With Atheism dying, on to "spritual agnosticism"

"That the universe has in it more than we understand, that the private soldiers have not been told the plan of campaign, or even that there is one, rather than some vaster unthinkable to which every predicate is an impertinence, has no bearing upon our conduct. We still shall fight — all of us because we want to live, some, at least, because we want to realize our spontaneity and prove our powers, for the joy of it, and we may leave to the unknown the supposed final valuation of that which in any event has value to us. It is enough for us that the universe has produced us and has within it, as less than it, all that we believe and love." O.W. Holmes Jr, 20th century Supreme Court Judge

"Evolution has reached the limits of what is possible on planet Earth. In particular our doors of perception can only be extended by scientific instrument, enabling a panorama from the big bang to DNA." Simon Conway Morris, University of Cambridge Eminent Paleontologist

"Real genius in nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought." Simone Weil

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (1 Corinthians 13:12) 

Fifty or sixty years ago, the consensus from intellectuals across most Western world campuses were uniform -- inevitably, Theism would be replaced by Atheism. There was no more need to provoke a God to explain phenomena -- ( though a strange reason to believe in a personal God to begin with). So were these intellectuals correct?

Well, anybody keeping up with pollsters and even liberal media outlets know the answer.

The reasons for this spritual revival over the past five years are starting to manifest in all the oddest places. An example of this are books like the one from the historically anti-Theist Michael Krasney, titled, " Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic's Quest", or from the the eminent atheist philosopher turned Deist/Theist Anthony Flew, "There is a God." (For publicity reasons, I'm guessing, the "no" is crossed out and replaced with "a" on the book cover). Even more surprising, is where this revival is being led -- in the ivory towers of philosophy and sociology departments across America.

This is a topic that's intersting but cannot in any meaningful way be discussed in this kind of forum. I recently read the late Christopher Hitchens, "The Portable Athiest", which, I highly recommend to anybody. It is a signficant and thorough collection of essays and book excerpts from the leading Atheist voices over the past couple hundred years. Firstly, anything Hitchens writes, even if it's just added commenatary, is colorful and intelligent, although rough-around-the-edges (for instance, he refers to Billy Graham as a "boring racist charlatan"). At any rate, it's always important to understand the latest arguments against religion and Christianity (though they are almost somewhat recycled versions of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud's objections to Christianity, with some extra scientific twists). But, that is exactly all they are. Negative statements. And, as I have pointed out before, it's just too bad many (not all, Carl Sagan and Stephen Weinberg, two brilliant scientists, seem to have a good idea of Christian thought) leading Atheist/Agnostic voices don't have a complete, and in cases like Sam Harris (I would not recommend any of Harris' work) or Richard Dawkins (he is an excellent scientist and an even better science writer) their understanding of Christianity/Theology/Philosophy would be comical if their ignorance wasn't such a serious matter.

I and much more elegant thinkers and writers have harped on one of the major problems with Atheism: The religion of Atheism is just too far-fetched. Atheism at its heart (no facetious pun attended) posits that a Big Bang Program (whether originating from a multi-verse or whatever) has resulted in me writing these words and you comprehending and rolling your eyes at them, in the absence of an intelligent agent getting us from point A to point B.  And, as it must follow, to come to that conclusion, we need to rely on something we call "senses" and "reason", which are analogous to the serendipitous construction of atomic molecules. Is it a worldview with explantory power? I would say no. If you can put your faith in that worldview, I envy your faith. And, for you, it will work out in the short-term, because obviously this world is set-up that it is precisely those folks that will get ahead -- and they will have much more pleasure in this world to boot.

When I was in graduate school, I became an Agnostic shortly after reading Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. I must have been close to get there before reading Dawkins, and I'm not sure I wasn't a lifelong Agnostic up to that point.  At the time, in my extended family, there may have been two or three Christians, and within my nuclear family at the time, one Christian. Thus, it was much of an Agnostic household as anything else. We went through the routines of a post-modern "Catholic" household in 1990's America, but that was about it. I had essentially done no inquiry -- after all, I was young, into other things that were much more fun at the time, and had little to no use for God, nevermind if we could explain our physical existence through materialism.

It is here, I disagree with Morris (one of the most distinguished paleontologists of our time). I think we will one day be able to explain everything from the big bang to this moment in materialistic terms. I think a reasonable human being does not nor will ever have to invoke God, or Gods, or the marshmellow man, to explain their existence. While science is a million miles away from this reality (there is a real dissention from Darwinism right now, amongst all the origin problems, etc), I do think we will get there. And for my faith, that is a good thing.

The God the Bible has revealed to us, if my understanding is correct, would never allow this. One of the major reasons the Judeo-Christian God is the God that exists, amongst thousands and thousands of past gods from different cultures, is because this is essentially a primary component of the God the Bible reveals. Harris makes the recycled and aggregiousy ignorant argument in "Letter to a Christian Nation", wondering why God didn't write something in the Scripture that exhibited supernatural knowledge (If I'm remembering correctly he uses an example about including somewhere information about what DNA is in Scripture). I've read this argument from much more informed skeptics, in different forms. It's the, "I am God written in the Sky" argument.  However, our idea of the Judeo-Christian God would collapse if this happened, or if the former happened. And, as an extension, I don't expect there to be any revelations that force people to consider a supernatural Creator as there only option of a worldview.


In this sense, Atheism should and needs to always be a viable option, or, pardoxically, it will effect our Jewish/Christian Theistic views.

But what Atheists are encountering as they are thinking and living through the decision to put aside God, is a giant hole, that success, love, and therapy aren't filling. Is this the whisper of God that Jews and Christains always speak of, or is it solely a product of evolutionary trickery, the unguided and meaningless process that Atheists attribute their feelings and logic to in the first place?

Hmmm. That's quite a tough position to be in. It's no surprise, that even in the poshest, most isolated offices in the post-modern world, where folks like Dawkins and Harris write their books from, and shrug off their colleagues' suggestions (for every Richard Dawkins there is a Simon Conway Morris, for every Sam Harris a Malcolm Jeeves) that things may be not as they think. Or to paraphrase the French Agnostic turned Christian Mystic and human rights advocate Simone Weil, "find that supernatural virtue of humility that will lead them down a different path". Folks like Krasney are indeed now on that path, with a herd of intellectuals in his shadow of his sojourn, out of the wilderness, and while some may only be in "spritual agnosticism" territory right now,  perhaps one day their reasoning and new found humility may lead them to the Promised Land.

They hear that whipser, that echo. They listen to their reason. They use their brain that God has given them to understand their worldview has very limited explanatory power. Atheists like OW Holmes Jr. can imagine that his life has (or in his case, had) meaning, but, looking through the lens of his worldview, he mind as well never existed and it wouldn't matter at all. That isn't harsh -- it's an honest appraisal. The Fundamental Christian, the Anthony Faber, the Simone Weil, even Paul the Apostle -- see through a glass, darkly, of course, with all our pre-suppositions, our biases, and our limited knowledge of God and His creation. The absolute reductionist, indeed the Atheist, doesn't see through a glass, darkly -- not at all. Instead, he looks through everything -- and when you look through everything, you see, much less than if you look through a glass, darkly -- you instead see nothing.

And that may be ultimately the eulogy of Atheism. Not incontrovertible evidence of an intelligent Creator. Not Jesus flying through the sky with fire behind him.  As Soren Kierkegaard rightfully points out, the proof of Christianity is in the "following". Fifty years after ordering the coffin and writing the eulogy of religion and Christianity, ironically, as Christianity enjoys a revival in post-modern university halls and globally, it appears we can now see others saying exactly the opposite -- the fallacy of Atheism is in the following.  

 

Thinking past the how, the real question becomes why

 "Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism" Stephen Jay Gould, former Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University and world-renown Paleontologist.

"The four absolutes we all have in our minds: love, justice, evil, and forgiveness.” Ravi Zacharias

As interesting as the question is (and it is) exactly how did the universe get to be how it is perceived by us today, eventually the more important question emerges in any thinking man's head.  Does it really matter whether primordial soup and random mutations led to human beings living in a physical world? Or whether some other, better, more scientifically sound and provable origin theory emerges five hundred years from now? Well, to be frank, no. While the fields of origins, evolutionary biology and cosmology are really interesting, it doesn't get us to the most interesting and important question.

That is, we move from the how to why. While many theists would view Stephen Jay Gould's opinion (as summarized above) as assertion, I would not disagree with the likeable, entertaining and enormously bright agnostic. But Zacharias detects the great four echoes of the "why",  while Gould tragically remained stuck at the "how" throughout his life. When discussing why the Christian worldview offers by far the most explanatory power of the Universe as we know it today, I like to preface my thoughts with "it would be an unreasonable coincidence". For example, it is an unreasonable coincidence that man, the crown jewel of evolutionary processes, is completely and utterly devoted to understanding why they are here, and, since recorded history, has always been, unless, there really is a reason as to why we are here.

So, humor me for a second and let's use my method of thinking to examine Ravi's four echoes:

1) Love. It, friend, would be an unreasonable coincidence if love was a meaningless feeling, yet throughout the recorded history of man,  was the constant and ultimate search for any human with a normally and abnormally developed brain (see art, music, life, for examples). And more than that, it would be an unreasonable coincidence if love wasn't the central attribute of our Creator, if, in fact, we were at all created, nevermind, as Christians claim, endowed in His image. And even more than that, it would be an unreasonable coincidence if love wasn't God. And, as the Beloved Apostle writes, "God is Love". So here we have Christianity, which out of all the historical Theist worldviews, is the only worldview that consistently insists on a God of Love. And -- as such -- a God that delights in His Creation, because it was borne out of Love, for Love, to Love. And, less us forget, redeemed through the greatest act of Love of human history -- Calvary.

2) Justice.  It would be an unreasonable coincidence if we struggle with the ability to suppress the feeling to act justly, yet we were not created by a God that demands absolute justice. It is only the Christian worldview that offers the best explanation for our sense of justice. Calvary, after all, is at the intersection of Love and Justice.

3) Evil. There has been no more frequently used argument against the Christian worldview than the problem of evil. But, most don't understand that in fact, the very presence of evil is what invokes us to a sense of justice and love. Selfishness is the greatest evil, and love is the opposite of selfishness. Justice is the declaration that selfishness exists -- and needs to be exacted. The Christian God has allowed evil to be Created, so we can respond in love and act justly. Thus, it would be an unreasonable coincidence if evil existed yet there wasn't a source of selflessness fully opposed to evil. Again, the Christian worldview best explains the origins of both.

4)  Forgiveness. I saw a wonderful, even great, movie the other day. Without ruining the story with great details (in case anybody wants to see it),  in the movie "Small Town Murder Songs", a sheriff (Peter Storemare) nearly beats a man to death, consumed with human feelings of jealousy, bitterness, anger. Then he enters the Jordan River (or whatever rivers are in the Ontario area where this film takes place), and comes up a man whom has placed His faith in Jesus Christ -- and has been forgiven for past, present and future sins. As the movie progresses, he finds himself in the near identical situation as he was years ago, yet with significantly more true rights to beat a man. Yet, in a moment of strength and clarity, he rises above his Darwinian roots, and, instead, allows the man to beat him. Wholly blown away by what her (his ex-love interest) has just witnessed, she does something that she would have never done if she had not witnessed what was nothing short of a man finding redemption of his soul by trading in the role of the beater to the beaten. And a thousand levels of meaning should sink in to the thoughtful movie-goer. This man, in every sense, forgave himself at that moment.  Forgiveness is all around us, person to person, self to self, self to soul. Perhaps the contemporary story of forgiveness most well known is Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. The hardened criminal, Jean Velijean, stole from the one man that would have mercy on him, an elder Bishop. When the Bishop was presented with Veiljean with certain proof that He had stolen from Him, the Bishop told the police officer that he had actually given Velijean the items as a gift, so he could not have stolen them. Touched by this anti-Darwinian response, Velijean emerged a wholly new man, transformed by the Bishop's forgiveness. These two stories sum up the power of forgiveness in the human culture.  There isn't a more outwardly accessible act of love than forgiveness. As human beings who constantly hurt each other, forgiveness is the fuel for the fire of love, and there is not a more powerful act of love, minus self-sacrifice for a friend or enemy, than the act of forgiveness without residual resentment. Need more proof? There remains no more touching a love story, sans the Cross, then the story of the Prodigal Son. The Christian God Forgave us, so we can forgive others. There is perhaps no less comprehensible plea in the Lord's prayer than "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us". Yes, it would be an unreasonable coincidence that forgiveness can have unrivaled transforming effects for people, yet deny that we were created by a God whose entire relationship with human beings has been a cycle of transforming forgiveness, culminating in the unrivaled transforming forgiveness found for those who look upon Jesus Christ at Calvary.

See, its not the how, its the why that really matters. The how is fun. The why is determinant for your soul.  We could find that all four of these attributes were borne out of Darwinian processes. But, really, who cares? The reality is they are here, part of our culture, dominating who we are, what we think about, how we process decisions. The Bible is incredible. Incredible. Written by dozens of authors over thousands of years, yet, somehow, it gets it right.

It would be an unreasonable coincidence if there was a God,  or marshmallow man for that matter, that was consistently over thousands of years by dozens of authors portrayed as never polytheistic (be informed, don't rely on one or two articles in popular magazines or one or two books by secular authors), never tribalistic, never anything but monotheistic. A God that lives outside space and time (never a trace of pantheism in Christianity), and created the world at one real moment in actual time (Big Bang Theory). A God who tells a story from the Garden to Calvary about Jesus Christ, the only satisfaction of man's soul (I've never read about, heard about, or have known a man who had a peaceful soul  who did not know and trust the Lord... have you?). Indeed, the Ancient Bible makes the contemporary field of psychology simultaneously derivative and incompetent. A God that was always Almighty, yet incredibly vulnerable. That was omnipresent, yet never anything but, less a few exploratory years with the wandering Jews, incredibly and consistently behind-the-scenes. And this last point is an important point. This God that the Bible has purportedly described has always allowed humans to choose Him or Not Him freely... I wish, wish, more thoughtful agnostics and atheists would understand that point. I think they would correct a lot of their thinking if they could comprehend that (and make our jobs easier as evangelicals). If you can grasp that, then you can understand why the Christain God allows all things He allows to happen, doesn't cure amputees, allows bad things to happen to Christians, allows Auschwitz to happen, allows you to freely read this blog and freely form your own opinion, and, most importantly, carries alongside by far the most explanatory power than any other God man has made up, including himself, the religion we call atheism.

I implore you to look around and think about the why, and forget the how. The why has immediate urgency. The Bible has given the Christian worldview incredible explanatory power thousands of years after much of it was written. Jesus Christ came and answered our longing hearts questions. Indeed, if human beings were going to make up a believable religion today, Christianity would be it. So, are we looking back at a self-fulfilling prophecy? I don't think that is a satisfying explanation.

Instead, I postulate this. I think Jesus Christ was precisely whom He said He was, and those hundreds of eye witnesses who died horrific deaths for not recanting their testimony about Jesus being God Incarnate were probably not all mistaken. I think the hundreds of thousands of people who have laid down their lives in some meaningful if not literal way because they believe Jesus Christ transformed their lives as the living, powerful Son of God, physically, tangibly, probably weren't all mistaken. I think the missing Body, the empty Tomb, Easter... would have to be the most complex and well-performed conspiracy theory of recorded human history, fully equipped with wholly devoted, to the death, characters whom left small children and wives to die gruesomely for a hoax with no long-term benefit to their DNA, just short-term horror. I think it is an unreasonable coincidence that I am pondering a Creator unless He was the Creator. I think Jesus Christ finishes the story of God and humans with a storybook ending that no human author could concoct. I think the Trinity best explains God's attribute of relationship in a way that no human thinker could concoct. I think the process of Darwinian Evolution is the most fitting way I could think of for the God that the Bible describes to create the universe and humans, as a "behind-the-scenes" God that He is consistently described as throughout Scripture. Moreover, I think living as Christ taught us to -- in every way anti-darwinian, is an ah-hah moment for the heart, the mind, the soul and the ages. I think there is no reasonable explanation for The Dead Sea Scrolls describing the actions of Jesus Christ, including things totally out of His control like place of birth and birth circumstances, other than that Jesus Christ is the Son of God described in a supernatural way hundreds of years prior to His birth. I think the breathtaking intelligence that underscores life, that the resolution of contemporary technology allows us to now see and understand, and the organized laws of physics that govern life, can only be reasonably explained if an intelligent agent in fact created it -- and beyond this, that we can comprehend the "big picture" -- or as the mathematician Mark Steiner would refer it to as, the anthropocentric picture of the universe as remarkably "user friendly" to human cognition. I think the fine-tuning of the universe and the astronomical probability of life emerging is most reasonably explained by the existence of an Intelligent Creator.  I think the fact that we can even study our origins is a deafening echo of His existence. I think explaining the evolution of life by saying that nature and organisms just want to survive is totally void of explanatory power. I think there are miracles in nature that cannot be reasonably explained outside of a Sovereign Creator. I think the wants and fears of every man -- every man -- whom escaped the sin of the world to develop with a normal brain -- yearns for the same basic things that only Jesus Christ can provide. I think Jesus Christ being born in a manger as an eating, crying, pooping infant says more about God than most people will learn about God in their entire lives. I think every person I know that does not know Jesus has a hole in their heart and a palpable fear to their soul, like a small child who can't find their mother, no matter the facade. I think the echoes of our Creator are too loud, too constant, too consuming, not to be actual echoes from Him. And I think there is a very differentiated afterlife, one in which there is no crossing over, where time is no longer a dimension, and where Love, Justice, Evil and Forgiveness meet.

Peter warns us: "Draw near to Him, while He is still close."

And you think Theists have problems?

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.” Thorton Wilder

"My conversion as an undergraduate was founded on a conviction that the Christian faith made intellectual sense of the world, of history, and of personal experience." Ian Hutchinson, Professor and Chair of Nuclear Science and Engineering, MIT

Dear non-Christian:

Here are a couple things you need to think about:

1) We (Christians) have problems. The problem of evil is not going away anytime soon. We are divided, with extremely intelligent, thoughtful Christians on both sides of the fence, on a number of issues. There are evolutionary dead-ends. Many, if not most "Christians" do not reflect the Spirit they claim to hold. The Universe is unfathomably large. We really, really thought Jesus would be back by now. We really are having trouble praying the cure of an amputee. Have you checked out the cruelty of the insect world lately? Have you tried to think about the Flood story lately? Oh boy.

2) You have much, much bigger problems. There is one thing that I have learned from my experiences at Harvard, and my interactions with people involved in my field outside of Harvard, for the past four years. There are a lot of very, very smart people in this world, that are very, very thoughtless about the most important things. Timothy Keller helps crystallize the following point which is worth thinking about. Immanuel Kant in his "Critique of Pure Reason" says something along the lines that every thoughtful, educated person needs to ask three primary questions: How do we know we know, How do we know right and wrong, and what do we live for? If Kant is right, and these have been more or less the big three questions any philosophy 101 class will discuss, then the Atheist position is totally untenable. Here is why:

1) How do we know we know? Here is the crux of the Atheist problem, that guys like Dennett, and Dawkins, and B. Russell could and will never be able to answer. Simply, a materialist, as Keller points out, "has no reason to trust reason". You cannot claim that we are an accidental collection of molecules, and then claim that the random, accidental interactions these chemicals have in your neo-cortex produce meaningful things we call feelings, like love, and the sense of justice, and form faculties that we call reason, and rationality, and come together and reflect truth. You cannot use reason and rationality to prove to me that you and I are nothing but an evolutionary accident. And beyond this, you really cannot claim that reason and rationality cannot actually reflect truth, because, of course, all our life experiences testify to just that. That is a big problem for a thoughtful atheist. You can say to me you are an atheist. Sure. But you cannot use rationality or reason, the very things you claim are products of random, meaningless molecules that have been formed from blinded, unguided processes. That is totally nonsensical, and, of course, any thoughtful atheist should understand this. The brightest and most honest secular atheists like the late Richard Rorty and Alex Rosenberg, understand and admit this, to both their credits.

2) Right and Wrong? Have you ever seen a one-year old look at you and you know that he knows what is right and wrong? Morality has been an ace up the theist sleeve for quite some time. The field of evolutionary psychology, a field fully devoted to answer this question, has been entrenched in corporal hand-waving. As the current top US physician-scientist Frances Collins will tell you, there is no explanation for humans sense of right and wrong outside the imago dei, as a reflection of our Creator. But this is hardly the point. Evolutionary psychology could one day present incontrovertible evidence that morality evolved through the evolutionary step-up to humankind, and that would hardly matter. What matters is if materialists believe our sense of morality is just a product of accidental chemical mixing, then the result of morality is meaningless. Rape is neither right nor wrong. Genocide is neither right nor wrong. Yet, of course, everyone would agree that these are not right, and most people would object if their neighbors were being raped, or their cities were being wiped out. Yet, from the materialist point of view, it cannot be meaningful. Thus, any sense of justice or good or bad is meaningless . How random chemicals are making us feel can of course only be meaningless. Yet, again, we know better. Any atheist that gets out of bed in the morning and lives with or protects any state or standard of morality is living a total life of contradiction, and one totally void of any integrity. Again, some of the brightest atheists will admit to this, speaking to their honesty but also to what I would understand as a considerable challenge.

3) What are we living for? My atheist friend, why get out of bed? The earth rotates around its axis because of physics. A bug crawls because it is programmed to. You love your kids, you miss your mother, you love your wife, you put your arm around a hurting neighbor, you fight for freedom -- because you are programmed to do so. The random assortment of the molecules that begin to exist at the big bang program you to do all these things. All these things -- no less love -- is totally meaningless.

Yet, you know better than that, right? Beauty lasts, movies touch, paintings move, books make you think, seeing an old friend ignites the heart, and, most importantly, your reason and perceptions do lead you to truth, you do have a sense of right and wrong, and you do long for something that you don't have.

Some of the smartest thinkers in the world, even the California cathouse-loving Hawking, makes the biggest intellectual mistake a person can make. The law of physics can explain, or will one day be able to explain, everything that is material in this big, big universe. But only if an eternal intelligent and loving Creator created the law of physics, and spoke everything (of course, not in the sense that we understand "spoke") material into reality, does the universe and the crown jewel of evolution - you - make sense. To simply say it is because of physics misses what any thoughtful person needs to consider, and, of course, ironically, violates one of the most fundamental laws of physics (cause and effect).

The older I get, the more I understand how utterly thoughtless and sloppy atheism actually is. And the more I understand how Jesus Christ -- with all the problems we Christians have, most of which I suspect is because of our nature to tie our interpretations into God's reality, and this multiplied by the messiness of humanity -- is the only thinking person's answer. God calls us -- almost begs us at times -- to reason with Him. To use our minds, our reason, to think it all through. The late Carl Sagan, who was described by Issac Asimov as one of the only two people he ever met that (he felt) was intellectually superior to him, once told R.C. Sproul that we now know what happened nanoseconds after the big bang. When Sproul pressed him about what happened right before that, Sagan's answer was essentially he was not interested in answering that. Not interested? While Sagan called Atheism "stupid", a lifetime of inquiry seemingly never led him to answer the big three questions that Kant and philosophers have put forward. Metastatic pancreatic cancer is a horrible thing. Watching a loved one die from ALS is a horrible thing. Not allowing your mind ponder these big three questions is catastrophic.

Simply put, the atheist lives a life void of meaning and integrity, and wakes up in the morning and goes to sleep at night living in total contradiction, in a sort of schizophrenic cloud of ignorance.

Thoughtfulness and honesty always and only lead to Jesus Christ, whom the law of physics and the law of love was created through.