GOD, CHRIST: QUESTIONS & FAITH

Stained Glass Window Saint Thomas Aquinas Church

 

Saint Thomas Aquinas Church, Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY

Evolution is Real and More

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I have always believed in God. I have also always been a Christian, which means I have always believed, at some level of understanding, Christian assertions about Christ. But during all of my adult life—I am now 65—I have struggled with many seeds of doubt brought on by modern science, objective history, the question of why a loving god would allow so much suffering in the world, and difficulties with seemingly conflicting moral precepts.

Evolution is an example from science. Darwinian natural selection of random genetic mutations, as refined and better explained by modern-day biologists like Oxford’s Richard Dawkins and the University of Chicago’s Jerry Coyle, makes perfect sense. We call evolution a theory, but not in the sense that some critics imply when they say it is ‘only a theory.’ Scientists mean ‘theory’ in the full scientific sense of the word: a scientifically accepted general principle about reality, one that is well tested and understood to be true. Isn’t this a gigantic problem for Christianity and other major religions? How can we reconcile this with belief in a creator god?

Other Issues of Faith

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The ongoing quest for the historical Jesus during the last two centuries raises many thorny questions. How accurate is the history in the Gospels given what we know about the political and cultural settings for these stories? This has given rise to many interpretations and even complete revisions of the stories. Jesus is sometimes portrayed as a revolutionary leader, an icon of the messianic hopes of a people, or a bigger than life character whose life was creatively retold to fit prophetic longings. Modern scientific worldviews, which are reluctant or at least taciturn about the possibilities of miracles, prompt further scrutiny and modern revisionism. “Get real,” science seems to say to history. There is no way to test these hypotheses: Jesus overcame death. He is the son of God, the Christ, the Word made flesh, God incarnate?

The problem of suffering is big. How is it that a god of love and justice—a common understanding of God by the three major Abrahamic religions—allowed centuries of racial, ethnic, national, cultural and religious intolerance; discrimination and genocide. Why did God allow the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Why does God allow (or cause) natural disasters and horrific diseases? Dawkins in his best selling book, The God Delusion, describes the god of Christianity, Judaism and Islam as a “a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, meglomaniacal, sadomasichistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” It is, after all, possible, in reading the Old Testament, to see God that way. Theologians and philosophers have wrestled this problem and not fully answered these tough questions. Anyone who has loved animals, as I have, quickly realizes that animals suffer too. In the wild, animals painfully kill and devour other animals. They suffer and die from draughts, floods, ice storms and disease. They suffer at the hands of cruel people. What sort of a loving god allows this?

The morality of the Christian church and its adherents can seem so very duplicitous. In the Old Testament—a source for much of Christianity’s morality—we find the commandment to not kill as well as God’s instructions to the Israelites to kill their enemies. St. Paul never condemned slavery; nor did Jesus. Slave holders in America used scripture to defend slavery. And throughout the history of Western civilization, some of the worst atrocities were precipitated or supported by the elite of the church. Pagans and indigenous people of many lands were told to ‘believe in our loving God, who commands us not to kill, or we’ll burn you at the stake, burn your villages and take your women and children and make slaves of them.’ The inquisitions in Spain and elsewhere stand out as permanent stains on history of the Church. The armies of Christian empires, with missionaries and bibles in tow, conquering nations and people of the world seem so very unchristian.

Evolution Seemed to be a Problem

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When I was sixteen, these thoughts—not yet well articulated and not yet carefully examined—were troubling. The modern worldview challenging the veracity of the Gospel stories made sense. Miracles, it seemed, did not seem likely; hence the full story of Jesus did not seem plausible. There was suffering in the world and it seemed that God allowed it on a grand scale. God’s moral prescriptions did not always make sense. But to this 16 year-old, evolution, as I learning it in school, was most problematic. God did not make sense.

God is Dead

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“Gott ist tot,” suggested Friedrich Nietzsche in the late 1800s. Of course, he did not mean it in a literal sense. The idea of a god as a source of moral authority was something that could not be taken seriously anymore by Nietzsche. Nor did he think that there was a creator God. His view of creation was that since matter was finite and time infinite, every possible world would evolve repeatedly over and over again. I had not heard of Nietzsche when I was in high school but if I had, I might have agreed with him.

We easily see Nietzsche’s anti-theistic philosophy as products of modernism. We tend to equate such thinking—atheism and rational agnosticism—with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason and the emergence of modern science. But these were not entirely new ideas. Questions and doubts about the existence of God (or some god or gods) can be traced back through antiquity. Diagoras, a Greek philosopher who lived about 400 years before the birth of Jesus, was an atheist. He was not alone among the philosophers of his age. And it is hard to imagine that these were not important considerations for Aristotle and Plato when postulating their arguments for a ‘first cause.’ Both of these great philosophers believed that matter always existed but that a “Prime Mover” or a “First Cause,” an eternal process of pure thought, initiated movement and created order.

It is also hard not to imagine that Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, medieval Arab scholars of Kalām and the Jewish Maimonides scholars did not consider God’s existence a serious question as they sought logical proofs that God existed. Why seek proof if there are no questions, no doubts?

Worldview Revolution

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It is fair to say that in medieval times, particularly in Christendom, we would not expect to hear doubts about God discussed openly. Heresy was dangerous. But that danger progressively died away between the 15th and 18^th centuries and by the 19^th century, open expressions of skepticism were widespread. The world was ready, at least in Europe and America, when James Hutton’s paper, Theory of the Earth and Charles Lyell’s famous book, Principles of Geology, challenged widely held biblical notions of the earth’s age. Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species demonstrated that evolution featuring natural selection and common ancestry explained why we are here, not Genesis. These works were not only intellectually brilliant, and thus seminal, but acceptable in academia and to a significant part of the public at large.

What preceded these works was a worldview revolution aided by an information revolution: the printing press. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo radically changed the long-held view of the earth at the center of the universe. Isaac Newton's explanation of gravity and laws of motion prompted new ways of thinking about the universe. Theories replaced myths. Observations replaced imagination. Mathematics became axiomatic. The Scientific Revolution, The Renaissance The Age of Reason, The Enlightenment: these bold descriptions of thinking in the centuries that preceded the shock of geology and evolution of species are fitting. And God seemed, bit by bit, less a part of the explanation for the world.

But God was not dead, yet. Deism evolved as a way of thinking. It was, because of new found laws of nature, possible to think that a creator God merely formed the universe, set it in motion, and left it to be naturally controlled by the laws of nature. Perhaps there were no supernatural events, no miracles, no mysteries that could not eventually be explained. Thus the authority of the bible was challenged. Thomas Jefferson, who did not believe in the divinity of Jesus or the miracles described in the New Testament including the resurrection, compiled his now-famous, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, also popularly known as The Jefferson Bible. He did not publish it in his lifetime and it had little impact on the deist movement at the time. It is, however, representative of deism then and it presages much of today’s more historically robust biblical revisionism. A few years earlier, Thomas Woolston, a British theologian, also a deist, predicted that Christianity would die out by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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The greatest skeptical thinker of this era was probably the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-1776). Best known, today, for his arguments against the possibility of miracles, he was perhaps most influential for his arguments against a designing creator. If a well-ordered existence requires a designer mind, he argued, then God’s mind, by necessity well ordered, also requires a designer mind. This designer therefore also needs a designer, on and on, ad infinitum. He also argued that design can not account for suffering caused by mankind or by nature. Atheism was a foot. Nietzsche would soon declare it strongly. Dawkins in his best selling book, The God Delusion, would revisit Hume’s arguments and argue them again.

But Christianity did not die out as Woolston predicted. As the 20th century dawned, Gilbert K. Chesterton wrote:

[Christians] went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty years were using all its light and learning for new religious foundations, new apologetics, new saints. [Christianity] was supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of Revolution. Science explained it away; and it was still there. History disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future.

Christianity Thrives

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Today, Christianity thrives in most parts of the world. About a third of the world’s population is Christian. One in every two people in the world believe in the Abrahamic god—God, YHWH, Allah. Only about fifteen percent of all people are not religious. But sociologist have noted that a significant portion of this last group tends to be ‘don’t care’ people, who when pressed, may express a belief in God or some spiritual reality. It is hard to determine a percentage for ‘reflective’ atheists or agnostics, but it is reasonably and widely assumed that the largest numbers are found in communist or formerly communist countries. Andrew Higgins, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal in Europe, in an article entitled, “As Religious Strife Grows, Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit,” reports that, “The number of atheists is hard to pin down. Some surveys put the figure at under 3%, but others say it is much higher.”

The percentage of atheists in Europe (as opposed to worldwide) is certainly much higher than 3%. Statistics suggest, it but it is not clear what constitutes atheism. As one commenter wrote in Richard Dawkins website:

[Higgins] is correct that the number is difficult to pin down as a majority of theist Europeans are religious in theory and atheists in practice. When confronted, they will say that perhaps, maybe they believe in a higher power, or God, but otherwise that question has no impact on their lives . . . [it] isn't quite religion, but isn't atheism either. People are just indifferent to the whole thing.

Higgins, wrote a subsequent, follow-up article in the Wall Street Journal. The title is, “In Europe, God Is (Not) Dead.” A subtitle reads: “Christian groups are growing, faith is more public.” He wrote:

Most scholars used to believe that modernization would extinguish religion in the long run. But that view always had trouble explaining why America, a nation in the vanguard of modernity, is so religious. The God-is-finished thesis came under more strain in the 1980s and 1990s after Iran, a rapidly modernizing Muslim nation, exploded with fundamentalist fervor and other fast-advancing countries in Latin America and Asia showed scant sign of ditching religion.

Now even Europe, the heartland of secularization, is raising questions about whether God really is dead. The enemy of faith . . . is not modernity but state-regulated markets [national churches] that shield big, established churches from competition. In America, where church and state stand apart, more than 50% of the population worships at least once a month. In Europe, where the state has often supported—but also controlled—the church with money and favors, the rate in many countries is 20% or less.

After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys. Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse.

Growth of Christianity

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Religion, and specifically Christianity, if not by the numbers, is nonetheless alive in Europe. It is still the majority religion and it is still a powerful voice “in public discourse.” The numbers are indeed hard to pin down. So are opinions about what is happening to Christianity in Europe. But there is ample evidence that the decline of church attendance in the national churches may be slowing as they shed past practices leftover from medieval Christendom and the age of empires. Some Church of England dioceses are actually growing, particularly dioceses in urban areas with younger communicants.

Evangelical Christians, both fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist, make up only about two percent of Western Europe’s population. But their numbers have grown eightfold in the last half of the twentieth century and their numbers are still growing exponentially. They are mostly young, well educated and committed. Immigrants, thought of as largely Muslim, are also significantly Christian and their numbers are growing as well.

Boston University sociologist Peter Berger notes that the modern world, pretty much everywhere, is “as furiously religious as ever.” But it is outside of Europe that this is particularly so. It is outside of Europe where Christianity really thrives.

The growth of Christianity in China has been explosive. Today there are about 16 million members of government sanctioned Christian churches and an estimated 50 to 100 million Christians who belong to non-sanctioned house churches. This is a communist country, and though the constitution of the Peoples Republic of China officially guarantees freedom of religion, it is highly restricted in the same way that the right of assembly is restricted. It is thus significant, as the University of Birmingham’s Edmond Tang reports that,

Today it is an open secret that Christian fellowships—a new kind of 'house church', run by Chinese professors and students, are active in most Chinese universities. More than 30 academic faculties and research centres are devoted to the study of a once maligned religion. The question is why.

In Africa, the growth of Christianity is astounding. Stanford University’s Dinesh D'Souza in his book, What's So Great About Christianity, writes in the first chapter entitled "The Twilight of Atheism: The Global Triumph of Christianity:”

A century ago, less than 10 percent of Africa was Christian. Today it’s nearly 50 percent. That’s an increase from 10 million people in 1900 to more than 350 million today. Uganda alone has nearly 20 million Christians and is projected to have 50 million by the middle of the century. Some African congregations have grown so big that their churches are running out of space. While Western preachers routinely implore people to come every Sunday to fill the pews, some African preachers ask their members to limit their attendance to every second or third Sunday to give others a chance to hear the message.

D’Souza, and many others who are studying the phenomena of Christian growth are reporting significant growth in every part of the world except the Middle East, North America, Australia and Western Europe. But in the United States, though Christianity is not growing, it remains strong. Ninety percent believe in God and eighty percent believe in the central tenet of the Christian assertion, the resurrection of Jesus. About fifty percent of the population attends church regularly.

But just as Christianity is showing extraordinary growth, perhaps the most significant growth since the first-century birth of this religion, there can be no denying a clamorous new outburst of atheism—the atheists that Higgins tells us are taking to the pulpits. Pundits have labeled this phenomenon as new atheism, evangelical atheism, anti-theism and even fundamentalist atheism. The names of its thinkers and writers are becoming household words: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett. Their books are trade books, readily found in popular bookstores. Sales are brisk of for titles such as (in order), 1) The God Delusion, 2) God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 3) The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, 4) Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Belief and Education

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The new atheists are raising the same issues that I confronted at an early age and have pondered all my life. They argue that most of the ills in this world are caused or justified by religion and religious strife. History, they say is distorted by the church. But mainly it is the thesis that science, particularly evolution, contradicts religious beliefs. Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea put it simply. “Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.”

As people become better educated, so the new atheists contend, and learn more about science, religion will wither away; particularly Christianity. Do they have a point?

The same Harris Poll (February 2003) that that reported that 90% of American believe in the existence of God and that 80% believe in the resurrection, shows that these beliefs do, in fact, decline with education level. Among Americans with post-graduate degrees, belief in God drops to 85% and belief in the resurrection drops to 64%. The drops (5% and 16%) are not all that significant but it has led some to conclude that education is directly related to disbelief. Some, particularly bloggers on the internet, have interpreted this as a correlation between intelligence and disbelief. But then why is that women are more likely to believe in God then men (93% vs. 86%) or blacks more likely than whites (96% vs. 90%). These factors suggest that maybe—just maybe—other factors could be at play including family traditions, income and life style. There isn’t enough data to draw a coherent conclusion.