A-theism: Humanity's loss not God's Loss

A-theism: Humanity's loss not God's Loss
Míceál Ledwith.

For a long time there has been no shortage of people who have made a living pointing out the strangeness of religion. Recently they have been joined by those who have successfully made a profession out of pointing out the strangeness of science. As Douglas Adams said in a speech at Cambridge several years ago, "The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered plant, going round a nuclear fireball ninety million miles away, and that we regard all this as normal, is obviously some indication of how askew our perspective on what is natural tends to be."

Breathtaking and unwarranted assumptions about what is normal or natural have bedeviled the relationship between the world views we crudely label "religion" and "science," with customary little regard for the variety of forms that hide under each of those descriptions.
I'm told that more than 90% of those elected to the American Academy of Scientists today are atheists. Of course I have no way of verifying that, and I'm not sure if anyone else could either. However, if it's even close to true that 90% of the people now in the vanguard of creative human reflection and discovery in our world are atheists, then that is a very disquieting fact - and not just for the religious-minded.

True, many of these scientists may still be practicing members of particular religious organizations even if they no longer subscribe to the views that their religions officially have about how the universe began, how it functions, or where we fit into it. Some may have successfully compartmentalized their lives and stayed religiously attached because of the ethical code which religious membership provides as a guide to life. Some may want to pass on a code of values to their children.

However, providing an ethical code does not provide the smallest vindication for the supernatural claims about reality which many religions proclaim; for example, that God had a particularly busy week just over 6,000 years ago when he created the universe, or that humans on earth are the only intelligent form of life in the universe. And, of course, religions also provide all sorts of dubious ethical codes as well. If we were still taking some of the most revered historical religious texts literally, we would be stoning adulteresses to death (note the feminine form) and selling unfortunates into slavery as a punishment. And certianly a view of God or a religion that can be marshaled to justify such atrocities as the destruction of the World Trade Center doesn't say much for the religious basis of those ethics, or for the type of God that's envisaged to lie behind it.

If 90% of the American Academy of Scientists can truly be said to be atheists, much of that agnosticism and atheism is probably a reaction against such caricatures of God and unacceptable and inconsistent ethical standards. In fact religions have probably done more damage to God than any other agency in human history. Some of history's most horrific atrocities have come, rather curiously, from preaching and practicing hatred in the name of a God of love. And we still see such hypocrisy on the news every day.

But back to our a-theistic scientists. An atheist is customarily understood as someone who believes there is nothing beyond the natural physical world - as some wag once put it, "A person with no invisible means of support." For the atheist there is no brooding, creative intelligence behind existence. There is no survival after death. And, since the world is comprised of only natural phenomena (whose physics we have not as yet come to understand), there are no miracles.

If I am concerned that so many of the leading thinkers of our day believe themselves to be atheists, it is not because I am concerned that some brooding deity somewhere is not getting "his" due share of worship. (If there were such a being who needed our worship "he" would, by that very need, have forfeited any realistic claim to be God.) Nor am I concerned that God is apparently the principal casualty of atheism. No. What is tragic is that so many of today's leading thinkers - turned off by second-hand mythologies about a second-hand God - conclude that there is no such thing as survival of the death of the physical body. Even worse, by extension, they conclude there is nothing truly remarkable that the human being can accomplish outside of the physical while still alive. This is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Ultimately, the denial of any 'divine' element in the human person imprisons us and creates yet another form of slavery. Human beings, not God, are the real losers in the bleak landscape of atheism.

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