Well this is from our own cardinal clown George Pell, Archbishop of
Sydney.
Note the last para
"Atheism is in trouble. Religion is on the up. The 21st century will
be post-atheist."
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12079759
%255E28737,00.html
http://tinyurl.com/634ua
God makes a comeback
George Pell
January 29, 2005
IN the Australian press God does not get much of a run. His followers
do, especially if they dissent from the consensus or fail to live up
to the standards they profess. But the search for meaning, faith and
traditional Christian spirituality struggle for space.
The visits to Australia of Pope John Paul II are one example of this.
The Pope has commanded enormous coverage, but the emphasis was on his
personality rather than his message, or on aspects of his message such
as social justice (generally approved) or teachings on life and
sexuality (generally rejected) rather than faith in God, the need for
meaning, prayer and worship.
The devastation which the tsunami caused changed this. God was back in
the news, putting to the test the consoling wisdom that it is better
in the long run to be criticised often than to be always ignored. The
hardest time to defend the good God is after a natural disaster,
probably harder than finding God in man-made catastrophes such as
world wars, Auschwitz or the Soviet slave camps.
After the tsunami God had his defenders, but a couple of them provoked
further outrage and for different reasons.
In a long response, the Anglican Dean of Sydney, Phillip Jensen, was
quoted - out of context, he says - as saying that disasters are part
of God's warning that judgment is coming, while Amjad Mehboob of the
Australian Islamic Councils was quoted as explaining that when we do
suffer some misfortune, it is what our own hands have wrought. Both
were criticised, but the more outspoken Mehboob escaped more lightly.
[Ad]
On the other side of the world Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of
Canterbury fumbled the ball badly. Incautious talk about the "the
vacuous words" of believers and "the consolations of belief in an
afterlife or whatever" and a controversial headline attached by sub-
editors to his London Sunday Telegraph article meant that his press
office had to issue a clarification that "the Archbishop nowhere says
that the tsunami causes him to question or doubt the existence of
God". Archbishop Williams's elegant words might have provoked
admiration in some College chapels at Oxford, but I regret that the
Christian God did not receive a sturdier public defence.
God is needed to explain the order, goodness and beauty of the world,
while we struggle with the consequences of God permitting so much
suffering and evil.
As a media event the tsunami has run its course, but the disaster has
thrown new light on two recent and important books by Alister McGrath,
professor of historical theology at Oxford University.
Last July, McGrath published The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and
Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (Doubleday), and this year has
followed up with Dawkins' God. Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life
(Blackwell), answering Richard Dawkins, also an Oxford professor, and
known affectionately as "Darwin's Rottweiler", the most outspoken
atheist in the English-speaking world.
McGrath, a Protestant Christian and a prolific author, is well
qualified for his task. Equally important perhaps are the facts that
he was a Marxist atheist as a young man and has a PhD in biochemistry
from Oxford. Even today he describes himself as "a wounded yet
respectful lover of the great revolt against God".
As a young man McGrath believed that Marxism held the key to the
future. He chose atheism because it proposed to eradicate religion,
making a decisive break with the religious strife and violence of his
own Northern Ireland. Atheism made sense of things, enabled people to
make of their lives what they chose and it offered hope for a better
future, especially through the secular messianism of the Marxists.
However, during his scientific studies at university and especially
through his work on the history and philosophy of the natural sciences
he came to realise he did not understand the religion he had rejected
and that what he had accepted was "an imaginatively impoverished and
emotionally deficient substitute". No longer for him was religion an
"oppressive, hypocritical and barbarous relic of the past".
Today McGrath believes that the atheist case against God has stalled,
run out of intellectual steam, with arguments resting more on fuzzy
logic and aggressive rhetoric than on serious evidence-based argument.
He believes that especially with the level of today's scientific
knowledge of biology (and physics), the natural sciences do not
constitute an intellectual super-highway for logic to arrive at
atheism. Today's world is post-atheist.
An example supporting McGrath's claims was the announcement last month
by the 81-year-old British philosopher Anthony Flew, for 50 years a
public champion of atheism, that he now believes in a minimal sort of
god.
He is a deist, believing in a supreme intelligence, which is not
actively involved in peoples' lives.
For Flew too the biologists' investigation of DNA, their discovery of
the extraordinary complexity of arrangements which lead to life, have
brought him to his god.
While still a Darwinian, his views parallel those of some American
"intelligent design" theorists. As some consolation to his former
allies, Flew insists that he does not believe in the afterlife and, to
show that the old fires are not completely dead, he insists that his
god is very different from the Christian and Islamic versions, where
both are depicted as "omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam
Husseins"!
Traditionally Catholics, especially through the rationalism of the
Scholastics (with Thomas Aquinas's five ways of proving God's
existence as the best-known example) have been confident of the powers
of the human mind to move towards the recognition of a super
intelligence, God as the first cause, the creator, sustainer and
designer of the universe, while requiring the revelation of the
Scriptures for evidence of a Trinitarian god, the incarnation and
redemption.
Some Protestants have been much more sceptical of the power of the
unaided human mind to recognise God and McGrath is closer to this
tradition.
He quite rightly follows Stephen Jay Gould in explaining that the
sciences cannot adjudicate on the God question. If the debate is to be
decided solely on scientific grounds, the outcome can only be
agnosticism. But he goes further than this by claiming that human
reasoning from the scientific evidence cannot contribute much to
deciding on non-scientific, that is, meta-physical grounds for atheism
or theism.
For him the belief that there is no god is as much a matter of faith
as the belief that there is a god, because the arguments of theists
and atheists are circular rationalisations which lead back to the two
different starting points.
With this avenue closed, McGrath has concluded from his personal
experience that the appeal of atheism is not intrinsic to its ideas,
but determined more by its social context. Atheism thrives where the
church has been oppressive and out of touch, unwilling or unable to
inspire altruism, to stir the imagination or the emotions. At best
this is an oversimplification.
Therefore, there are two other more important reasons why atheism is
in trouble. First its innocence has been extinguished by Stalin's
death squads and Nazism, even if some still want to argue whether
Nazism was explicitly atheist in its demonic hatred of the Jewish
people who gave us monotheism.
The moral credentials of atheism are exploded and the history of the
20th century showed that Dostoyevsky was right in claiming that
without God the way is open to unrestricted tyranny and violence.
Atheism made Lenin and Stalin possible, although atheists too opposed
them.
This line of argumentation is well known to theists and indeed many
victims of the communists.
However, McGrath's second argument is more surprising, because he
believes the rise of postmodernity poses a greater threat to atheism
than to Christianity. For him atheism was the ideal religion of
modernity, that period ushered in by the Enlightenment, although
atheists were a tiny minority everywhere, especially in Australia. But
postmodernism is intrinsically post-atheist.
Postmodernism is antagonistic to totalising world views, which is as
much a challenge to atheism as it is to Christianity. An
uncompromising denial of God is seen as arrogant and repressive,
rather than principled and moral.
Postmodernism also regards purely materialist approaches to reality as
inadequate, while it encourages an interest in the spiritual dimension
of life (which is nearly always hostile to organised religions such as
Christianity). Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code incites readers to
imagine the worst about Catholicism, but it also stimulates religious
curiosity.
With its hostility to truth claims, postmodernism offers no path
forward for Christianity, but the space it creates for New Age
spirituality, with all its intrinsic deficiencies, is more likely to
muddle towards God than to atheism. For McGrath atheists are a greying
minority in a modern world which is dying, while too many young people
are showing interest in the forbidden fruits of spirituality. Here in
Australia the number of people without religion dropped in the 2001
census for the first time in 100 years.
This is, all in all, a provocative thesis and he provides a great deal
of sociological evidence to support his views. Everywhere, except in
the Western world, the various brands of Christianity are stronger
than they were 50 years ago (even in China) and this is probably true
of Hinduism and Buddhism in Asia also. The US remains one of the most
religious societies in history and we have a resurgent Islam, even in
Europe, where the vitality is not confined to violent fundamentalists.
In Australia despite the significant decline in Protestant and
Anglican membership over the past 50 years and the continuing decline
in regular Catholic worship (but not in the number of adherents),
Christianity is far from dormant.
No religion which is dead can inspire people to contribute $75 million
to overseas relief, which is what the Christian agencies did after the
recent tsunami.
Marx and then Lenin wrote that religion was the opium of the people, a
spiritual intoxicant for slaves. For the young people of the free
world, especially in Australia where communist oppression is scarcely
remembered, Lenin's claim is barely capable of provoking curiosity.
Far more worthy of discussion today is the claim of the Polish poet
Czeslaw Milosz, himself a victim of communist oppression, in his essay
The Discreet Charm of Nihilism that the root of the 20th century's
oppressive totalitarianism lay not in religion, but in its nihilist
antithesis. This is a transformation. For Milosz "a true opium of the
people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of
thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not
going to be judged".
Even here in Australia, where we enjoy so much decency and are capable
sometimes of outstanding generosity, Milosz's thesis might prove to be
too much to be stomached. Part of the furore over Jensen's remarks was
because he had touched clumsily on a raw Australian nerve, that
unwillingness to recognise God as a personal judge.
But individual accountability after death is an almost inevitable
consequence of the existence of a good and just God.
In both of his books, but especially in The Twilight of Atheism,
McGrath has made an important contribution, not just by giving heart
to Christians, but by pointing out what is changing in our world which
is not as secular as we imagine, even though it might be often
superstitious and neo-pagan. We are often slow to realise what is
happening under our eyes.
Atheism is in trouble. Religion is on the up. The 21st century will be
post-atheist.
George Pell is the Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney.
--
epicurus1*at*optusnet*dot*com*dot*au
apatriot #1, atheist #1417,
Chief EAC prophet
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~pk1956/
Apatriotism Yahoo Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/apatriotism
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves
were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in
Hell.
-Mencken
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