There’s been a lot of crazy, even murderous religion in the news lately. Some of it Muslim, some of it Christian, all of it nuts.
And now we’re experiencing the backlash. Books like Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything are claiming that religion—all religion—is not only mistaken but downright evil.
Hitchens, the New Yorker magazine recently pointed out, is especially provocative. The hard-hitting atheist is quoted as saying: “Creationists are ‘yokels,’ Pascal’s theology is ‘not far short of sordid,’ the reasoning of the Christian writer C.S. Lewis is ‘so pathetic as to defy description,’ Calvin was a ‘sadist and torturer and killer,’ Buddhist sayings are ‘almost too easy to parody,’ most Eastern spiritual discourse is ‘not even wrong,’ Islam is ‘a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,’ Hanukkah is a ‘vapid and annoying holiday,’ and the psalmist King David was an ‘unscrupulous bandit.'”
Proponents of atheism have always been around. But the rhetoric today has certainly gone up a notch or two, so much so that militant atheists are being called secular fundamentalists.
The label is one that Dawkins in particular resents. “Fundamentalists know they are right,” the British scientist points out in The God Delusion, “because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief.”
But scientists, Dawkins assures us, follow the truth wherever it leads. Scientists change their minds when new truth turns up and re-examine their teachings when a better explanation of old evidence arises.
Well, sure, but as soon as Dawkins says anything about religion, whether for or against, he’s no longer talking as a scientist. He’s talking as a metaphysician, as someone interpreting ultimate reality in a way that takes us beyond what people can verify with their eyes or ears or hands.
God exists, religious believers say in their own interpretation of ultimate reality. And Christians go even further and say that Jesus Christ is the unique revelation of God’s love.
That, of course, is a statement of faith. And like any faith statement it may be wrong. But it’s not wrong because of anything science has to say. Science is not talking about God at all. Science is talking about the concrete reality of God’s created world.
And even to speak of the reality of the world is to make a highly contentious religious statement. Millions of Hindus and Buddhists, for example, don’t believe the world is real at all.
Only Brahman, they claim, is real, Braham being pure, unchanging, impersonal spirit. Everything else, they say, is maya, an illusionary spirit that only has the kind of reality that objects in a dream have for the person dreaming.
The atheist takes his own leap of faith and says there is no God at all. There are no Absolute Standards, just right and wrong with a small r and a small w.
When people do things that the atheist considers wrong (let’s say, beating a child to death), they’re not doing anything wrong in the strict sense of the word. They’re simply doing something the atheist doesn’t happen to like.
Fortunately, when it comes to child beating, very few people like that sort of thing. But if they did, the atheist couldn’t complain.
Who is there to complain to? Again, there is no Right or Wrong for the atheist. There’s just the universe made up of what Bertrand Russell once called “accidental collocations of atoms.”
Religious fundamentalists can drive us crazy with their know-it-all approach to God. But secular fundamentalists today are just as cocksure. There’s no point arguing with them. Their minds are made up.
Well, okay, I won’t argue. I’ll just confess my own little faith for what it’s worth.
God, I believe, has created the world in which we find ourselves and given it a distinctive reality of its own.
God doesn’t interfere in the world, which is kind of scary. If, for example, we decide to kill each other (think of all the wars in history), or kill ourselves (think of our excessive use of fossil fuels today), no glass arm is going to come down from heaven to save us.
On the other hand, if the Creator doesn’t interfere in the world of his creation, he still quietly and helpfully intervenes.
In Jesus, God especially draws near, even to the point of sharing our human life, tasting our human joys and terrors, undergoing our human death, and then mysteriously rising again as the sign and promise that nothing can finally separate any of us—believers and unbelievers alike—from God’s eternal love.
No, I can’t prove it. But I believe it. And nothing the secular fundamentalists are saying these days leads me to believe otherwise.
