Like most things, it’s as old as the Greeks — but atheism has put on a surge in recent years. Several books on the theme appeared in short order: Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and Philosophers Without Gods, edited by Louise M Anthony.
We probably haven’t had as intensive an assault on religion since the Enlightenment. Why now? There are two main historical factors.
For leading evolutionary theorist Dawkins, the rise of “intelligent design” as an idea in battle with evolution (an attempt to sneak God in though the back door, he calls it) seems to have sparked his take on God and why He does not explain … well, anything, really.
With Harris and Hitchens, it’s more directly political. In 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” they see not so much a “clash of civilisations” but a clash of ancient fundamentalisms that threatens to take humanity back to the Dark Ages.
Harris goes further, refusing to distinguish between “fundamentalist” and “moderate” forms of religion, in this case Christianity and Islam (though even gentle Hinduism has its extremists and Zen Buddhism was folded into Japanese militarism).
Religious moderates may invoke “God is love” rather than the vengeful Yahweh of the Old Testament, constantly urging his Chosen People to massacre others, but they still provide cover for the fundamentalists. Besides, Harris et al argue, the whole edifice of religious belief is ridiculously compromised, self-contradictory and practically a recipe for abuse.
It’s not hard to see that the God of Bush and the God of Osama Bin Laden are closer than the God of Bush and the God of, say, Desmond Tutu, or the godhood represented by Jesus himself. The God of Bush and Bin Laden is the self-described “jealous god” of the Old Testament, Jehovah-Allah, not the comforting, hazy figure who “has a plan” and to whom we will “return” when we die.
For many today, God is more an office than a person. He has been partly depersonalised, but He’s still there as a form of comfort in the face of life’s pain — even if He doesn’t answer many prayers.
You might say this is about different ideas of God, and not just in Harris’s sense of “I’m going to kill you because my imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend”, or, more absurdly, “my interpretation of our mutual imaginary friend is better than yours, so I have to kill you”. Its many ramifications have left Christianity with more blood and suffering on its hands than any other ideology in history — though Islam is catching up. If Saul slew his thousands and David his tens of thousands, Christianity is surely many millions ahead. Evolutionarily speaking, religion may once have been a Good Thing. In Inside the Neolithic Mind, David Lewis-Williams and David Pierce argue that the spiritual experience generated a great leap forward in human consciousness.
Karen Armstrong makes a strong case for a similar historical and social leap in the five centuries before the birth of Christ in The Great Transformation.
In the 21st century, though, the God idea clearly stands in the way of human progress. To argue that religion provides us with a moral compass is to put the cart before the horse and is easily refuted: 85% of South Africans claim to adhere to a religion, while we have rates of murder and rape that beggar belief.
Anyway, most religious moral solutions seem backward. Any ideology that divides everyone into the “saved” and the “damned”, or harps on about “sin” (usually victimless “crime”), is already working against freedom of thought, toleration of diversity and democratic ideals.
What goes through Ray McCauley’s head as he convenes the committee on the debate about morals advertised by President Jacob Zuma? McCauley’s Rhema Ministries makes nasty noises about same-sex marriage and abortion, but is silent on Jacob Zuma’s adultery, a Christian sin, and on polygamy (bugbear of the old missionaries) and women’s rights.
Asking him to convene a morals debate is like asking someone who only knows cuneiform to write a computer program.
Is there a way forward? It’s easy for us atheists to anathematise religion, but how to give expression to the human desire for meaning and purpose beyond self-preservation? Some find purpose in secular humanism, human rights, democracy and art — all at least beliefs in human progress, which we need if we are to better our world.
Believers — and Dawkins — see a radical opposition between religion and science, hence the “intelligent design” backlash. The classic sciences are reductionist: they reduce the illimitable factuality of existence to atoms, points of mass or quivering strings of … what? As Stuart Kauffman says in his Reinventing the Sacred, no amount of atomic science will tell us what it means to be in love.
Kauffman’s title offers a solution to the religion/reason gridlock. Humanity has reinvented God a few times, he argues, so why not reinvent Him again? Not as a transcendent being somehow outside the cosmos in which we are functioning participants, but as immanent in the creative unpredictability of the self-generated universe, of our minds, of our being in the world.
Interestingly, Kauffman’s ideas, bolstered by up-to-date scientific research in everything from neurology and cognition to genetics and quantum physics, resemble those put forward in Wes Nisker’s lovely book, Buddha’s Nature.
“What if God and gods are our inventions, our homes for our deepest spiritual nature?” Kaufmann asks. We humans need meaning, and our making and remaking of meaning is part of our ongoing evolution.
Kauffman argues that in the “ceaseless creativity of the universe, biosphere and human culture and history, we can reinvent the sacred and find a new view of God as the fully natural, awesome creativity that surrounds us” — and, indeed, within us.
Here is a God I can live with, though I’d prefer not to speak of God at all. If I must, I’d go for a lower-case god, or, better still, plural gods. At any rate, I see less that is sacred in a church than in a blade of grass, which stands for an entire living world that is indeed holy, in and of itself, without an external creator.
Am I still an atheist?