Atheism as a religion

I recently met a retired teacher, an intelligent man who, in the course of a conversation, mentioned that he was an atheist. I said nothing, respecting his beliefs (or lack thereof). I wondered at first if he mean "agnostic," then, reflecting on the confidence with which he spoke--and the fact that he was not a listener--I decided, No, he knows the difference, and he has made his choice.

Sam Harris, one of the prominent New Atheists who have published books in the past decade criticizing religion, is a neuroscientist who values reason above all and, while  dismissing any notion of God, prefers not to call himself an atheist.

Yet in his latest book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion, excerpts of which I have read, he seems to have found that reason is not enough to explain the meaning of life and reality. It seems that emotion--that often suspect, "effeminate" entity foreign to the scientific mind--has its place, though Harris would not put it this way.  The self-transcendence that he finds in art or nature is not, he insists, irrational. Reason for him is still the dominant player.

Like the Romantic poets of England and the Transcendentalists of the American nineteenth century, and many since, Harris has found satisfaction (happiness?) in some form of transcendence of material reality, independent of religion.  Yet he insists on the primacy of reason, and it is reason, divorced from feeling, that keeps him safely among the "atheists," free from what he sees as the corruptions of religion.

At least, Harris is more open and positive than Richard Dawkins, the British author who has become rich and famous attacking God and belief and who is the subject of a recent New Republic article ("The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins"), which suggests that his atheism has become its own type of narrow religion.  For Dawkins, et al, science is unquestionably right and has all the answers there are to understanding man and his world. He would agree with the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, who once said that the goal of science is the destruction of mystery.

To me, as a theist, the loss of mystery--that sense of awe found in the mystical tradition as well as in art that evokes the unknowable and unknown, is tragic.  The great poets and writers, following Aristotle, always connect head and heart, always write or create with feeling as well as ideas. And at their best, they evoke the unknowable mysteries of humanity in a way that neuroscience will never rival.

Yet thinkers like Dawkins and Harris find reason and science to be supreme and thus cut themselves off from an essential part of the human experience--the emotional need to be connected to something beyond themselves. As such, they cheat themselves, hoping to find a glimmer of something vaguely "out there" while fearful of believing in God. Their rational arrogance blinds them.

In thinking of Harris, Dawkins, and the atheist I recently talked with, I wonder, What God do they not believe in?  The simplistic God "up in the sky" that children learn about?  Why don't they read more widely in philosophy (even medieval thought) and see that God is being itself, the "ground of our being," the inescapable presence that's all around and in us? If they would read Teilhard de Chardin and other scientists who have explored the connection between faith and science, maybe they would be more open to a fuller understanding of the Mystery.

In the meantime, some of the new atheists, like a few in California, feeling the need for some community on Sunday mornings, have established "churches" of sorts, where positive thinking is practiced. It may sound absurd for atheists to meet in "churches," but does it not indicate the human need to go beyond the isolated, rational mind and reach out to others?  And in reaching out to others, and caring about them, are we not embracing love and thereby affirming that life has purpose and meaning? If so, we can talk about, even believe in God.

That organized religion, included Catholicism, has often failed to articulate an understanding of a loving God is clear from a recently influential book by Walter Kasper on mercy, which is influencing the deliberations among the bishops in Rome this week. Cardinal Kasper writes: Theologians have too often had difficulty making sense of God's compassion: "The proclamation of God who is insensitive to suffering is a reason that God has become alien and finally irrelevant to many."

So it is up to believers to articulate a fuller understanding of the mystery of God as the source of existence and compassion in a way that makes sense to a skeptical world: no easy task!

The Non-Disappearance of God

Roger Ebert, the esteemed movie critic, said a few months before his recent death that he considered himself a Catholic, but "I cannot believe in God."

This may surprise or shock many people who see adherence to religion and a belief in God as inseparable.  What Ebert might have meant was: I no longer believe in a God who allows evil (like the cancer that killed him) to exist, the kind of loving father who is also the all-powerful creator depicted in the Bible.

This idea of anthropomorphic God who directs our lives, Karen Armstrong suggests, is merely a "starter-kit," something we receive in our childhood and are expected to build upon. We are expected to grow up.

Christians may never let go of the words of Jesus about his heavenly Father caring for us, but they learn, through experience and reading of theology, that the idea of God has to be more expansive than this. 

We need a more mystical notion of God as the unknown and unknowable, not the omniscient, eternally static Supreme Being of 4th century Neoplatonism or the God of the Old Testament, who angrily punishes or lovingly rewards. As Matthew Fox once wrote, our universe is expanding, but our idea of God remains static.

Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit scientist, saw the universe moving toward the future, with God "up ahead," not "up above" like a divine Santa Claus.  Such a concept of God images the unknowable God either as the great silence or the creative potential that exists in the mysterious space of the future. God is the ultimate coming-to-be.

In what I have written about the contemplative mysticism of Thomas Merton, I have explored the "negative way" of the mystics: God is the unknowable Unknown yet the ultimate gound of being, who is Being itself, and beyond all knowing.

A recent article by Richard L. Rubenstein in the New English Review (3-4-13) helped me understand a bit more about the so-called Death of God, which means the death of the limited idea of the Old Testament, anthropomorphic God cited above.  God can, rather, be seen (says Rubenstein) as the Holy Nothingness, the Great Silence, an idea with ancient roots in several religious traditions.

"In place of a biblical image of a transcendent creator God," Rubinstein writes, "an understanding of God which gives priority to the indwelling immanence of the Divine may be more credible in our era"--that is, after the so-called death of God.  God, as the Ground of Being and all beings, can be understood as the ground/basis of all feeling, thought and reflection.

The mystical idea of God as Holy Nothingness does not mean, says Rubenstein, that God is a void; rather that since nothing means "no-thing," nothing is not the absence of being but the overflow of being. So too, as I have shown, silence is not the absence of sound but the source of presence, human and divine.

"The infinite God, the ground of all that is finite, cannot be defined for there is nothing outside of God, so to speak."  The infinite God, Rubenstein says, is not a thing, but a no-thing. This does not seem far removed from the God revealed to Moses as the "I am who am" or the God Thomas Aquinas called not a being but Being itself.

All of this speculation seems important as I continue to encounter books, many successful, by atheists or agnostics who recount their loss of God. They have grown up not to a more complex notion of God but to a rejection of the God of their childhood. It seems to me that their very atheism or agnosticism is part of an honest recognition of a broader idea of God than that with which they were raised. It is the type of God depicted "up there" in the movies enjoyed so much by Roger Ebert.

But such a God is mythical and cannot explain reality. Such a God has disappeared, been denied, even laughed at by best-selling atheists (Richard Dawkins, et al.) because such an idea of the divine is not in sync with reason and science. It seems to me that those who reject God on such terms are really rejecting the older concept of God since the real God is inescapably everywhere, immanent as well as transcendent.

Once a thinking person defines God as a being both omnipotent and omniscient, there is no way out of the problem of evil: how can it exist in a world made and governed by a loving God? The problem here is not with evil but with the idea of God.

It seems to me that God, Being itself, is alive as a personal, loving presence in and through all reality while the old idea of God has, for many thinking believers, died.

Maybe, without being too irreverent, we can say the death of God has been greatly exaggerated.

Fighting God and Religion

A. C. Grayling has joined Richard Dawkins and other militant British atheists by publishing a book, The God Argument.  Bryan Appleyard provides a valuable perspective on it in The New Statesman.

I suppose that theists like me should welcome such books, even though their attack on all religion sounds surprisingly less sophisticated than what one would expect from an intellectual. 

Any debate about the meaning of life is of value, and the history of philosophy is a record of such discussions.  In the case of Grayling, who seems to be replacing the late Christopher Hitchens as a publicity-seeking public atheist, the argument, as Appleyard views it, sounds simplistic.

Grayling does not want to admit the lesson of history: that religion is here to
stay, that the emotional as well as rational needs it fulfills are deep in human nature, attested by evolution. He argues that religion is kept alive by political power and he seems to equate it with superstition or the belief in fairy tales.

To quote Appleyard: "Religious faith is not remotely like the belief in fairies; it is a series of stories of immense political, poetic, and historical power" that are deeply embedded in human nature. This has been attested by scientists in many fields.

To dismiss religion as meaningless or immature is to accept ignorance, and it makes impossible an appreciation of great art, be it the poetry of Donne or Eliot, the novels of Dostoyevsky, the Gothic cathedral, or the music of Bach.  Religion is not only fundamental to our inherited civilization but offers, as Appleyard notes, "a mountain of insights into the human realm."

It is always too early, too dangerous, too simplistic to say that science has moved us so far into secular humanism that the idea of God is both irrelevant and silly.  Books like these by Grayling may sell copies and get their authors on certain TV shows, but their ideas go nowhere, do nothing to advance our self-understanding.

Even non-believers have much to learn from religion and respecting the role of faith in human life is expected of a sophisticated, well-educated person, even if that person chooses to dismiss God and religion.

Who Needs Religion?

When my university colleagues in the Department of Philosophy dropped religion from the curriculum as a major some years ago, I told the dean, who was sympathetic to my concern, that no self-respecting university should be without a religion department.

His concern, of course, was with numbers: few, if any majors; courses under-enrolled meant lack of funding and so religion must go. Some on the faculty, being agnostic or atheistic, probably cheered because they believed that religion historically has done more harm than good and is actually at the root of most of the world's conflicts and problems.

But this trite old argument, still widely heard, is to ignore the enormous contribution of religion to civilization. It has from ancient times provided humankind with a source of meaning and of community as well as wisdom and ritual and beauty. It has been there to remind people of virtue. Can one find happiness without being and knowing the good? Ask Aristotle.

Or, more easily, ask Alain de Botton, the often clever Swiss pop philosopher who resides in London and writes engaging, witty books like the one I enjoyed a decade ago:
How Proust Can Change Your Life (even if I was not entirely persuaded that he could). He has now come out with Religion for Atheists, which apparently tries to show that the secular skeptics should borrow a few ideas from religion---notions like kindness, tenderness, community, and "making our relationships last."

Calling himself a "gentle atheist," de Botton has great respect for the intellectual contribution of religion, by which I think he really means the Judaeo-Christian tradition, in contrast to the best-selling atheists of recent vintage like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have attacked religious belief as folly. So I welcome this effort to emphasize the positive aspects of religion in our history and culture, including its impact on art.

De Botton apparently believes that religion is capable of changing the world as few secular institutions can, and it helps us emotionally so that we feel less alone. The notices for this new book also promise some practical ways in which religion, like reading Proust, can change our lives. I will have to see the specfics, but I am doubtful how serious the author, who respects religion but not devotion or dogma, really is.

What intrigues me the most about this original approach to religion is that it counters the view of many that the childish creeds of faith are the mark of simple minds, as if Augustine and all the other great religious thinkers were intellectually deficient. The usual opponents of religion don't read theologians or religious philosophers yet conclude that believers are dim-witted. Try reading Karl Rahner or Charles Taylor. Or Pascal, the great 17th century mathematician, scientist and author who had the humility to mistrust the intellect and to respect the wisdom of the heart.

I hope de Botton convinces his secular readers that religion provides the only effective means of cultivating the values we need. But I wonder how useful or practical religion can be when shorn of its supernatural doctrines, its vital heart. Who needs a religion made up of spiritual platitudes?

Searching for God

In a new book, The Quest for God and the Good, which I have only read excerpts of, Diana Lobel uses the word "God" to mean the ultimate principle of the universe, the source of all existence, knowledge and value. She says (in an interview) that the divine or absolute is what's at the heart of reality, is what assures our existence and gives life meaning.

So far so good: a possible response to the spate of new atheists with best-sellers in recent years (Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris)?

I'm not sure. The philosophical God searched for here is closer to Plato's idea of the Good. There is no personal divinity with a will who creates and sustains life. There is no "personhood" involved, as theologians would say.

Still, it's important that a contemporary thinker and academic would put God in the title of a book and consider the name coterminous with the mystery of life and existence. It's refreshing to find a serious secular writer today claim that when we look at the world, we see significance, that if anything in the world has value it is "because there is an ultimate source or principle of worth." Does this make Lobel a theist?

If not, she is at least moving in a positive direction. But I still want to hear something a little warmer, some definition that includes love as the divine energy propelling the universe. When contemplatives like Thomas Merton confronted an unknown God in the solitude and silence of their hearts, did they find a principle?