Is God Dead - or Is Godlessness?

“At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.” (Robert Jastrow, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute)

It has been less than forty years since Time magazine asked the question, “Is God Dead?” Now the question some are asking is, “Is atheism dying?”

While atheism enjoys wide acceptance in secular Europe and the scientific community at large (including 93 percent of the National Academy of Science membership), theism is embraced by almost 90 percent of Americans and is making sustained gains in the developing world. And with birthrates in the world’s theistic communities outpacing those in secular ones, it appears that atheism is destined to become a victim of its own doctrine of natural selection.

Added to those woes is news that a bastion of atheism is losing its faith—or at least allegiance. According to Science & Theology News, the Council for Secular Humanism has begun to distance itself from atheism, insisting that atheism is only a subset of humanist values.

Although the Humanist Manifesto still espouses the atheistic worldview of naturalism, its anti-God statements have softened. For example, comparing the latest version of the Manifesto (2003) with the 1933 original, the open denials of theism and deism have been replaced by the dismissal of what it terms “supernaturalism.”

By all appearances, atheism seems poised for extinction in the “survival of the fittest.” But how did it come to this?

WITHOUT MAP OR COMPASS
When Frederich Nietzsche announced the death of God in 1882, his message came as an indictment against the Enlightenment movement, which, after Darwin had rendered God unnecessary, was still tethered to Judeo-Christian morality.

The thinkers who followed in Nietzsche’s footsteps accepted his assessment with its sobering conclusion: Man is alone in an inhospitable universe without any source of absolutes. As French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre acknowledged: “Thus we have neither behind us, not before us, in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. . . . That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.”

By the 1960s, what was conceived in the Cartesian “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), and gestated in the mind-dependent reality of Kant, and then given birth in the unsupervised world of Nietzsche, emerged as the autonomous self: the liberated individual who, without map or compass, was both free and fraught to define the concepts of meaning and existence.

Thus, when Time published its shocking cover in 1966, atheism was well on the way to dismantling the last vestiges of supernatural “nonsense” carried over from the pre-Enlightenment era. Or was it?

THE GODLESS SOCIETY
The twentieth century experienced the rise of the Soviet Union: a Godless society based on the utopian vision of Karl Marx. According to Marx, the perfect society would be achieved by leveling class distinctions and eliminating all allegiances competing with the State, including God. Yet from the Bolshevik Revolution onward, the road to the Marxian ideal was strewn with countless victims of “education,” exile, and execution.

By 1991, within seventy-five years of its inception, society’s first atheistic government disintegrated from the decay of its moral foundation. Although the Soviet collapse portended the grim days ahead for atheism, the first death knell was sounded eleven years prior.

In the early spring of 1980, Jean Paul Sartre, who had shaped the thought of a generation with his God-denying philosophy, made a startling disclosure. After a lifetime of advancing the existentialist ideals of meaninglessness, absurdity, and personal autonomy, Sartre, shortly before his death, confided,

“I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here: and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.”

Sartre’s admission sent shock waves through the atheistic community. His stunned mistress and fellow existentialist, Simone de Beauvoir, echoed the reaction of fellow Sartrians when she remarked“How should one explain this senile act of a turncoat?”

During that same year, William J. Murray, the former president of American Atheists and son of famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hare, converted to Christianity, reflecting later, “It was the result of living thirty years of a lifestyle where nothing mattered, nothing meant anything, except getting what I could.”

TOO MUCH FAITH REQUIRED
Stories like Sartre’s and Murray’s abound, revealing that the faith required for atheism, and its underpinning of philosophical naturalism, is enormous; in fact, one could say that it’s without rational basis altogether.

Beginning with the metaphysical question of why there is something instead of nothing and the physical question of how something can proceed from nothing, the explanatory power of naturalism starts at zero, and then flat-lines.

But given that inchoate something, why does it lead to order rather than disorder? Where does that something get the organizing principles that govern it and shape it into functional structures that display purpose and design? In a universe in which only the material phenomena of matter, energy and physical law are allowed, what is the origin of immaterial phenomena like thought, creativity, aspiration, pride, disappointment, gratitude, and guilt?

And what about free will? Contrary to Sartre’s philosophy of radical individualism, naturalism undermines any notion of a free, autonomous self. If everything is a product of matter acting under the influence of nature’s causal laws, then all phenomena, including whether I finish writing this column, are fully determined and predictable from the birth of that inchoate something.

In a naturalistic universe, choice and free will are illusion. To maintain intellectual integrity, an atheist has but two choices: abandon his conviction in the sovereign self or lose his faith in naturalism. Sartre and Murray chose the latter, realizing they didn’t have enough faith to remain in atheism.

ON THE OTHER HAND . . .
On the flip side are stories of those like media mogul Ted Turner and Skeptic magazine editor Michael Shermer, who rejected the religious faith of their early years. Interestingly, their rejections reveal less about what was rejected than they do about who rejected. The spiritual journey of writer Mark Lilla is a case in point.

At the age of 13, Mark Lilla’s journey started out in atheism. Then, after an all-night encounter reading the Bible, Lilla writes in a recent New York Times article, “I considered myself ‘saved.’ . . . [My heart] was infused with something my mind wanted to understand.”

Convinced that the Bible contained answers to all the questions in his adolescent mind, Mark dove headlong into Biblical study and became an “amateur scholar.” But eventually, the yearning for truth that led Mark to faith, was the very thing, he suggests, that led him “out of faith.”

The turning point came after a dispute with a friend over a passage of Scripture. After further study the following day, Mark determined that while his friend was correct in his reading of the passage, his heart told him that the doctrine at issue was wrong.

(“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.”)

Lilla does not disclose the passage in question or the doctrine; or whether the difficulty could have been resolved by a seasoned scholar more knowledgeable about the idioms of the day and the cultural setting of the text, or by reference to the original language; he only says that the idea the Bible could contain errors drove him away from the faith of his youth.

Will Lilla end up like those who, after dismissing theism at the first hint of difficulty, turn to naturalism with tenacious loyalty despite its numerous theoretical, empirical, and logical problems? Maybe. But I suspect that skepticism will not be Mark Lilla’s terminal destination. For his essay ends with something that he knows “is there”—a certain inner quickening he considers a dilemma in a God-vacant world—something he identifies as “a kind of care . . . directed toward others.”

The bleak outlook for atheism is not due to the rational power of theistic arguments, but to the innate and irrepressible knowledge that there is purpose and meaning in existence—“a kind of care” and intentionality from beyond.

“Atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul: the sense that there is meaning and direction in the world it sees.” -- G.K. Chesterton

Regis Nicoll is a freelance writer and a Centurion of the Wilberforce Forum. His "All Things Examined" column appears on BreakPoint every other Friday. Having worked in the nuclear power industry for over thirty years, Regis serves as an elder, teacher, and men’s ministry leader in the Collegedale Church in Tennessee. Regis publishes a free weekly commentary to stimulate thought on current issues from a Christian perspective. To be placed on this free e-mail distribution list, e-mail him at: centurion51@aol.com.

Matt Donnelly, “The Twilight of Atheism,” Science & Theology News, 6 December 2005.

Mark Lilla, “Getting Religion,” New York Times Magazine, 18 September 2005.

Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Understanding Secular Religions, Existentialism, (Campus Crusade for Christ, 1982).

Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism (Baker Books).

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Ignatius Press).