SOURCES OF MODERN ATHEISM Understanding why people reject God

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Becoming a DIY Believer / 6

SOURCES OF MODERN ATHEISM

Understanding why people reject God

In suffering I have felt and known God reach into my life and grab me by the scruff of my neck and shake me with the brusque affection of a father’s compassion. [Andrew Sullivan, Article, Faith in the Unknown (on Christopher Hitchens, now dying of cancer, refusing to renounce his atheism), Sunday Star Times, 22 Aug 2010]

You only get anywhere near the truth when all the easy things to say about God are dismantled – so that your image of God is no longer just a big projection of your wish-fulfillment fantasies. Either you sense that you are confronting an energy so immense that here are no adequate words for it, or you give up.[Rowan Williams, Review of John Pulman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Guardian Weekly, 23 April 2010]

Atheism: the theory or belief that God does not exist. ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from French athéisme, from Greek atheos, from a- ‘without’ + theos ‘god.’

Agnostic: a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena; a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God.

Starters Or, what’s this all about?

1. ‘The root of materialism is probably a firm commitment to empirical scientific method as the only reliable way to discover truth. Commitment to experimental method is in itself entirely commendable. But when it begins to exclude every other understanding of truth, one may suspect that it will result in a radically impoverished view of reality as a whole. The root of theism is probably a commitment to worship and prayer, which carries with it the belief that aesthetic, ethical, personal and relational aspects of experience provide distinctive paths to truth, and that the highest truth of all lies in apprehension of an objective reality of supreme beauty and goodness.’ Keith Ward, God, Chance, & Necessity, OneWorld Publications, Oxford, 1996, p.101.

2. ‘Realists about the existence of God will typically regard the question of whether God exists as genuine and would assert that such existence is in no way logically dependent on our understanding. Indeed, they would claim, God’s existence must be wholly independent of the nature of contingent beings like ourselves. Atheists, however, would also agree with this. They might accept that there could be a God, but hold that there is not. This is an argument about what in fact is the case. Atheism holds that reality does not in fact include God, but its readiness to talk of falsity suggests that it concedes the possibility of truth in this area. Such an understanding of fact certainly goes far from a crude empiricist understanding of factuality, and one of the motives for antirealism about God comes from an unwillingness to think in any way of God as part of the “furniture” of reality, as somehow a mere ingredient in any objective state of affairs. Yet it is only a short step from this to conceiving of God as not objective at all.’ Roger Trigg, Theological realism and antirealism. Article in, Blackwell’s Companion to Philosophy of Religion, 1997, p. 214.

3. ‘[Simon] Fisher is a follower of … Sam Harris, author of, The End of Faith. Harris observes that, “the atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy of his neighbours”. Fisher, ‘I grew up in a Christian home. My parents were relatively liberal. I remember little about Sunday school except playing games. I stopped going to church in my teens because it was not the best thing to do on a Sunday morning … I remember liking some of the stories … I remember thinking it [the Bible] didn’t add up … [like] the basic question of, “If God created everything, who created God?” … Science alerted Fisher to the theory of evolution, “that humans are essentially another animal developed over time. It made more sense … Science also revealed the massive size of the universe. “We’re one small dot in so many galaxies. Unimaginable. None of these facts gets absorbed into religious theory.”’ No God as my Witness, Article by Diana Dekker, Dominion Post, Your Weekend, August 7, 2010, pp. 6-8.

4. ‘Bus slogan ex. London: “IN THE BEGINNING, MAN CREATED GOD. THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE”’.

Varieties of Modern Atheism. A Taxonomy

A. The Atheism of Complacency.

‘Now stop worrying & enjoy your life’. What is so striking about this (& the whole slogan) is its complacency & unquestioning self-satisfaction.

According to sociological research, religious practice/belief is at its highest in Agrarian/Traditional societies (44%-64%), a lot lower in Industrial Societies (25%-34%), and at its lowest in Postindustrial Societies (20%-26%). See, Pippa Norris & Ronald Inglehart, Sacred & Secular, Religion & Politics Worldwide, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.58. As a possible explanation of this, Norris & Inglehart offer the hypothesis that the more well-off people are – housing, education, food, employment, travel, Medicare & etc. – the more likely they are to be atheists. In other words, their atheism, lived rather than thought-out, is a sociological version of LaPlace’s famous remark, ‘I no longer have need of that hypothesis’. ‘We’ve got all we need (& more)’; ‘this is as good as it gets’; ‘our suburban beatitude is as near to heaven on earth as it’s possible to be’ – these are all typical statements of this kind of atheism. These people are exponents of an all-embracing humanism that politely ignores (or excludes) God. ‘We don’t do God’ (Alistair Cambell, Tony Blair’s spin-doctor).

What’s wrong with this? In a word, its complacency. This is the ideology of the ‘in-group’ of prosperous, mostly western nations, North America, Europe, & as aspirants, China, India, Brazil … ; though there is an unevenness about this: in American around 60% are believers, in Europe, many fewer, 20/30%. This is the group that has a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth; is the major consumer of energy & therefore the major driver of climate change; that lives in a media-driven, consumerist culture where little uncensored information about the have-nots of the world (the vast majority) ever gets through. Its ideology is: We’re OK. You’re not OK. So what?

Is this type of atheism living on borrowed time? Can this overuse/exploitation of the world’s resources by the few at the expense of the many go on indefinitely? When is crunch time? What happens when the world’s supply of fossil fuels runs out/ ‘peak oil’? when there are no longer big trucks to bring food to supermarkets? when the world starts to heat up beyond the point where it is inhabitable (according to scientists in Australia, this will occur at present rate of temperature increase in approximately 300 years time)?

Vignette. Last time I was in Germany & staying in a Carmelite Convent in Berlin, I met a young woman in her late twenties called Astrid. She was/is an Aid Worker in the Congo in Africa. She had been brought up, she told me, as a person with no time for religion, with a university degree, but with a sense of social compassion that resulted in her becoming an Aid Worker. When she got to the Congo and saw what was actually happening there – absence of Medicare, chronic food shortages, inter-tribal fighting, displaced persons, refugees, minimal education, AIDS, rape in epidemic numbers – she was so shocked that she began to wonder how she (or anyone) could cope with this reality. And so in a small way, she started to pray, to read the Bible … The reason she was at the Convent was to deepen her faith, draw on the wisdom of the Sisters living the vowed life of prayer & hospitality. She was moving, as I should say, via faith, from complacency to care, a caring that could be both sacrificial & sustainable.

So as a counter-slogan to the ethics of complacency, how about: I AM, I CARE – GOD.

B.Science is the Only Show in Town

See DIY/1, DIY/2. This is the belief that everything is transparent to rational/scientific exploration and description. All other explanations of reality are either ancillary to this or else pseudo-explanations that sooner or later will be overhauled and ruled ‘out of date’ by science.

Let’s take a case in point: the theory of evolution. In The Origin of the Species (1859), Charles Darwin (1809-1882) discovered that the mechanism operative in the evolution of any species (including humankind) was/is ‘the survival of the fittest’. That fits the facts; though there are genuinely scientific arguments over whether now – more than a century later – and with the discovery of the human Genome – Darwin focused too exclusively on external factors in evolution to the neglect of internal/biological factors with their own push/logic. Be that as it may, there is now a very vocal group of atheists [Dawkins et al.] who think that ‘the survival of the fittest’ can be elevated into a metaphysic that explains everything whatsoever. For example, all human actions have a common denominator: the propagation & flourishing of our share of the gene pool over time; and this motivated by the so-called ‘selfish gene’.

Without calling the Theory of Evolution itself into question, there are two objections that can be made against simplistic uses of it.

• In a review of several books offering ‘evolutionary’ explanations of aspects of human behaviour, Stephen Pinker of MIT compared these explanations to ‘bird shit on a statue’, the bird shit being the explanations, and the statue the ‘explanandum’, what they sought to explain. His point was that the explanations only bear an external or adventitious relation to the things they are supposed to explain. Soon the rain comes along and it all washes off. In other words, instead of generating real insight into reality, these so-called ‘explanations’ were more like a copycat intellectual fashion, a heap of facile buzzwords with not much of substance to them. Examples of things resistant to this type of explanation might be a great work of art like Bach’s Goldberg Variations – playful, inventive, logical, beautiful; the complexity and multi-faceted nature of human interactions as analyzed, for example, in Shakespeare’s plays – which include tragedy, comedy, history; any kind of selfless behaviour, spontaneous or heroic actions where, with a high degree of risk to themselves, people reach out to care for others – e.g. lives of saintly, holy people. Is evolutionary theory little more than a truism when it comes to real life? Are not other sorts of discourse – of art, ethics, fiction, religion & etc. – better at getting to the heart of what’s going on than these quasi/pseudo-scientific theories? NB also, people like Julia Gillard, Helen Clarke who have decided not to breed. Also: how to account for gay & lesbian people? Celibates?

• Can ‘survival of the fittest’-type thinking deliver a humane or life-affirming ethic? Here we have to distinguish between evolutionary theory as a good explanation of how nature got to where it is now – we might give this ‘the big tick’ – and, on the other hand, the kind of ethical theories or practices that will enable people(s) of great diversity – of gender, wealth, race – to co-exist in a mutually enhancing, non-destructive way. Consider: suppose we take the idea of ‘the survival of the fittest’ literally as a present-day ethic, we should have to say things like: all those poor unfortunate people in dysfunctional economies in failed states should be culled, dropped, left to die; the same goes for what the Nazis called ‘life unworthy of life’ in society, mentally or physically handicapped people, both adults and children; equally, the old and infirm, shouldn’t they be pressured into ‘taking themselves off’ (euthanasia)? For do they not absorb so much of society’s resources & contribute so little? The technical name for all of this is, Social Darwinism. It also goes under the name of Eugenics. We live, let it be noted, in a world of increasing population & competition for shrinking resources. Are we (humankind) going to manage the ensuing conflicts with the same old ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking and practice? Or has humankind evolved to an ethical consciousness that leaves all that behind? What will the sources of this ethic be? Might not religion have a key role to play?

Contrast the ethical thinking implicit (or explicit) in this DIY series: the co-passionate God/person who regards suffering (and lack) as spurs to an active, loving justice that liberates; the richness of the human person as such; the ability to build relationships based on the giving & receiving of love; communities of (such) persons-in-relation where the name of the game is not competition but listening & responding to the needs of the other in a realistic way. Are we not now talking about an ‘empathetic civilization’ in which the survival of all depends on the ability of each to care for the other? See, Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathetic Civilization: The Race to Global Conciousness in a World in Crisis, Tarcher/Penguin, 2009)

C.What ‘God’ is the Object of our Disbelief?

In Christian countries such as NZ, disbelief centres on what people are pleased to call ‘Theism’. By this is meant an objectively existing entity called ‘God’ like a galaxy in space, but existing in a quasi-human form somewhere ‘out there’. This ‘God’ moreover is supposed to be all-loving & all-powerful; the one who creates & controls everything for the good (or the best). This is supposed to be the ‘God’ of the Bible and Christian Tradition generally (confused with Sunday School/fundamentalism?). Obvious knock-down arguments put paid this ‘God’: what we now know about space makes incredible the existence of ‘something/someone’ out there called ‘God’; & even if this ‘God’ exists, s/he has made a pretty awful mess of this so-called creation. Witness the widespread undeserved suffering of so many, so much pain & etc. So let’s get this failed ‘God’ out of the way. Can’t we do better ourselves? So we go from theism to atheism; from fundamentalism to the now fashionable religious atheism. Yes, we want to be religious, but no, we don’t want to believe anything in particular. It’s us that control ‘God’ now – like a dog (god spelt backwards) on a leash.

Two comments on the above. First, it’s based on a very superficial reading of the Bible as though this taught ‘one thing’. In fact there are lots of internal critiques of one strand of the Bible against another. For example, Deuteronomy is based on the idea that history proceeds according to a system of rewards & punishments; that the righteous are rewarded, the wicked punished. The Book of Job, by contrast, is a radical critique of this way of thinking. Here we have the paradox that the most righteous man of his time is the very one who suffers the most. Isn’t this more like real life? And behind it is the hint that for all the reality of suffering, it becomes meaningful/bearable providing (a) we don’t blame God for it; & (b) providing we realize that God, however ‘hidden in light’, is our best ally, the source of life & healing in our de facto suffering. In Jesus, we may see an example of this, a Job-figure par excellence who is ‘a fellow-sufferer who understands’. This begins to deliver a picture of human maturity with huge potential for development of a true self free (or capable) of real self-love (self-esteem) and, out of that, able to love & sympathize with others as they actually are.

Job’s ‘friends’ had sought to divert his torment by offering explanations, while he retained his dignity and displayed his freedom by appealing directly t the source of his torment – and of his freedom. They spoke about God while Job spoke to [with?] his God, thereby unveiling the object of their discourse to be an idol – in stark contrast to the subject to whom Job directly addresses his plaintive pleas, and from whom he receives an equally direct response. The result is distinctively postmodern. [David B. Burrell, C.S.C, Learning to Trust in Freedom, Signs from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Traditions, University of Scranton Press, 2010, pp. 22-23].

Another way of putting this argument internal to the Bible, would be to say that it moves from a simplistic idea of God as ‘a’ Person, and a controlling One at that, to an exploration of God as personal and free. Here we see God as one who creates in freedom i.e. not out of any inner necessity; and who, in creating, creates a universe free to be itself & people free to be themselves. In this scenario, the ensuing interactions between God & humankind can only be described as ‘personal’ (if not, they wouldn’t be real), but interactions that face up to suffering for what it frequently is – undeserved, horrific – but in a way that is maximally caring & constructive. In this we could say that humankind is invited into partnership (co-creating, co-redeeming) with the God who is by nature co-passionate, & who is ‘personally’ at work in the ‘narrowings’ of history/life. Witness Golgotha.

The second comment I would make is that it is OK to step back from the Bible & start using our own good sense & imagination. An example of this would be the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), a philosopher who was also a Christian. Very roughly, Ricoeur at the end of his long career was working on the concept of ‘capable man’ ( & of course, woman). This the person who says ‘I can’; & who, further, imaginatively entertains statements to the effect ‘I could’ i.e. ‘might I not be capable of …?’; & then, more or less courageously, brings all these ‘I could’s’ into the realm of ‘I can’. This capable person, however, is also ‘fallible man/woman’, the one who makes mistakes, is confused in his/her sense of identity (corresponding to the many & confusing ‘names’ of God in the Bible). This capable person, however, doesn’t exist in metaphysical isolation. ‘Underneath’ him or her is what Ricoeur calls a ‘groundless ground’ or inexhaustible (or excessive) source. In so far as ‘capable man/woman’ taps into this – by whatever route, religious or other – his/her heart is set free for an abundance of action both ethical & effective. The former we may call ‘Human Capacity I’, the latter, ‘Human Capacity II’. In the former, much is already possible – natural man? In the latter, & as ‘capable man/woman’ ‘hears the call’, s/he discovers ‘how much more is possible’, & this in relation to others, otherness, the Divine Other.

Here then, in conclusion, is a recent scholar’s attempt to summarize this.

‘Selfhood is at its very core a self that has the capacity to respond to the other, in particular, to respond to the source that has been given as the Word/gift of the goodness of existence, and the Word/call releasing us from what was hidden in the heart all along, namely the good gift of life understood as fallible goodness. While we have the capacity to fail, human capacity is first and foremost our capacity to hear the call that has gifted life and to receive the goodness of the overflow of the excess, gift, and generosity that comes from a groundless ground that the believing heart names as God, and calls upon in the intimacy of prayer.’ Brian Treanor & Henry Isaac Venema, How Much More Than the Possible? Article in, A Passion for the Possible. Thinking with Paul Ricoeur, Fordham University Press, New York, 2010, p.10.

In other words, in interpreting the Bible, it’s important to have some of the best non-biblical accounts of the human condition in mind. This will keep us ‘up to speed’, deliver a communicative missionary theology in dialogue with modernity.

D.Evil: Innocent & Undeserved Suffering

I’ve already addressed that issue in DIY 4 & 5 (& bit in 3). The reader is referred to that; & anyway, there isn’t time or space to go into that issue in depth or detail here! There is, of course, much more that could be said.

• Religion Doesn’t Allow Me to Deploy My Sexuality

Irreligion, Rather Than Atheism?

• Anything You Can Do We Can Do Better

Secularism Achieves What Religion Tried to Do

• Religion is Divisive, Violent; Tries to Monopolize the Sacred

Secularism is Peaceful, Inclusive, Worldwide/Universal

• I’m a small town escapee. Rejected Mum & Dad’s religion

With a University Degree & now part of a moral crusade I see religion as toxic, right wing stuff

• I’m a patriotic NZ’er. We’re an innovative country

Hopefully we’ll be the first atheist, secular society

I could write a play with these as stock characters.

Raymond Pelly, Cathedral, 26 August 2010