Both Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen and Catholic Cardinal George Pell have this Good Friday returned fire on the growing atheist-Church conflict (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/02/2863269.htm), accusing the rise of atheism for many of the great wrongs of last century and challenging it as simply an alternative faith. But isn’t atheism the absence of faith? Isn’t it the rational decision to believe in only those things that can be backed with genuine evidence?
The response often given to this is “I can’t prove there is a God, but you can’t prove there isn’t; ergo, both of us have faith”. Ok, so then is the decision not to believe in fairies, aliens or magical elves that clean our bedrooms for us therefore also a matter of faith? You can’t prove that they don’t exist.
This is where the idea of rational faith comes in. By definition, faith has to do with believing in something you can’t prove, so when a Christian says “I just know this is true”, they are either using a poor choice of words, exaggerating, exercising wishful thinking or they no longer require faith because they now feel they have evidence of some form. That’s not faith. A person with faith knows that they could be wrong but makes a deliberate choice to believe what they do because it appears rationally to be the best choice when the consequences are considered. Irrational faith by contrast considers the evidence to be unimportant and does not consider the consequences of the belief. Irrational faith is not a decision to step from the cliff trusting the one who will catch them, but the belief that there is really no cliff.
The distinction is important. Unlike the fairy scenarios, the decision to believe or not to believe in God or the choice of which God to believe in has immediate consequences.
The people in the Ricky Gervais movie “The invention of lying” are physically incapable of lying and therefore blindly believe everything they are told. So when one day someone discovers how to lie and invents God, Heaven and Hell; the response is overwhelming. The newspapers report “Finally, a reason to do good!” Why? In this case it’s because God will punish them if they do wrong and reward them if they do good.
The “God hypothesis” is the belief that there is an absolute. Without a God to define what is good and evil, it’s not so much that there is no reason to do good, but that there is no such thing as ‘good’. The reason is still there – we see hungry people and can still be motivated to feed them; the issue is that feeding the hungry is no longer ‘good’, it’s just something you do. In the same way, stealing from them is not bad, it’s a rational decision to put self interest ahead of the concern for others. As Nietzsche said “You have your way, I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way. It does not exist.” Abolish God and you abolish the distinction between good and evil.
But, I hear you say, altruism is observable amongst animals that don’t have religion or philosophy; concern for others can be the most rational form of self-interest. Quite true; ants spend their lives working for the welfare of the colony and will often give their lives in defence of that colony. But do ants give their lives in defence of a neighbouring colony if they are to get no benefit from the action? A father will defend his family, but he is less likely to defend a stranger’s family. He will go to war and fight for his country, but will he care for the needs of those he is fighting? When a Nazi officer gave my grandfather his Greatcoat to aid his escape from a labour camp, was he acting in self interest or was he being led by some more abstract notion of right and wrong that prickled his conscience? It’s quite possible to convince a population that just, fair rules are in their self interest and even inspire them through nationalism or some other means to give above and beyond what’s expected; but how easy is it to convince them that self interest involves taking in those refugees, forfeiting their trade advantages with a poorer nation or cancelling the debts owed to them? The fact that these things only occur when lobbyists expose the self interest of those nations and the damage it is causing testifies to the fact that people motivated by self interest only stop doing something when it hurts them more to continue doing it.
So will atheism drive the world into an abyss of godless destruction? Are the rise of Nazism, Communism and Pol Pot the precursors of what we should expect? Well, I don’t see why. Zuckerman’s analysis of the atheistic societies of Denmark & Sweden “Society without God” presents a pretty strong case that these nations rank amongst the most developed, wealthiest, most democratic, least corrupt, charitable and environmentally compassionate nations on earth. As stated earlier, ants are basically atheists, but they keep a pretty stable society together.
Does this then answer the argument? Well, yes and no. I disagree that an atheist society has to be violent, uncaring and corrupt because peace, mutual concern and justice are all things that a wise society will aim for - they make that society stable. Buddhism for instance is founded on some very Biblical-sounding concepts of justice and compassion, all without invoking the need for a god. But at the same time the answer falls short. While it is possible that society may naturally drift in these directions without the need for a god, there still remains the fact that this society can no longer call any of these actions ‘good’. This is not a technicality and I’ll explain why.
One of the reasons put forward for the success of Denmark & Sweden is the fact that they are happy, prosperous nations. The saying is that “hurt people hurt people”, i.e., people that are violent, rapists, child molesters etc tend to be people that have suffered in related ways themselves. Countries where people are hungry have social unrest. Cultures that have been persecuted through racism often produce dysfunctional families, violence and alcoholism. If you can remove these things however, society over time will improve. If you’re happy and content, you don’t need to hurt others to exorcise your demons. You do ‘good’ things because you have no need to do ‘bad’.
So what happens then if something goes wrong? An economic crisis? Oil crisis? Natural disaster? Perhaps there’s a degree of resilience in the fact that people have inbuilt ‘good’ habits, but if things really go wrong – if someone declares war on you or you start to go hungry; if the Police become tyrants and the only way you can feed your kids is to steal from someone. To break into their home. To shoot people. If your society crumbles, your cars rust, your plasma screen breaks and you have to live with the reality that the majority world faces from day to day, how far will those ‘good’ habits get you if you never actually believed they were good, only effective under the circumstances?
There is something very different about connecting with a nice person and connecting with someone that genuinely cares deeply about you. You can pay for a listening ear or a comforting embrace, but where do you buy the kind of genuine love and compassion that only comes from a person who is made of the stuff? 1 John 3:16 says:
“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us and we aught also to lay down our lives for our brothers.”
The Biblical idea of love is ‘laying down your life’ for someone else. It is coming to the point where someone else’s life is more important than your own. Connecting with someone that has laid down their life for you and therefore cares for your welfare more than they do for their own life, and someone who is being nice to you because it is a mutually beneficial interaction are two vastly different experiences.
So how does someone get to the point that their core motivation is to lay down their life for others when that is the exact opposite of self interest? You can’t motivate it with threats of hell or promises of heaven; the best that will achieve is conformity to an outward appearance. 1 John4:7-8 says:
“Everyone that loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
According to John, the only way to know God is to love. God is love, so you cannot relate to him if your motivation is only self interest. Followers of Jesus love because they want to know God. When they are faced with a need that can only be met by putting aside self interest, they are also faced with the reality that their pathway to God lies through love for that person. God loves that person, their need is palpable to him. The Christian then can only relate to God if their heartbeat is changed to the same rhythm as that of God’s.
The difference between the two motivations is fundamental. The motivation to care for someone without God only occurs when circumstances permit self interest to align with concern for the other. The motivation for the Christian is independent of circumstances. The Christian that longs to know God, who has accepted Jesus’ call to ‘take up his cross’ understanding that the cross is the failures, the suffering and the disgrace of the world around them – the Christian will give whatever it takes because their one deepest longing lies in the direction of the need. Until they can identify with the broken person, “weep with those who weep”, carry their burdens and care about them more than they care about themselves they cannot relate to the God they long to know. Getting to heaven is no part of the consideration for a Christian because the crux of Christianity is the cross.
And this is where we get to Easter. The historical fact that Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be God, allowed himself to be tortured and crucified then looked out on the people that had nailed him to the beams and said “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”; this fact removes all compulsion from Christianity. Any use of guilt to motivate is opposite to Christianity because of the cross. We are forgiven before we even fall; all that is asked is acceptance.
So what decisions does this give us if we want our faith to be rational? Either decision is a faith decision, but it is only rational if it is undertaken with the understanding of its implications. The implications of each are far reaching – rejection of God is an assertion that there is no higher purpose than self interest. Self interest can create order and peace when there is no competition for resources, but where competition exists, self interest equates to natural selection and the poor and disadvantaged will always lose. In contrast, the decision to accept Jesus’ claim of Godhood is an assertion that the ultimate purpose of life is to reconnect with this person, to learn to lay down our lives for others. There is no compulsion in that; only the hope that we may see a hint of our God. There is so often no blinding revelation; only a whisper that the wind is moving and a change is coming. It does not promise deliverance from the pain of the world but urges us to enter it more deeply – all with the promise that we will see the face of the one we love. It is a harsh world, but in the words of CS Lewis:
“All the pages of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so.”
Irrational faith on the other hand is far more common. It is far more common that Christians do not embrace the central purpose of their lives as being the need to reconnect with the God of Love. History is a dark list of failures on that count, with the occasional light breaking through. William Wilberforce and the abolition of slavery, Reverend Martin Luther King and the heroic battle for social justice in America. We forget that Jesus did say that the road was narrow and few are walking on it. As a result, it’s not hard to understand how Ghandi was able to say:
“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
Irrational faith amongst atheists is equally common. Does the average atheist recognise that qualities like honesty, compassion and justice are not good, just useful under certain circumstances? Have they examined their contributions to charity in light of the fact that the world’s population is growing exponentially but its resources are not? Are they aware that if those other nations take their fair share of resources then no one will be affluent? Are they aware that the selfish policies of our governments in regard to energy, trade, environment and other global concerns are ‘necessary evils’ if we want to maintain self interest? The new atheist utopia is new because it is a luxury of the rich. Self interest does not produce peace without affluence.
Having said that, I suggest that blaming atheism for the fall of love in the world is too easy. Much too easy when so much of the ‘church’ does not exhibit a rational faith and therefore occupies a place where some can far too easily slip into the great wrongs of the past. Atheism combined with wise leadership can produce happy, caring communities amongst the wealthy, and either overt or insidiously cruel dealings amongst those who want to be wealthy. Christianity by Christians that don’t want to ‘carry the cross’ of other’s burdens however produces the same violence, greed and cruelty; only in this case it is justified as ‘the will of God’. The first pathway is human nature; the second pathway is evil.
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“If might is right then love has no place in this world. It may be so, it may be so; but I do not have the strength to live in a world like that.”
Father Gabriel, The Mission