Archbishop of Sydney

 

In the Australian press God does not get much of a run. His followers do, especially if they dissent from the consensus or fail to live up to the standards they profess. But the search for meaning, faith and traditional Christian spirituality struggle for space.

 

The visits to Australia of Pope John Paul II are one example of this. The Pope has commanded enormous coverage, but the emphasis was on his personality rather than his message, or on aspects of his message such as social justice (generally approved) or teachings on life and sexuality (generally rejected) rather than faith in God, the need for meaning, prayer and worship.

 

The devastation which the tsunami caused changed all this. God was back in the news, putting to the test the consoling wisdom that it is better in the long run to be criticised often than to be always ignored. The hardest time to defend the good God is after a natural disaster, probably harder than finding God in man-made catastrophes like World Wars, Auschwitz or the Soviet slave camps.

 

After the tsunami God had his defenders, but a couple of them provoked further outrage and for different reasons.

 

In a long response the Anglican Dean of Sydney, Phillip Jensen, was quoted as saying that disasters are part of God's warning that judgement is coming, while Amjad Mehboob of the Australian Islamic Councils was quoted as explaining that when we do suffer some misfortune, it is what our own hands have wrought. Both were criticised, but the more outspoken Mehboob escaped more lightly.

 

On the other side of the world Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury fumbled the ball badly. Incautious talk about the "the vacuous words" of believers and "the consolations of belief in an afterlife or whatever" and a controversial headline attached by sub-editors to his London Sunday Telegraph article meant that his press office had to issue a clarification that "the Archbishop nowhere says that the tsunami causes him to question or doubt the existence of God". Archbishop Williams' elegant words might have provoked admiration in some College chapels at Oxford, but I regret that the Christian God did not receive a sturdier public defence.

 

God is needed to explain the order, goodness and beauty of the world, while we struggle with the consequences of God permitting so much suffering and evil.

 

As a media event the tsunami has run its course, but the disaster has thrown new light on two recent and important books by Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University.

 

Last July Professor McGrath published "The Twilight of Atheism. The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World" (Doubleday) and this year has followed up with "Dawkins' God. Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life" (Blackwell) answering Professor Richard Dawkins, also of Oxford, and known affectionately as "Darwin's Rottweiler", the most outspoken atheist in the English-speaking world.

 

McGrath a Protestant Christian and a prolific author is well qualified for his task. Equally important perhaps are the facts that he was a Marxist atheist as a young man and has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Oxford. Even today he describes himself as "a wounded yet respectful lover of the great revolt against God".

 

As a young man McGrath believed that Marxism held the key to the future. He chose atheism because it proposed to eradicate religion, making a decisive break with the religious strife and violence of his own Northern Ireland. Atheism made sense of things, enabled people to make of their lives what they chose and it offered hope for a better future, especially through the secular Messianism of the Marxists.

 

However during his scientific studies at university and especially through his work on the history and philosophy of the natural sciences he came to realise he did not understand the religion he had rejected and that what he had accepted was "an imaginatively impoverished and emotionally deficient substitute". No longer for him was religion an "oppressive, hypocritical and barbarous relic of the past".

 

Today McGrath believes that the atheist case against God has stalled, run out of intellectual steam, with arguments resting more on fuzzy logic and aggressive rhetoric than on serious evidence-based argument. He believes that especially with the level of today's scientific knowledge of biology (and physics) the natural sciences do not constitute an intellectual super-highway for logic to arrive at atheism. Today's world is post-atheist.

 

An example supporting McGrath's claims was the announcement last month by the 81 year old British philosopher Anthony Flew, for 50 years a public champion of atheism, that he now believes in a minimal sort of God.

 

He is a deist, believing in a Supreme Intelligence, which is not actively involved in peoples' lives.

 

For Flew too the biologists' investigation of DNA, their discovery of the extraordinary complexity of arrangements which lead to life have brought him to his God. While still a Darwinian, his views parallel those of some American "intelligent design" theorists.

 

As some consolation to his former allies Flew insists that he does not believe in the afterlife and to show that the old fires are not completely dead he insists that his God is very different from the Christian and Islamic versions, where both are depicted as "omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins"!

 

 

Traditionally Catholics, especially through the rationalism of the Scholastics (with Thomas Aquinas' five ways of proving God's existence as the best known example) have been confident of the powers of the human mind to move towards the recognition of a Super-Intelligence, God as the First Cause, the creator, sustainer and designer of the universe, while requiring the revelation of the Scriptures for evidence of a Trinitarian God, the Incarnation and Redemption.

 

Some Protestants have been much more sceptical of the power of the unaided human mind to recognise God and McGrath is closer to this tradition.

 

He quite rightly follows Stephen Jay Gould in explaining that the sciences cannot adjudicate on the God question. If the debate is to be decided solely on scientific grounds, the outcome can only be agnosticism. But he goes further than this by claiming that human reasoning from the scientific evidence cannot contribute much to deciding on non-scientific i.e. meta-physical grounds for atheism or theism.

 

For him the belief that there is no God is as much a matter of faith as the belief that there is a God, because the arguments of theists and atheists are circular rationalizations which lead back to the two different starting points.

 

With this avenue closed McGrath has concluded from his personal experience that the appeal of atheism is not intrinsic to its ideas, but determined more by its social context. Atheism thrives where the Church has been oppressive and out of touch, unwilling or unable to inspire altruism, to stir the imagination or the emotions. At best this is an oversimplification.

 

Therefore there are two other more important reasons why atheism is in trouble. Firstly its innocence has been extinguished by Stalin's death squads and Nazism, even if some still want to argue whether Nazism was explicitly atheist in its demonic hatred of the Jewish people who gave us monotheism. The moral credentials of atheism are exploded and the history of the 20th century showed that Dostoyevsky was right in claiming that without God the way is open to unrestricted tyranny and violence. Atheism made Lenin and Stalin possible, although atheists too opposed them.

 

This line of argumentation is well known to theists and indeed many victims of the Communists. However McGrath's second argument is more surprising, because he believes the rise of postmodernity poses a greater threat to atheism than to Christianity.

 

For him atheism was the ideal religion of modernity, that period ushered in by the Enlightenment, although atheists were a tiny minority everywhere, especially in Australia. But postmodernism is intrinsically post-atheist.

 

Postmodernism is antagonistic to totalising world-views, which is as much a challenge to atheism as it is to Christianity. An uncompromising denial of God is seen as arrogant and repressive, rather than principled and moral.

 

Postmodernism also regards purely materialist approaches to reality as inadequate, while it encourages an interest in the spiritual dimension of life (which is nearly always hostile to organised religions such as Christianity). Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code incites readers to imagine the worst about Catholicism, but it also stimulates religious curiosity.

 

With its hostility to truth claims postmodernism offers no path forward for Christianity, but an interest in New Age spirituality, with all its intrinsic deficiencies, is more likely to muddle towards God than to atheism. For McGrath atheists are a greying minority in a modern world which is dying, while too many young people are showing interest in the forbidden fruits of spirituality. Here in Australia the number of people without religion dropped in the 2001 census for the first time in 100 years.

 

This is, all in all, a provocative thesis and he provides a great deal of sociological evidence to support his views. Everywhere, except in the Western world, the various brands of Christianity are stronger than they were 50 years ago (even in China) and this is probably true of Hinduism and Buddhism in Asia also. The United States of America remains one of the most religious societies in history and we have a resurgent Islam, even in Europe, where the vitality is not confined to violent fundamentalists.

 

In Australia despite the significant decline in Protestant and Anglican membership over the last 50 years and the continuing decline in regular Catholic worship (but not in the number of adherents), Christianity is far from dormant. No religion which is dead can inspire people to contribute $75,000,000 to overseas relief, which is what the Christian agencies did after the recent tsunami.

 

Marx and then Lenin wrote that religion was the opium of the people, a spiritual intoxicant for slaves. For the young people of the Free World, especially in Australia where communist oppression is scarcely remembered, Lenin's claim is barely capable of provoking curiosity.

 

Far more worthy of discussion today is the claim of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, himself a victim of communist oppression, in his essay "The Discreet Charm of Nihilism" that the root of the twentieth century's oppressive totalitarianism lay not in religion, but in its nihilist antithesis. This is a transformation. For Milosz "a true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged".

 

Even here in Australia, where we enjoy so much decency and are capable sometimes of outstanding generosity, Milosz's thesis might prove to be too much to be stomached. Part of the furore over Dean Jensen's remarks was because he had touched clumsily on a raw Australian nerve, that unwillingness to recognize God as a personal judge. But individual accountability after death is an almost inevitable consequence of the existence of a good and just God.

 

In both of his books, but especially in "The Twilight of Atheism" McGrath has made an important contribution, not just by giving heart to Christians, but by pointing out what is changing in our world which is not as secular as we imagine, even thought it might be often superstitious and neo-pagan. We are often slow to realise what is happening under our eyes.

 

Atheism is in trouble. Religion is on the up. The twenty-first century will be post-atheist.