ATHEISM AND THEISM PART II

Let us first briefly consider atheism.

In his book, The Twilight of Atheism, Alister McGrath says, “atheism is an explicit denial of all spiritual powers and supernatural beings, or the demand for the elimination of the transcendent as illusion” (p. XII) Modern day atheists Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris describe theism as belief without evidence, whereas atheism is based on scientific evidence. Or as Mark Twain quoted one school boy, “faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

Philosopher Bertrand Russell put it this way, he said, “...we may define faith as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no one speaks of faith.” Thus, atheists are those who, they tell us, believe only on the basis of evidence.

Of course there are more prosaic definitions of atheists. One humorist said, “an atheist is one who has no invisible means of support.” Former President Dwight Eisenhower put it even more plainly. “An atheist,” said Ike, “is one who watches a game between Southern Methodist University and Notre Dame and doesn’t care who wins!”

Let us say a few good words for atheism. We are reminded some of the great Greek philosophers like Socrates were called atheists because they didn’t believe in some of the Greek gods of Mt. Olympus. If the ancient Greek priests said regarding philosophic question’s, “this far and no farther,” the Greek philosophers broke through the restrictions and pushed out the boundaries of human thought by asking profound questions.

Early Christians also were sometimes called atheists – not because they disbelieved in the Eternal God, but because they disbelieved in the panoply of pagan gods. They dared question the prevailing belief systems in the name of higher truths.

I am grateful to many of the contemporary atheists for the enormous challenges they place before me. If years ago J. B. Phillips could challenge Christian denominations, saying their God was too small, the current atheists challenge me to believe in a God “big enough” to encompass all reality.

And I’m grateful for the wit, incisiveness and plain-spokenness of many current atheists. They often are adept at exposing the hypocrisy, inflated truth claims and the terrible exploitation of some religions. Sometimes, they almost sound like an Old Testament prophet or Jesus himself in their denunciation of phony religion.

But the current atheism rests on shaky foundations – foundations which they affirm as unquestionable evidence. One foundation is that of materialism, the belief - note I say belief – that all reality is at bottom material. But the new physics suggests that at bottom all reality may be energy and mind and spirit. There may be no such thing as a basic particle.

A further foundation stone of atheism is similar – that of reductionism – that everything can be reduced to the stuff of the universe. I am reminded of the scientists who said to God that they now, in their scientific knowledge, knew how to make a man.

God said, “okay, show me.” The scientists said, “first, you take a little dirt…..and…” God said, “wait a minute, wait a minute. Get your own dirt.” Reductionism presumes the pre-existence of the “dirt” of the universe and further presumes it is matter, not energy.

Another foundation of atheism is determinism or naturalism. It is assumed all of the universe, all of nature, evolves out of laws that are “naturally” embedded in the universe. No outside God or Creator is needed, thank you.

But as a Scottish theologue, once said, “nature is not as natural as it looks.” More than that, the questions of why it should be this kind of a natural world and not another, and why life should move toward complexity, and why life should evolve and not devolve, and why even in the atom there may be an element of freedom, and how life can come from non-life, and how mind can come from non-mind – all these and many other questions are not satisfactorily answered by atheism. In other words, they seem to be lacking sufficient evidence for the belief systems.

(to be continued)