(Eusebius of Caesarea. Eusebius of Caesarea: Praeparatio Evangelica (The Preparation of the Gospel)
Book XV, Chapter LVIII):
Colonel Ingersoll blames the Bible for slavery, among other things:
"The Bible
is not inspired in its morality, for the reason
that slavery is not moral, that polygamy is not
good, that wars of extermination are not
merciful, and that nothing can be more immoral
than to punish the innocent on account of the
sins of the guilty."
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The Best of
Robert Ingersoll, p. 7 .)
"Upon the limbs of unborn babes this fiendish God put the chains of slavery. I hate him."
(Robert G. Ingersoll, Lectures of Robert Ingersoll, Reply to Rabbi Bien).
How is it that a book, which according to Colonel Ingersoll promotes
slavery, played such an important role in the movement to abolish slavery?:
It's not uncommon for war-time combatants to claim that God is on their side.
But surely both cannot make such a claim, with any plausibility, while
doing all in their power to annihilate one another. The parties to World
War I all claimed to have taken the field in God's defense, inviting
cynical denial of all such claims. The scalawags of
the Confederacy did make the claim, at least those who were not openly
irreligious, like Jubal A. Early. As Ingersoll cannot have been unaware,
the Union made the same claim for itself. Ingersoll's assumption that you
can disprove theism by focusing on one of these claims,— that made
by the bad guys,— while
ignoring a similar claim made by the good guys,— is transparently
bad logic. That the God of Battles actually favored the losing side of the
combat lacks all plausibility. That the God of the Bible loves slavery and
injustice is as wrong as wrong can be. That the God of the Bible believes
blacks to be inferior to whites, the foundation stone of the Confederacy,
is fiction pure and simple. Yet this transparent fiction entered into the
'Lost Cause' mythos, and colored people's perceptions for generations.
Colonel Ingersoll's own father, John Ingersoll, was an abolitionist
Congregationalist minister and associate of Charles Finney. What family
dynamics caused him to effectively erase the movement in which his own
father had been a participant I can't say. One must assume his own
abolitionist sentiments were a heritage passed on to him by his father,
yet his anti-slavery rhetoric seems to assume that people like his father
don't exist. In his youth he seems to have described himself as a Deist,
later as an agnostic, which is a word addressing knowledge. Agnostics do
not know whether there is a god or not, but do not serve any such god any
more than do atheists, who are somewhat more certain on the matter. When
he raised a regiment and volunteered to lead it in the Civil War, it was
presumably as a Deist.
Moses freed thousands upon thousands of slaves, and enslaved none, other than the
thief unable to make restitution. Where in the Bible is there breathed the
slightest hint that Black folk are inferior to white folk? That was the
foundation stone of the Confederacy, the cornerstone of the new republic, according to its own founders:
Where is any notion of African racial inferiority found in the scriptures? It's absent altogether!
Yet this notion was the foundation stone of the Confederacy, according to
Alexander Stephens, its vice president. It's high time this atheist scam stopped dead in its tracks, on grounds it
is fraudulent. The Bible does not promote racism nor injustice.
Incidentally, they've slapped a new coat of gilt paint on St. Gaudens'
magnificent equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman, and the results
are stunning:
Makes you wonder why there is still any confusion on this point.
Wealth and Poverty
Colonel Ingersoll was not impressed with Christian morality:
His dissatisfaction with Biblical morality was radical, going right back to the source:
The precepts of Christian morality he would discard include such
minor matters as the opposition many Christians express to
dancing and card games:
"Why should we postpone our joy to another world? Thousands of people take
great pleasure in dancing, and I say, let them dance. Dancing is better than weeping and
wailing over a theology born of ignorance and superstition. . .I believe in cards and
billiards. No one should fail to pick up every jewel of joy that can be found in his
path." (Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, page
50).
This is a common theme with atheist and agnostic ethics. They say,
'You can be good without God.' They ought to add a codicil, 'You will of
course have to redefine what "good" means.' Paul's principle, "We
then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not
to please ourselves." (Romans 15:1), never makes the transition to
atheist ethics. Gambling is a harmless pastime,
and those who think there's something wrong with it and the ruined lives
it leaves in its wake just don't want you to have fun:
"If the ministers had their way, there would be no form of human enjoyment
except prayer, signing subscription papers, putting money in contribution boxes, listening
to sermons, reading the cheerful histories of the Old Testament, imagining the joys of heaven
and the torments of hell. The church is opposed to the theater, is the enemy of the opera,
looks upon dancing as a crime, hates billiards, despises cards, opposes roller-skating,
and even entertains a certain prejudice against croquet." (Colonel
Robert G. Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, p. 64).
A devoted family man, Colonel Ingersoll was less impatient
with monogamy that his modern-day intellectual heirs: "I believe in
marriage, and I hold in utter contempt the opinions of those long haired
men and short haired women who denounce the institution of marriage."
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, p. 57).
Whether because he was a sentimental softy who loved his wife and
daughters, or because monogamy really can be integrated with his
materialistic world-view, he is on the same page as the church on this
point: "The marriage of one man to the one woman is the citadel and
fortress of civilization." (Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The Best of
Robert Ingersoll, p. 57).
On one very significant point he disliked Biblical morality, and that is the
question of wealth and poverty. Colonel Ingersoll was active in Republican Party politics throughout
his life. His nemesis was this man, William Jennings Bryan:
"I have
many objections to the philosophy of Christ. I
do not believe in returning good for evil. I
believe in returning justice for evil. I do not
believe that I can put a man under a moral
obligation to do me a favor by doing him a
wrong. The doctrine of non-resistance is to me
absurd. The right should be defended and the
wrong resisted. Goodness should have the right
to protect itself. Neither do I believe in
decrying this world. We should not say, 'Thou
fool,' to the man who works for those he loves.
Poverty is not a virtue, nor is wealth a crime.
Christ is not my ideal."
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, letter, The
Best of Robert Ingersoll, p. 14).
Bryan stood for everything Colonel Ingersoll disliked. Bryan was a
Christian, and he wanted the government to help the poor, simply because
they were poor. Though he supported laws to limit working hours and otherwise
improve the circumstances of the laboring class, Colonel Ingersoll was less convinced of
the merits of government intervention in the private economy:
"I am a believer in individuality and in each individual taking care of
himself. I want the government to do just as little as it can consistently with
the safety of the nation." (Colonel Robert Ingersoll, The Best of Robert
Ingersoll, p. 39).
In the popular vote, Colonel Ingersoll lost the public
over the theological question; most Americans are not now agnostics.
However, he ultimately won big on the political question: most Americans
who now call themselves evangelical Christians, while they share William
Jennings Bryan's faith, most emphatically do not share his politics. Is
this result correct and consistent with the Bible?
He found the torments of Hell particularly obnoxious: "The doctrine of eternal punishment is the most infamous of all
doctrines—born of ignorance, cruelty and fear. Around the angel of
immortality Christianity has coiled the serpent. Upon Love's breast the
church has placed the eternal asp." (Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The Best
of Robert Ingersoll, pp. 44-45). There is a progression here, like a man
doggedly sawing off the bough of a tree upon which he is perched. The
universalists, believing deeply that God is love, dispute what is taught
about Hell by the same Bible which teaches that God is love. The next
generation, among whom Robert Ingersoll is numbered, do not even believe
anymore that God is love, though they still cling with a certain nostalgia
to those precepts of their Christian upbringing without which they find life
unthinkable. Their children don't even have that, and the door is open to
all the horrors of the twentieth century.
Resurrection was a particular stumbling-block. Colonel Ingersoll could not understand how God, who made Adam from the dust, could reconstitute
a human being who had died and whose remains had suffered damage:
It would seem that Colonel Ingersoll demanded the resurrected body be comprised of the very same
atoms of which it was comprised in temporal life before it can be identified as belonging to the same person:
"I suppose that I believe that the atoms that are in me have been in many other people
and in many other forms of life, and I suppose at death the atoms forming my body go back to the earth
and are used in countless forms. These facts, or what I suppose to be facts, render a belief in the
resurrection of the body impossible to me." (Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The
Best of Robert Ingersoll, page 48).
What has come to shipwreck here is reductive nineteenth century materialism, which posits atoms and the void
as the ultimate reality, banging into the experience of the perseverance of personal identity.
Colonel Ingersoll himself was not comprised of the same atoms before his (no
doubt) very substantial lunch as afterwards; new material is continually
added to the body, unneeded material discarded. If the very same atoms are
required, then Colonel Ingersoll is not the same man before lunch as after.
He is looking in the wrong direction to discern what makes a human being who
he is and not another; it's not the atoms.
Build on Sand
Colonel Ingersoll was a believer in 'scientism.' He saw the physical
sciences bringing in a new dawn of enlightenment, forcing out the
darkness of the old superstitions.
What solid, lasting things had this
faith brought him? The conviction that matter is indestructible:
"The idea of a creative
deity is gradually being abandoned, and nearly all truly
scientific minds admit that matter must have existed from
eternity. It is indestructible, and the indestructible
cannot be created. It is the crowning glory of our century
to have demonstrated the indestructibility and the eternal
persistence of force. Neither matter nor force can be
increased nor diminished."
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The Lectures of
Robert Ingersoll, Lecture on Gods.)
Colonel Ingersoll did not survive into the twentieth century to see
when they dropped that bit about matter being indestructible. Science,
like capitalism, thrives on creative destruction. Where does that leave
you when you have founded your life upon a moving rock, groping for floating,
unstable certainties about the world? Whose "crowning glory" is it
to discover something that isn't so, namely the indestructibility of
matter? That's been phased out, replaced with E=MC2. So
what sort of principle was that to live by, when it never was so?
When God breaks into history to reveal His word, here at last is
something immune from the ravages of time: "For ever, O LORD, thy word
is settled in heaven." (Psalm 119:89). God's words do not appear plausible
today, ridiculous tomorrow, as do the certainties of science. God is not
constrained by time nor is even subject to time:
"So it is declared that the Father is God, and the Son God, and the
Holy Ghost God, and that these three Gods make one God."
(Robert Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, p. 22). Is that quite right?:
This agnostic did not wonder why bad things happen to good people, but
was brimming with indignation that anything bad should ever happen to anyone at all:
"There may be a God who
will make us happy in another world. If he does, it will be
more than he has accomplished in this. A being who has the
power to prevent it and yet allows thousands and millions of
his children to starve, who devours them with earthquakes,
who allows whole nations to be enslaved, cannot—in my
judgment—be implicitly depended upon to do justice in
another world."
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The Best of
Robert Ingersoll, p. 35.)
"If God governs this world, if he builds and destroys, if back of every
event is his will, then he is neither good nor wise. He is ignorant and
malicious." (Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The Best of Robert Ingersoll, page 36.)
Just a Man
Like most atheists and agnostics, Robert Ingersoll insisted that
Jesus was a mere man:
"Do away with the
miracles, and the superhuman character of Christ is
destroyed. He becomes what he really was—a man."
(Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, The Best of
Robert Ingersoll, p. 60.)
No doubt the Bible does teach that Jesus was a man:
