100 Sermon Illustrations on Skepticism

[A skeptical/psychological assessment of religious belief]

Is religious belief a mere leap into irrationality as many skeptics assume? Psychology suggests that there may be more to belief than the suspension of reason.

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Religious beliefs and practices are found in all human groups and go back to the very beginnings of human culture. What makes religion so ‘natural’? A common temptation is to search for the origin of religion in general human urges, for instance in people’s wish to escape misfortune or mortality or their desire to understand the universe. However, these accounts are often based on incorrect views about religion (see table 1) and the psychological urges are often merely postulated. Recent findings in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience offer a more empirical approach, focused on the mental machinery activated in acquiring and representing religious concepts.[1]

COMMON BELIEFS ABOUT RELIGION, WITH COUNTERARGUMENTS:

Religion answers people’s metaphysical questions

Religious thoughts are typically activated when people deal with

concrete situations (this crop, that disease, this new birth, this dead

body, etc.)

Religion is about a transcendent God

It is about a variety of agents: ghouls, ghosts, spirits, ancestors,

gods, etc., in direct interaction with people

Religion allays anxiety

It generates as much anxiety as it allays: vengeful ghosts, nasty

spirits and aggressive gods are as common as protective deities

Religion was created at a specific time in human history

There is no reason to think that the various kinds of thoughts we call

“religious” all appeared in human cultures at the same time

Religion is about explaining natural phenomena

Most religious explanations of natural phenomena actually explain little

but produce salient mysteries

Religion is about explaining mental phenomena (dreams, visions)

In places where religion is not invoked to explain them, such phenomena

are not seen as intrinsically mystical or supernatural

Religion is about morality and the salvation of the soul

The notion of salvation is particular to a few doctrines (Christianity

and doctrinal religions of Asia and the Middle East) and unheard of in

most other traditions

Religion creates social cohesion

Religious commitment can (under some conditions) be used as signal of

coalitional affiliation, but coalitions create social fission

(secession) as often as group integration

Religious claims are irrefutable; that is why people believe them

There are many irrefutable statements that no one believes; what makes

some of them plausible to some people is what we need to explain

Religion is irrational/superstitious (therefore not worthy of study)

Commitment to imagined agents does not really relax or suspend ordinary

mechanisms of belief formation; indeed it can provide important evidence

for their functioning (and therefore should be studied attentively) [9]

The first thing to understand about religion is that it does not activate one particular capacity in the mind, a “religious module” or system that would create the complex set of beliefs and norms we usually call religion. On the contrary, religious representations are sustained by a whole variety of different systems, of which I will describe some presently. A second important point is that all these systems are parts of our regular mental equipment, religion or no religion. In other words, belief in religion activates mental systems involved in a whole variety of non-religious domains. These two points have important consequences for our understanding of why there is some kind of religion in all human cultures, why religion is so easy to acquire and transmit.

When thinking about religion, one can make a number of very tempting mistakes, some of which are summarized in table 1. Here I want to discuss one particular view of religion, popular among skeptics, that I call the “sleep of reason” interpretation. According to this view, people have religious beliefs because they fail to reason properly. If only they grounded their reasoning in sound logic or rational order, they would not have supernatural beliefs, including superstitions and religion. I think this view is misguided, for several reasons; because it assumes a dramatic difference between religious and commonsense ordinary thinking, where there isn’t one; because it suggests that belief is a matter of deliberate weighing of evidence, which is generally not the case; because it implies that religious concepts could be eliminated by mere argument, which is implausible; and most importantly because it obscures the real reasons why religion is so extraordinarily widespread in human cultures.

RELIGION AS THE “SLEEP OF REASON”

There is a long and respectable tradition of explaining religion as the consequence of a flaw in mental functioning. Because people do not think much or not very well, the argument goes, they let all sorts of unwarranted beliefs clutter their mental furniture. In other words, there is religion around because people fail to take prophylactic measures against beliefs, for one of the following reasons:

PEOPLE ARE SUPERSTITIOUS, THEY WILL BELIEVE ANYTHING. People are naturally prepared to believe all sorts of accounts of strange or counter-intuitive phenomena. Witness their enthusiasm for UFOs as opposed to scientific cosmology, for alchemy instead of chemistry, for urban legends instead of hard news. Religious concepts are both cheap and sensational; they are easy to understand and rather exciting to entertain.

RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS ARE IRREFUTABLE. Most incorrect or incoherent claims are easily refuted by experience or logic but religious concepts are different. They invariably describe processes and agents whose existence could never be verified and are consequently never refuted. As there is no evidence against most religious claims, people have no obvious reason to stop believing them.

REFUTATION IS MORE DIFFICULT THAN BELIEF. It takes greater effort to challenge and rethink established notions than just accept them. Besides, in most domains of culture we just absorb other people’s notions. Religion is no exception. If everyone round about you says that there are invisible dead people around, and everyone acts accordingly, it would take a much greater effort to try and verify such claims than it takes to accept them, if only provisionally.

I find all these arguments unsatisfactory. Not that they are false: religious claims are indeed beyond verification. People do like sensational supernatural tales better than banal stories and they generally spend little time rethinking every bit of cultural information they acquire. But this cannot be a sufficient explanation for why people have the concepts they have, the beliefs they have, the emotions they have. The idea that we are often gullible or superstitious is certainly true; but we are not gullible in just every possible way. People do not generally strive to believe six impossible things before breakfast, as does the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS. Religious claims are irrefutable, but so are all sorts of other far-fetched notions that we never find in religion. Take for instance the claim that my right hand is made of green cheese except when people examine it, that God ceases to exist every Wednesday afternoon, that cars feel thirsty when their tanks run low, or that cats think in German. I could make up hundreds of such interesting and irrefutable beliefs that no one would ever consider as a possible belief.

Religion is NOT a domain where anything goes, where any strange belief could appear and get transmitted from generation to generation. On the contrary, there is only a limited catalogue of possible supernatural beliefs. Even without knowing the details of religious systems in other cultures, we all know that some notions are far more widespread than others. The idea that there are invisible souls of dead people lurking around is a very common one; the notion that people’s organs change position during the night is very rare. But both are equally irrefutable. So the problem, surely, is not just to explain how people can accept supernatural claims for which there is no strong evidence but also why they tend to represent and accept THESE particular supernatural claims rather than other possible ones. We should explain why they are so selective in the claims they adhere to.

Indeed, we should go even further and abandon the credulity-scenario altogether. Here is why: In this scenario, people relax ordinary standards of evidence for some reason. If you are against religion, you will say that this is because they are naturally credulous, or respectful of received authority, or too lazy to think for themselves, etc. If you are more sympathetic to religious beliefs, you will say that they open up their minds to wondrous truths beyond the reach of reason. But the point is that if you accept this account, you assume that people FIRST open up their minds, as it were; and THEN let it be filled by whatever religious beliefs are held by the people who influence them at that particular time. This is often the way we think of religious adhesion. There is a gate-keeper in the mind that either allows or rejects visitors, that is, other people’s concepts and beliefs. When the gate-keeper allows them in, these concepts and beliefs find a home in the mind and become the person’s own beliefs and concepts.

Our present knowledge of mental processes suggests that this scenario is highly misleading. People receive all sorts of information from all sorts of sources. ALL this information has some effect on the mind. Whatever you hear and whatever you see is perceived, interpreted, explained, and recorded by the various inference systems I described above. Every bit of information is fodder for the mental machinery. But then some pieces of information produce the effects that we identify as ‘belief’. That is, the person starts to recall them and use them to explain or interpret particular events; they may trigger specific emotions; they may strongly influence the person’s behavior. Note that I said SOME pieces of information, not all. This is where the selection occurs. In ways that a good psychology of religion should describe, it so happens that only some pieces of information trigger these effects, and not others; it also happens that the same piece of information will have these effects in some people but not others. So people do not have beliefs because they somehow made their minds receptive to belief and then acquired the material for belief. They have some beliefs because, among all the material they acquired, some of it triggered these particular effects.

A LIMITED CATALOGUE OF CONCEPTS

Do people know what their religious concepts are? This may seem an absurd question, but it is in fact an important question in the psychology of religion, whose true answer is probably in the negative. In most domains of mental activity, only a small part of what goes on in our brains is accessible to conscious inspection. For instance, we constantly produce grammatical sentences in our native tongue with impeccable pronunciation, often without any idea how this is done. Or we perceive the world around us as made up of three-dimensional objects, but we are certainly not aware of the ways in which our visual cortex transforms two retinal images into this rich impression of solid objects out there. The same goes for all our concepts and norms. We have some notion of what they are, but we certainly do not have full access to the way our minds create and sustain them. Most of the relevant mental machinery that sustains religious concepts is not consciously accessible.

People’s explicitly held, consciously accessible beliefs, as in other domains of cognition, only represent a fragment of the relevant processes. Indeed, experimental tests show that people’s actual religious concepts often diverge from what they believe they believe. This is why theologies, explicit dogmas, scholarly interpretations of religion cannot be taken as a reliable description of either the contents or the causes of people’s beliefs. For instance, psychologist Justin Barrett showed that Christians’ concept of God was much more complex than the believers themselves assumed. Most Christians would describe their notion of God in terms of transcendence and extraordinary physical and mental characteristics. God is everywhere, attends to everything at the same time. However, subtle experimental tasks reveal that, when they are not reflecting upon their own beliefs, these same people use another concept of God, as a human-like agent with a particular viewpoint, a particular position and serial attention. God considers one problem and then another. Now that concept is mostly tacit. It drives people’s thoughts about particular events, episodes of interaction with God, but it is not accessible to people as “their belief.” In other words, people do not believe what they believe they believe. [2]

A systematic investigation of these tacit concepts reveals that notions of religious agency, despite important cultural differences, are very similar the world over. There is a small repertoire of possible types of supernatural characters, many of whom are found in folktales and other minor cultural domains, though some of them belong to the important gods or spirits or ancestors of “religion.” Most of these agents are explicitly defined as having counterintuitive physical or biological properties that violate general expectations about agents. They are sometimes undetectable, or prescient, or eternal. The way people represent such agents activates the enormous but inaccessible machinery of “theory of mind” and other mental systems that provide us with a representation of agents, their intentions and their beliefs. All this is inaccessible to conscious inspection and requires no social transmission. On the other hand, what is socially transmitted are the counterintuitive features: this one is omniscient, that one can go through walls, another one was born of a virgin, etc.

More generally, we observe that most supernatural and religious concepts belong to a short catalogue of possible types of templates, with a common structure. All these concepts are informed by very general assumptions from broad categories such as PERSON, LIVING THING, or MAN-MADE OBJECT. A spirit is a special kind of person, a magic wand a special kind of artifact, a talking tree a special kind of plant. Such notions combine (i) specific features that violate some default expectations for the domain with (ii) expectations held by default as true of the entire domain. For example, the familiar concept of a GHOST combines (i) socially transmitted information about a physically counterintuitive person (disembodied, can go through walls, etc.), and (ii) spontaneous inferences afforded by the general person concept (the ghost perceives what happens, recalls what he or she perceived, forms beliefs on the basis of such perceptions, and intentions on the basis of beliefs).

These combinations of explicit violation and tacit inferences are culturally widespread and may constitute a memory optimum. Associations of this type are recalled better than more standard associations but also better than oddities that do not include domain-concept violations. The effect obtains regardless of exposure to a particular kind of supernatural beliefs, and it has been replicated in different cultures in Africa and Asia.

To sum up, we can explain human sensitivity to particular kinds of supernatural concepts as a by-product of the way human minds operate in ordinary, non-religious contexts. Because our assumptions about fundamental categories like PERSON, ARTIFACT, ANIMAL, etc., are so entrenched, violations of these assumptions create salient and memorable concepts.

EXCHANGE, MORALITY, AND MISFORTUNE

We can understand other aspects of religious concepts as by-products of these ordinary, non-religious mental systems that organize our everyday experience. For instance, consider the fact that in all human cultures, a great deal of attention is focused, not so much on the characteristics of supernatural agents, as on their interaction with the living. This is visible in the constant association between moral judgments and supernatural agency, as well as in the treatment of misfortune and contingency.

Developmental research shows the early appearance and systematic organization of moral intuitions: a set of precise feelings evoked by the consideration of actual and possible courses of action. Although people often state that their moral rules are a consequence of the existence (or of the decrees) of supernatural agents, it is quite clear that such intuitions are present, independent of religious concepts. Moral intuitions appear long before children represent the powers of supernatural agents, they appear in the same way in cultures where no one is much interested in supernatural agents, and in similar ways regardless of what kind of supernatural agents are locally important. Indeed, it is difficult to find evidence that religious teachings have any effect on people’s moral intuitions. Religious concepts do not change people’s moral intuitions but frame these intuitions in terms that make them easier to think about. For instance, in most human groups supernatural agents are thought to be INTERESTED PARTIES in people’s interactions. Given this assumption, having the intuition that an action is wrong becomes having the expectation that a personalized agent disapproves of it. The social consequences of the latter way of representing the situation are much clearer to the agent, as they are handled by specialized mental systems for social interaction. This notion of gods and spirits as interested parties is far more salient in people’s moral inferences than the notion of these agents as moral legislators or moral exemplars.

In the same way, the use of supernatural or religious explanations for misfortune may be a byproduct of a far more general tendency to see all salient occurrences in terms of social interaction. The ancestors can make you sick or ruin your plantations; God sends people various plagues. On the positive side, gods and spirits are also represented as protectors, guarantors of good crops, social harmony, etc. But why are supernatural agents construed as having such causal powers?

One of the most widespread explanations of mishaps and disorders, the world over, is in terms of witchcraft, the suspicion that some people (generally in the community) perform magical tricks to “steal” other people’s health, good fortune, or material goods. Concepts of witches are among the most widespread supernatural ones. In some places there are explicit accusations and the alleged witches must either prove their innocence or perform some special rituals to pay for their transgression. In most places the suspicion is a matter of gossip and rarely comes out in the open. You do not really need to have actual witches around to have very firm beliefs about the existence and powers of witches. Witchcraft is important because it seems to provide an “explanation” for all sorts of events: many cases of illness or other misfortune are spontaneously interpreted as evidence for the witches’ actions. Witchcraft beliefs are only one manifestation of a phenomenon that is found in many human groups, the interpretation of misfortune as a consequence of envy. For another such situation, consider the widespread beliefs in an “evil eye,” a spell cast by envious people against whoever enjoys some good fortune or natural advantage. Witchcraft and evil eye notions do not really belong to the domain of religion, but they show that, religious agents or not, there is a tendency to focus on the possible reasons for some agents to cause misfortune, rather than on the processes whereby they could do it.

For these occurrences that largely escape control, people focus on the supernatural agents’ feelings and intentions. The ancestors were angry, the gods demanded a sacrifice, or the god is just cruel and playful. But there is more to that. The way these reasons are expressed is, in a great majority of cases, supported by our SOCIAL EXCHANGE intuitions. People focus on an agent’s reasons for causing them harm, but note that these “reasons” always have to do with people’s INTERACTION with the agents in question. People refused to follow God’s orders; they polluted a house against the ancestors’ prescriptions; they had more wealth or good fortune than their God-decreed fate allocated them; and so on. All this supports what anthropologists have been saying for a long time on the basis of evidence gathered in the most various cultural environments: Misfortune is generally interpreted in SOCIAL terms. But this familiar conclusion implies that the evolved cognitive resources people bring to the understanding of interaction should be crucial to their construal of misfortune.

Social interaction requires the operation of complex mental systems: to represent not just other people’s beliefs and their intentions, but also the extent to which they can be trusted, the extent to which they find us trustworthy, how social exchange works, how to detect cheaters, how to build alliances, and so on. These mental systems are largely inaccessible, only their output is consciously represented. Now interaction with supernatural agents, through sacrifice, ritual, prayer, etc., is framed by those systems. Although the agents are said to be very special, the way people think about interaction with them is directly mapped from their interaction with actual people.

PRECAUTION, RITUAL, AND OBSESSION

Magic and ritual the world over obsessively rehash the same themes, in particular “concerns about pollution and purity [ ... ] contact avoidance; special ways of touching; fears about immanent, serious sanctions for rule violations; a focus on boundaries and thresholds.” [3] Anthropologists have long documented, not just these particular themes of magical and ritual thinking, but also the more abstract principles that organize them: (1) dangerous elements or substances are invisible; (2) any contact (touching, kissing, ingesting) with such substances is dangerous; (3) the amount of substance is irrelevant (e.g., a drop of a sick person’s saliva is just as dangerous as a cupful of the stuff). [4]

People spontaneously apply these principles in situations of potential contact with sources of pathogens and toxins: dirt, faeces, rotten food, bugs, diseased or decayed organisms. The three principles are particularly apposite when dealing with such situations, as most pathogens are invisible, use diverse vectors for transmission, and there is no dose effect. So it may be that “magical” thoughts are an extension of non-magical inferences about possible sources of contagion. [5] In this sense, many intuitions about magical “pollution,” “defilement,” etc., simply hijack, as it were, cognitive resources used in non-symbolic, non-religious domains.

More generally, rituals are usually performed with a sense of urgency, an intuition that great danger would be incurred by not performing them. These themes are also characteristic of obsessive- compulsive disorders (OCD). As many anthropologists and psychologists have noted, the themes of ritual, as summarized above, and those of personal pathological obsessions are almost exactly similar. The particular emotional tenor of rituals might derive from their association with neural systems dedicated to the detection and avoidance of invisible hazards. Neuro-imaging studies of OCD patients generally show a significant increase of activity in cortical and limbic areas dedicated to the processing of danger signals. [6] So the pathology might consist in a failure to inhibit or keep ‘off-line’ a set of normal neural reactions to potential sources of danger. We are still far from understanding to what extent this network is also involved in the production of “mild,” controlled, socially transmitted notions about purity and the need for magical ritual. But it seems that the salience of a particular range of ritual themes to do with hidden danger and noxious contact [7] and a susceptibility to derive rigid, emotionally vivid sequences of compulsory actions from such themes, may be spectacular cultural byproducts of neural function.

WHAT MAKES RELIGION “NATURAL”

For lack of space, I cannot pursue this list of the mental systems (usually activated in non-religious contexts) that sustain the salience and plausibility of religious notions. To be exhaustive, one should also mention the close association between ritual participation and group affiliation, the role of our coalitional thinking in creating religious identity, the specific role of death and dead bodies in religious thinking, and many other aspects of religion. Psychological investigation into these domains reveals the same organization described above. A variety of mental systems, functionally specialized for the treatment of particular (non-religious) domains of information, are activated by religious notions and norms, in such a way that these notions and norms become highly salient, easy to acquire, easy to remember and communicate, as well as intuitively plausible.

The lesson of the cognitive study of religion is that religion is rather “natural” in the sense that it consists of by-products of normal mental functioning. Each of the systems described here (a sense for social exchange, a specific mechanism for detecting animacy in surrounding objects, an intuitive fear of invisible contamination, a capacity for coalitional thinking, etc.) is the plausible result of selective pressures on cognitive organization. In other words, these capacities are the outcome of evolution by natural selection.

In other words, religious thought activates cognitive capacities that developed to handle non-religious information. In this sense, religion is very similar to music and very different from language. Every normal human being acquires a natural language and that language is extraordinarily similar to that of the surrounding group. It seems plausible that our capacity for language acquisition is an adaptation. [8] By contrast, though all human beings can effortlessly recognize music and religious concepts, there are profound individual differences in the extent to which they enjoy music or adhere to religious concepts. The fact that some religious notions have been found in every human group does not mean that all human beings are naturally religious. Vast numbers of human beings do without it altogether, like for instance the majority of Europeans for several centuries.

Is religion “in the genes,” and could it be considered a result of natural selection? Some evolutionary biologists think that is so, because the existence of religious beliefs may provide some advantages for individuals or groups that hold them. The evidence for this is, however, still incomplete. It may seem more prudent and empirically justified to say that religion is a very probable byproduct of various brain systems that are the result of evolution by natural selection.

CAN WE REASON RELIGION AWAY?

Taking all this into account, it would seem that the “sleep of reason” interpretation of religion is less than compelling. It is quite clear that explicit religious belief requires a suspension of the sound rules according to which most scientists evaluate evidence. But so does most ordinary thinking, of the kind that sustains our commonsense intuitions about the surrounding environment. More surprising, religious notions are not at all a separate realm of cognitive activity. They are firmly rooted in the deepest principles of cognitive functioning. First, religious concepts would not be salient if they did not violate some of our most entrenched intuitions (e.g., that agents have a position in space, that live beings grow old and die, etc.). Second, religious concepts would not subsist if they did not confirm many intuitive principles. Third, most religious norms and emotions are parasitic upon systems that create very similar norms (e.g., moral intuitions) and emotions (e.g., a fear of invisible contaminants) in non-religious contexts.

In this sense, religion is vastly more “natural” than the “sleep of reason” argument would suggest. People do not adhere to concepts of invisible ghosts or ancestors or spirits because they SUSPEND ordinary cognitive resources, but rather because they use these cognitive resources in a context for which they were not designed in the first place. However, the “tweaking” of ordinary cognition that is required to sustain religious thought is so small that one should not be surprised if religious concepts are so widespread and so resistant to argument. To some extent, the situation is similar to domains where science has clearly demonstrated the limits or falsity of our common intuitions. We now know that solid objects are largely made up of empty space, that our minds are only billions of neurons firing in ordered ways, that some physical processes can go backwards in time, that species do not have an eternal essence, that gravitation is a curvature of space-time. Yet even scientists go through their daily lives with an intuitive commitment to solid objects being full of matter, to people having non-physical minds, to time being irreversible, to cats being essentially different from dogs, and to objects falling down because they are heavy.

In a sense, the cognitive study of religion ends up justifying a common intuition, best expressed by Jonathan Swift’s dictum that “you do not reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into.” The point of studying this scientifically is to show to what extent we can expect religious notions to be stable and salient in human cultures, not just now but for a long time to come.

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Passages in the first part of the article are modified from Chapter 1 of Boyer, P., RELIGION EXPLAINED: EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT, 2001, New York, Basic Books.

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NOTES

1. Boyer, P. 2001. RELIGION EXPLAINED: EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. New York: Basic Books, 403.

2. Barrett, J.L., and F.C. Keil. 1996. Conceptualizing a nonnatural entity: Anthropomorphism in God concepts. COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 31(3): 219-247.

3. Dulaney, S., and A.P. Fiske. 1994. Cultural rituals and obsessive-compulsive disorder: Is there a common psychological mechanism? ETHOS 22(3): 243-283.

4. Nemeroff, C.J. 1995. Magical thinking about illness virulence: Conceptions of germs from “safe” versus “dangerous” others. HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY 14(2): 147-151.

5. Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. 1999. Toward an evolutionary taxonomy of treatable conditions. JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY 108(3): 453-464.

6. Rauch, S.L., et al., 2001. Probing striato-thalamic function in obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette syndrome using neuroimaging methods. ADVANCES IN NEUROLOGY 85: 207-24.

7. Fiske, A.P., and N. Haslam. 1997. Is obsessive-compulsive disorder a pathology of the human disposition to perform socially meaningful rituals? Evidence of similar content. JOURNAL OF NERVOUS & MENTAL DISEASE 185(4): 211-222.

8. Pinker, S. 1995. THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT. 1st HarperPerennial ed. New York: HarperPerennial, 494.

9. Table 1: DO’S AND DON’T’S IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION. Table 1 is taken from Boyer P. “Religious thought and behavior as by-products of brain function.” TRENDS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCES 2003. 7(3): p. 119-124.

[A skeptic’s take on souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens and other invisible powers]

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I define as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind — the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others — we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agent­icity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agent­icity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Aliens are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati. Even the belief that government can impose top-down measures to rescue the economy is a form of agenticity, with President Barack Obama being touted as “the one” with almost messianic powers who will save us.

There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them, well documented in the new book SUPERSENSE (HarperOne, 2009) by University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood. Examples: children believe that the sun can think and follows them around; because of such beliefs, they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer’s sweater, believing that “evil” is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers’s cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. Subjects watching geometric shapes with eye spots interacting on a computer screen conclude that they represent agents with moral intentions.

“Many highly educated and intelligent individuals experience a powerful sense that there are patterns, forces, energies and entities operating in the world,” Hood explains. “More important, such experiences are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence, which is why they are supernatural and unscientific. The inclination or sense that they may be real is our supersense.”

We are natural-born supernaturalists.

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Note: This article was originally published with the title, “Agenticity”.

Joy Davidman, a brilliant writer, was at the time of her death the wife of C. S. Lewis. She was raised by parents who were militant nonbelievers. She graduated with top honors from Hunter College and began her adult life with a kind of cynical sophistication and skepticism that expects the worst and believes the least. She disdained religion and morality. In her arrogant, intellectual pride, she conceived of them as havens for the neurotic, ideas on which only the untutored would depend. Peak experiences of poetic insight were dismissed as some glandular disturbance that science would in time explain.

Then one day her husband, who had been growing more and more depressed, called from another city and told her that he was losing his mind, that life no longer mattered to him, and then sent her into shock and despair by abruptly hanging up and saying no more. Joy Davidman was in the country with her children. She didn’t know where her husband was in the city, so she was desperate, hopeless. All she could do was telephone some friends in the city to help, and then wait in quiet desperation and despair.

Then something happened. In her words, “There was another person with me in the room - a presence so real that all my previous life was by comparison mere shadowplay. . . . I think I must have been the world’s most astonished atheist. My awareness of Christ’s presence was not conjured up to bolster me about my husband. No, it was terror - terror, and ecstasy, repentance and rebirth.”

Even in the life of a supposed atheist, God works with loving patience and long-suffering grace to reveal Himself as the one who cares for each one of us, who is concerned about our coming out and our going in, who notes the fall of a sparrow.

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A different version from The Rev. Ed Hird, Rector, St. Simon’s Church, North Vancouver, Canada:

Joy Davidman, a self-declared atheistic Communist of Jewish heritage, loved to read the NARNIA CHRONICLES to her sons. In the process, she came to faith in Aslan, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah (Revelation 5:5). Looking back, Joy Davidman commented: “My first published poem was called “Resurrection” — a sort of private argument with Jesus, attempting to convince him (and myself) that he had never risen. I wrote it at Easter, of all possible seasons, and never guessed why.”

As Joy Davidman wrote in ‘The Longest Way Round’, God “had been stalking me for a very long time, waiting for his moment; he crept nearer so silently that I never knew he was there. Then, all at once, he sprang. For the first time in my life I felt helpless; for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, ‘the master of my fate’. All my defenses — the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God — went down momentarily. And God came in. Since childhood, I had been pouring half my energy into the task of keeping him out. When it was over I found myself on my knees, praying. I think I must have been the world’s most astonished atheist.”

C.S. Lewis once wrote to a friend,

“The trouble with me is lack of faith. I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God’s existence: but the irrational deadweight of my own skeptical habits, and the spirit of this age, and the care of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address. Mind you I don’t think so – the whole of my reasonable mind is convinced: but I often feel so.”

________

Letters to Arthur Greeves, Dec. 24, 1930, 398-399

The true and living God desires to be known and has made himself known. That makes all the difference. True theology is not explaining the unknowable, but coming to know the God who wants us to know him. Theology is about knowledge — indeed, about the knowledge that matters most of all.

________

Terry Sanderson is president of Britain’s National Secular Society, so it is hardly news that he has little time for the efforts of theologians. Writing in THE GUARDIAN [London], Sanderson dismisses theology as a form of knowledge. Theologians may talk, he suggests, but they are really not saying anything.

In his words, “theology is drivel.” Thus, any attention given to theology — even to refute it — is just wasted effort. Efforts to understand theology are “hopeless,” he insists.

In order to bolster his claim, Sanderson cites the late science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, who wrote, “Theology ... is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.”

Sanderson also calls H. L. Mencken to testify: “For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.”

Well, at least he didn’t equivocate. Heinlein and Mencken had their say, and to their assessments of theology Sanderson adds his own: “Theology is an excuse for grown men to spend their lives trying to convince themselves, and others, that ridiculous fairy tales are true.”

Sanderson doesn’t even believe in the so-called “big questions” about life and its meaning. “My problem is these questions don’t have a answer,” he asserts, “no matter how long you think about them and however much you try to bring God into the equation.” Sanderson prefers Gertrude Stein’s succinct worldview: “The answer is: there is no answer.”

And yet, for someone who says theology is not worth reading, he seems to have at least made some effort to read the works of Rowan Williams, who was an academic theologian before becoming the Archbishop of Canterbury. Sanderson goes so far as to cite a rather lengthy paragraph from one of Williams’ sermons. Williams, he concedes, is thought to be intelligent. “He is said to have a brain the size of Jupiter because he can produce convoluted writing that nobody with their feet in reality can comprehend.”

Williams, whose tepid leadership of the Anglican Communion and refusal to call liberal churches in the United States and Canada to account has brought his communion to the point of break-up, is quite capable of writing incomprehensible prose. That skill is shared by far too many academics in every field. But Sanderson’s central point is not that this particular theologian is incomprehensible, but that theology itself is incomprehensible, and that is a very different matter.

Theology is worse than useless, he complains, because it contains no knowledge. He compared theology to modern science: “if science disappeared from human memory, we would soon be living in caves again. If theology disappeared from human memory, no one would notice.”

Now, a careful thinker might quickly point out the illogical and absurd argument Sanderson makes here. By simple logical fact, no one notices what one has forgotten — otherwise one has not forgotten. But Sanderson’s main point is clear enough.

On the one hand, what makes Terry Sanderson’s argument so untenable is the fact that one cannot explain human history in general, and the history of Western civilization in particular, without endless reference to the fact that human beings have indeed believed in God and that these beliefs did and do matter. Like it or not, one cannot explain our culture and civilization without constant reference to theology.

But Sanderson’s larger point is more serious and important. He is truly certain that theology has no claim upon knowledge. In other words, theologians are not talking about any reality. Theology is just a mind game played by individual theologians or theological communities.

Oddly enough, Sanderson’s argument is championed by some within the theological academy. A good many radical and revisionist theologians openly accept Sanderson’s claims. They, too, argue that theology offers no knowledge, only potential meaning. Their God is not a self-revealing, self-existent person, but a symbol or a literary character.

Feminist theologian Janet Martin Soskice describes theological realists as “those who, while aware of the inability of any theological formulation to catch the divine realities, none the less accept that there ARE divine realities that theologians, however ham-fistedly, are trying to catch.” In other words, she is explaining to her readers that when some theologians speak of God, they really believe that there IS a God of whom they are speaking.

It says a very great deal about the state of so much academic theology today that Soskice had to explain that some theologians really believe that there is a God and that we can truly know him.

Far too many academic theologians are in basic agreement with Terry Sanderson, but they take their paychecks and attend their academic meetings anyway. For them, theology is just one more discipline in the theory-laden world of the modern academy.

But if theologians are not making a claim to knowledge — if theology is just looking for a non-existent black cat in a dark room — then shut it all down and spend the money on something useful.

Authentic Christian theology begins and ends with the knowledge of God — a true knowledge that God has graciously revealed to us in his Word. Without the gift of God’s self-revelation, we would be groping in that dark room for a black cat. However, the fact that God has revealed himself changes everything.

The true and living God desires to be known and has made himself known. That makes all the difference. True theology is not explaining the unknowable, but coming to know the God who wants us to know him. Theology IS about knowledge — indeed, about the knowledge that matters most of all.

Don’t worry about the black cat in the dark room. Our task is to know, serve, and worship the God who is there, and has made himself known.

________

Terry Sanderson, “Theology — Truly a Naked Emperor,” THE GUARDIAN [London], Wednesday, March 26, 2010.

J. M. Soskice, “Theological Realism,” in THE RATIONALITY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF, edited by W. J. Abraham and S. W. Holtzer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), page 108.

There is a lot of debate in some sectors of the church about the nature of Scripture, especially in the categories of inerrancy and infallibility. Invariably this discussion turns to the nature of prophecy, and the theological implications various ways of understanding Scripture have on how prophecy should be viewed.

In most cases, the discussion ranges widely, but largely outside the biblical text itself. That is, the actual narratives, oracles, and sermons from the prophetic books are not closely examined, or often even referenced, in relation to these debates. The doctrinal positions are too often drawn up and assertions made about the Bible from assumptions and in contexts apart from Scripture without looking closely at the biblical evidence itself from a variety of perspectives (see The Modern Inerrancy Debate). The result tends to produce positions that sound good as doctrinal statements, but which do not correspond to the features of the biblical text.

I simply think that positions about the nature of Scripture ought to be developed in dialog with the text about which the assertions are made, as well as with various methods of understanding that text. If they do not, there is great risk that the assertions will be comforting, but will be about something other than Scripture. I offer the following as a short example of a particular feature of prophetic writing that I think needs to be taken seriously in how we develop, articulate, and defend our views of the nature of Scripture.

The example to consider is from the book of Ezekiel. The middle section of Ezekiel contains a series of what are known as “Oracles Against Foreign Nations” (chs. 25-32). All of the major prophetic books contain these. They are indictments against surrounding nations, often listing their crimes against humanity and sins against God, as a way to universalize accountability to God. They are highly stylized and poetic, but often contain specific predictions of the judgment of God against those nations for their self-sufficient arrogance, pride, and worship of false gods. Often the nations are evaluated specifically in terms of how they have treated Israel as God’s people.

An unusual feature of these oracles in Ezekiel is that they are dated, rather than simply being stereotyped and stylized generic judgment speeches. This relates these prophetic oracles to particular historical circumstances, which also explains why so many of them are very specific in terms of historical predictions. Ezekiel was clearly interpreting history as it was unfolding in front of him in light of what he understood about God.

The oracles fall between 588 and 586 BC, with one dated 571 BC. This was an extremely traumatic and pivotal time in Israel’s history. There was a lot happening, but a brief summary will serve our purpose (see The Rise of Babylon and Exile). The Babylonians had consolidated their empire through a series of strong leaders, and were in the process of incorporating most of the Eastern Mediterranean into that empire, with dreams of extending their control into Egypt.

Israel lay between Babylon and Egypt and was in great peril. Compounding the fact that Israel was far outclassed militarily, there had been a series of weak and godless leaders since the aborted attempt at reform by Josiah in 621 BC. This had undermined the nation’s commitment to God, and allowed a false sense of security to develop that prevented them from hearing prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel (“[they] have ears, but do not hear,” Jer 5:21, cf. 25:4).

The Babylonians destroyed the Assyrian empire in 612 BC, and pushed south toward Egypt, and Israel. Because of failed political maneuvering, Israel became a vassal state of Babylon in 605 BC. There was discontent and simmering nationalism, however, which led to rebellion against Babylonian control. After years of struggle, the Babylonians took Jerusalem in 598 BC, deported a number of Israelite leaders to Babylon, and set a puppet king over Israel. Unrest continued with political intrigue that included rebellion prompted by attempted alliances with several surrounding nations.

Finally, in 586 the Babylonians sent a large army into Palestine to put an end to the rebellions. As a result Jerusalem was totally destroyed and a second wave of deportees was taken to Babylon. Several other nations were also disciplined for their part in the ongoing turmoil.

Ezekiel was among the first deportees and probably wrote much of the book from the perspective of exile in Babylon between the first deportation in 598 and the destruction of Jerusalem in 586. The oracles we are looking at came from the period immediately preceding the destruction of Jerusalem as Nebuchadnezzar marched south from Assyria along the Mediterranean coast via Tyre and Sidon before he turned toward Jerusalem on his way to Egypt.

The specific oracle under consideration is against the Phoenician city of Tyre in Ezekiel 26, and is dated 586. To understand this oracle, we also need to know a little about Tyre. Tyre was a major seaport for the world renowned sailors and merchants, the Phoenicians. It was a wealthy city since it was the primary commercial seaport in the Eastern Mediterranean linking shipping to Cyprus, Italy, Greece, Spain, and North Africa with land caravans from Arabia, Babylon, Persia, and as far east as India.

At this time, the main part of Tyre was an island city about a mile off the coast of what is now Lebanon. There were smaller villages on the mainland, called “daughters of Tyre,” but the city itself was an offshore seaport. Because of its location, it could be easily defended and could be re-supplied from the sea.

Now, note Ezekiel’s prediction about the destruction of Tyre at the hands of the Babylonians.

26:3 therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I am against you, O Tyre, and will bring up many nations against you, as the sea brings up its waves. 26:4 They shall destroy the walls of Tyre, and break down her towers; and I will scrape her soil from her, and make her a bare rock. 26:5 She shall be in the midst of the sea a place for the spreading of nets; for I have spoken, says the Lord GOD; and she shall become a spoil to the nations; 26:6 and her daughters on the mainland shall be slain by the sword. Then they will know that I am the LORD.

This is a rather unambiguous prediction. The city will be totally destroyed, including the city walls and defensive towers. The city would be leveled like a rock. In typical prophetic fashion, there is an interesting word play here, since the Hebrew word for Tyre means “rock,” the city of “Rock” will become a bare rock. The mainland villages (“her daughters”) will also be destroyed. This is all put under the rubric of the prophetic word that comes from God: “I have spoken” and “says Yahweh.” All of this will be a sign that God is indeed God.

But the oracle goes on:

26:7 “For thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I will bring upon Tyre from the north Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, king of kings, with horses and chariots, and with horsemen and a host of many soldiers. 26:8 He will slay with the sword your daughters on the mainland; he will set up a siege wall against you, and throw up a mound against you, and raise a roof of shields against you. 26:9 He will direct the shock of his battering rams against your walls, and with his axes he will break down your towers. 26:10 His horses will be so many that their dust will cover you; your walls will shake at the noise of the horsemen and wagons and chariots, when he enters your gates as one enters a city which has been breached. 26:11 With the hoofs of his horses he will trample all your streets; he will slay your people with the sword; and your mighty pillars will fall to the ground. 26:12 They will make a spoil of your riches and a prey of your merchandise; they will break down your walls and destroy your pleasant houses; your stones and timber and soil they will cast into the midst of the waters. 26:13 And I will stop the music of your songs, and the sound of your lyres shall be heard no more. 26:14 I will make you a bare rock; you shall be a place for the spreading of nets; you shall never be rebuilt; for I the LORD have spoken, says the Lord GOD.

In case there was any ambiguity in the first oracle, this one is even more specific. It is not just “many nations” who will plunder Tyre. It will be a specific nation, Babylonia, and a specific king, Nebuchadrezzar (sometimes called Nebuchadnezzar). It seems fairly obvious here that Ezekiel had heard reports of the Babylonian march southward, and he predicts, as a prophet of God, what will unfold as Nebuchadnezzar’s army punishes the nations for their rebellion. They will lay siege to Tyre, take the city and destroy it, kill its inhabitants, and loot its riches (which was a way to pay soldiers in the ancient world). He goes so far as to say that after its destruction, Tyre will never again be rebuilt. There are actually a series of such oracles that continue through chapter 28.

So, here is a very specific prediction coming from a particular historical circumstance, but couched in all the traditional prophetic formulae that say this is a “word” from the Lord. The problem is that very little of this actually came to pass! In fact, it badly missed how history actually unfolded.

We know from other historical records, including the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, that Nebuchadnezzar did, indeed, take and destroy the mainland part of the city, and then lay siege to the island city of Tyre. However, the Babylonian army was a land based army with no ships, which made it very difficult to lay siege effectively to an island fortress that had an armada of ships at its disposal. Nebuchadnezzar spent 13 years in the siege of Tyre and was never able to take the city. He finally abandoned the attempt sometime in 573/572 and put his resources into the invasion of Egypt, having already destroyed the Israelite stronghold in Jerusalem.

The city of Tyre did pass into Babylonian vassalage, but that was the result of a negotiated settlement that required tribute, a form of taxation (or extortion). The city of Tyre was not destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar or the Babylonians, and in fact continued to thrive as a commercial center.

Now, some who want to maintain the absolute inerrancy of biblical prophecy point to the fact that Tyre was eventually destroyed, and so the accuracy of Ezekiel’s prophecy is vindicated. Tyre was, indeed, destroyed in 332 BC by the Greek Alexander of Macedon (Alexander the Great). He used the ingenious tactic of using rubble from the destroyed mainland settlements to build a causeway to the island, providing a land bridge for his troops. Since that time, Tyre has no longer been an island, now connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus.

So, the inerrantists would claim, the prophecy was really a long range prediction even though Ezekiel himself thought it was a short range prediction. But this raises another whole series of serious problems, and sounds far more like the rationalization of a position in spite of contrary evidence than it does a careful analysis of the biblical text. There are still several aspects of the Ezekiel prophecy unresolved.

1) Even though Alexander did, indeed, destroy parts of the city of Tyre, it was immediately rebuilt and became an important Greek, and later Roman, seaport. It still exists today as a resort city of Lebanon. This clearly violates Ezekiel’s judgment that it would never be rebuilt and become a bare rock upon which to dry fishnets.

2) There is no internal rationale for changing the specific reference to Babylonians and assume that it really means Greeks, or to change Nebuchadnezzar to Alexander. If the text were inerrant in the way that many claim it to be, then we should be able to read “Greeks” and “Alexander” here. Again, this sounds suspiciously like an attempt to preserve a certain view of prophecy that the evidence will not support.

3) There are serious implications about the nature of Scripture and revelation (and God!) involved here. To maintain the “long range” view, Ezekiel, facing one urgent historical situation for which the people needed an immediate word from the Lord, actually and unknowingly addressed a situation 250 years in the future, spoke of a nation that had not yet emerged on the scene of world history, referred to persons and events for which he could have no direct knowledge, and predicted world events that involved huge shifts in how history unfolded from his own time. In other words, the only way this position can be maintained is to affirm both that history is predetermined, and that Scripture is verbally given to the prophet without any awareness on his part of the actual meaning of what he was being told (100% God!). In fact, it even deceives him into thinking he was actually talking about his own situation when in fact he was talking about a situation centuries in the future. This, as it often does, assumes a certain theory of inspiration of Scripture in order to maintain its inerrancy, which is then used in a circular fashion, to confirm the same theories of inspiration (see Revelation and Inspiration of Scripture and God’s Foreknowledge, Predestination, and Human Freedom).

4) Even beyond that, there is some sense that Ezekiel was himself worse than in the dark about his own prophecy. He seems to have rather badly misunderstood his own message, because he seems to believe that he is talking about the Babylonians and Nebuchadnezzar, when in reality, according to this view, he is talking about the Greeks and Alexander. This raises other serious questions about how we at any time in history can understand God’s work in the world. This seems to make Scripture more obscure than it makes it more authoritative.

5) What good is a prophetic word, or Scripture, if it has little or no meaning for 200 or 1,000 or 2,000 years when the precise “fulfillment” finally comes about? This reduces God’s word to a puzzle to be solved, or something that has little relevance to ordinary living because there is no way to tell, until after the “fulfillment,” whether it has any meaning for today or not. It is not a living word that shapes how God’s people live their life as His people now, but is, at best, only a pregnant word with some potential that we may or may not understand, and may never live to see. The word of God is not redemptive for God’s people in on ongoing way, but is reduced to the level of proof to bolster our own criteria of validation.

All this says that to attempt to relate this prophecy to events 250 years later simply to vindicate a certain view of prophecy is not valid, and borders on not dealing with the biblical text honestly.

But there is even more compelling evidence from within Scripture itself, indeed, from Ezekiel himself, that this view is deficient. In 571 BC, two years or so after Nebuchadnezzar abandoned the siege of Tyre and it had become obvious to everyone that he would not be able to destroy the city, Ezekiel gives another prophecy concerning Tyre.

29:17 In the twenty-seventh year, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the word of the LORD came to me: 29:18 “Son of man, Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon made his army labor hard against Tyre; every head was made bald and every shoulder was rubbed bare; yet neither he nor his army got anything from Tyre to pay for the labor that he had performed against it. 29:19 Therefore thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I will give the land of Egypt to Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon; and he shall carry off its wealth and despoil it and plunder it; and it shall be the wages for his army. 29:20 I have given him the land of Egypt as his recompense for which he labored, because they worked for me, says the Lord GOD.

Here, Ezekiel rather frankly acknowledges Nebuchadnezzar’s failure to take Tyre even though he labored hard trying to do so (13 years!). So Ezekiel, seemingly without any embarrassment at the failure of his original prophecy, simply changed it after the fact to fit the historical situation as it had actually unfolded.

Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel saw the Babylonian invasion as part of the out working of the consequences of Israel’s sins and repeated failure to serve and trust God. While God had fought for Israel in the past, both prophets vigorously proclaim, “Not this time!” So the Babylonians are unwittingly serving the purposes of God in the world, and the prophets conceptualize them as actually in the employ of God. And if they are working for God, God needs to pay their wages. Since they did not get anything from Tyre for their labor, Ezekiel affirms that God will allow them to be paid from the riches of Egypt (29:20).

Now, we do not know from historical records whether the Babylonians ever sacked Egypt. History is silent on this point. But it doesn’t matter. The issue was never whether or not a certain historical event would unfold exactly in the specific way any particular prophet predicted that it would. History simply does not work that way, and that is not really the task of a prophet. The issue had always been the truth of what Ezekiel was proclaiming to the people about God and their responsibility and accountability to Him as their covenantal God. The prophet’s role was to help the people respond faithfully to God in their own time. So, Ezekiel could change his prediction, and even admit that he got it wrong, because, finally, the historical prediction was not his message!

What is even more amazing is that the community of faith, perceptive enough to know that this failure was in the Ezekiel tradition, did not attempt to gloss it over or change it to fit some modern ideas of inerrancy and the absolute infallibility of prophetic prediction to fit within a certain view of how God orders the world. In other words, the community of faith who collected together Ezekiel’s writings and oracles saw no problem in preserving this failure, even though they most likely knew about the criteria in Deuteronomy (18:22). They saw no problem because, I suggest, they understood that “prediction of the future” is not primarily what a prophet does, is not the final or only or most important test of a prophet of God, and because they had no need to establish or maintain any dimension of inerrancy.

And the important fact is, Ezekiel was right! He was not right about all of his historical predictions. But he was right in that the message he proclaimed about the nation of Israel, its responsibilities to God, and the consequences of their failure to respond to God in faithfulness was proven true in the flow of history (which is the heart of the Deuteronomy 18 passage). That is, the community could look back at Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, and understand that they had faithfully borne witness to God, even though virtually no one listened to them at the time. They knew that not every historical prediction, or even most of them, directly corresponded to some specific historical event. But the community understood Ezekiel’s proclamation about God and His work with humanity, as they verified it in their own historical experience, to be a faithful witness to God.

There are other examples of prophecy that could be used here. And there are other theological implications of this particular sequence. But perhaps this is enough to evoke some thought about how we develop views of Scripture, and prophecy in particular, that takes seriously the evidence within Scripture itself.

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Copyright © 2011, Dennis Bratcher, All Rights Reserved

Unless otherwise attributed, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.

We live in a confused and confusing age. Things once considered obviously true are now rejected. Things once considered unthinkable are now thought to be unquestionable. How should a Christian think?

In the state of Oregon, high school graduates will now no longer have to demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing, or arithmetic. The logic behind the suspension of the state standards, according to the governor, has to do with equity. Somehow, she missed that “helping” racial minorities by not giving them even the most basic tools for life is a different kind of bigotry altogether, one which Andrew Sullivan has called a bigotry of no expectations.

Then there’s the story of Michaela Kennedy Cuomo announcing to the world that she’s moved beyond identifying as a homosexual and bisexual, and even beyond pan-sexual, to now demi-sexual, meaning that she’s only attracted to those with whom she shares an emotional bond. The need to publicize each and every stop on a journey of identity tourism is an odd feature of our day. The idea that every feeling, attraction, or preference is in and of itself an identity, is a tragic feature of our day.

And in case anyone thinks we’ve reached the bottom of this slippery slope, a TikTok video has now resurfaced from last fall in which a young woman passionately explains what may be next. Instead of identifying as “he” or “she,” many now claim the words “kitty-,” “pup-,” or “bunny-self” as pronouns. All this means that we may soon see chosen identities that transcend species, not just gender.

As my friend Dr. Kathy Koch said at a recent event, “Our first response in all of this should be tears, not anger.” It’s true, of course, that many people are the victims of self-inflicted bad ideas. But it’s also true that we live in a cultural moment in which even medical schools deny the basics of biology. How sad for young people to feel so distant from their own bodies that they’d rather be called rabbits than humans.

But to be clear, our crisis is not merely a moral one; it’s a cosmological one and an epistemological one. We’ve not just lost the ability to know right from wrong; we’ve lost the ability to know what’s real, what’s true, and what’s false.

In the ancient world, it was much simpler. There were authorities, civic and religious, that would announce what was good and true. You were told these berries are good. The water from that spring will make you sick. Your people came from this place and therefore you worship these gods. People came to know the world primarily by trusting the accumulated wisdom of those who had lived before.

A major shift emerged a few hundred years ago, first in the West and then elsewhere. People discovered that their ancestors weren’t always right. As society began to question the knowledge it had been given, the growing distrust in revealed wisdom grew alongside a greater confidence in what could be learned through reason and science. Reason offered not only a critique of revelation and tradition, but a compelling replacement for it. However, along with material comforts, this human-centered approach to knowledge brought along new and oppressive ideologies.

On a societal level, we saw state-sponsored evils unleashed under the banners of “progress” for “the common good.” On a personal level, these coldly clinical beliefs of the Enlightenment made life easier; but they also left it emptier. Beauty and truth lost their meaning; and the arts and social sciences in particular took a hedonistic turn. Truth claims built on human reason alone proved inadequate for human needs and human nature.

With the postmodern shift, in whose waters we now swim, suspicion and doubt are just the only things we can trust. There’s now a skepticism, not only of authority but also the objectivity of human reason, and this underlies and permeates our relationships to ourselves, to one another, and to the outside world. This habitual doubt now dominates the search for knowledge.

This leaves truth as subjective, found within, and created by each of us individually. We imagine ourselves to be free thinkers. We’re “free” from the constraints of governing authorities, “free” from the tyranny of tradition, and “free” from anyone else’s expectations. We’re “free” to imagine that reality conforms to our imaginations and fantasies, even though it doesn’t.

Underlying this brief history of Western civilization is a very basic reality. Without God, true knowledge is impossible. Without God, certainty loses to skepticism, truth claims devolve into power plays, and objectivity can never escape subjectivism.

Philosopher Richard Rorty put it this way, saying, “I came to realize that the search of the philosophers for a grand scheme that would encompass everything was an illusion, because only a theism that combined a God with equal measures of truth, love and justice could do the trick.”

I know what you’re thinking: I know Who that God is. But Rorty had already dismissed the possibility of God. And so that made any real attempt at discovering truth a dead end. But 1,000 years ago, Anselm of Canterbury offered a way forward, suggesting that the pursuit of truth could best be understood as, fides quaerens intellectum, or “faith seeking understanding.”

The Christian worldview acknowledges the frailty of the human mind, but still grounds knowledge in the eternal, unchanging nature of a God outside of us. And, even better, a God who communicates to us. In this vision, our limitations are best understood not as dead ends, but as invitations to ask questions, and to seek answers from the One who has them.

Christianity offers something far better than the fallible traditions of ancient days, or the arrogant ideology of the modern era, or the socially constructed tales of our postmodern time. It offers the true description of the world — as it really is, the self-revelation of an omniscient God who not only loves us but created us with the ability to know.

________

Resources

"What Does 'Demisexual' Say about Christian Hope?" by John Stonestreet, BreakPoint, July 27, 2021.

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Copyright (c) 2021 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Harvard University’s humanist chaplain considers himself something of a ministerial vanguard -- a help and inspiration to fellow unbelievers. Furthermore, he is evangelistic in his promotion of unbelief as a foundation for meaning. Preparing to preside over a funeral service, he carries a book of readings appropriately titled FUNERALS WITHOUT GOD.

David Abel of THE BOSTON GLOBE describes the chaplain, Greg Epstein, age 30, as “a kind of ministerial paradox, a member of the local clergy who disavows God, preaches to atheists and agnostics, and seeks to build the equivalent of a church for nonbelievers and others skeptical of or alienated by religion.”

The fascinating aspect of this story is the fact that humanists would need chaplains. Why do atheists and agnostics need clergy? The reason is quite simple -- they can’t get around the big questions. A funeral requires us to face those questions as much as some might like to avoid them. Even if an atheist has no ground for hope in a life to come, he can at least be comforted by the knowledge that someone with ministerial credentials is there to commemorate his death.

As the paper explains:

In a world where zealots crash planes into buildings in the name

of God and politicians use the Bible to craft public policy,

Epstein sees himself as in the vanguard of an emerging movement

fueled by the rise of skepticism, advances in science and

technology, and a spreading aversion toward radical religious

ideologies and traditions. He and other humanists, who also call

themselves atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, secularists, or

brights, point to a survey published in January by the Pew

Research Center for the People & the Press, which found that 20

percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 say they have

no religious affiliation or consider themselves atheists or

agnostics – nearly double those who said that in a similar survey

20 years ago. Another Pew survey in March concluded the nation

is witnessing a “reversal of increased religiosity observed in

the mid-1990s.” Today, 12 percent of Americans surveyed age 20

and older describe themselves as not religious, up from 8 percent

in 1987. “This change,” the survey’s authors wrote, “appears to

be generational in nature, with each new generation displaying

lower levels of religious commitment than the preceding one.”

There is reason to believe that Epstein may indeed be the vanguard of an emerging movement. Unbelief is all the rage these days, with best-selling books promoting atheism and secularists newly emboldened to trumpet their numbers and influence. An academic community like Harvard University, while far from completely secular, does offer a far more secularized environment than would be found in the heartland. Given the tenor and worldview of the academic elites, a humanist chaplain at Harvard makes sense.

Epstein prefers to call himself a humanist rather than an atheist because humanism is a more positive term, he explains. “Atheism is what I don’t believe in; humanism is what I do believe in,” he says. He defines humanism as a “philosophy of life without supernaturalism that affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment aspiring to the greater good of humanity.”

Of course, non-supernaturalism is the very heart of atheism. So it is hard to see why affirming non-supernaturalism is more positive than affirming atheism. Either way, the point is to create or find some meaning for life without God.

The report in The Boston Globe does make the point about the generational dimension here. As Abel reports:

Students on college campuses and others have begun to organize

nonbelievers. The number of campus groups affiliated with the

Secular Student Alliance, for example, has increased by more than

50 percent in the past two years, to more than 80 groups, says

August E. Brunsman IV, executive director of the Albany, New

York-based alliance. Since January, the Center for Inquiry in

Amherst, New York, a science-promoting umbrella group, has

sponsored or helped organize more than 50 atheist outfits on

campuses from the University of Georgia Law School to the

University of Texas at Austin to Kent State University in Ohio,

says D.J. Grothe, the center’s vice president of outreach. The

MySpace atheist and agnostic group has grown by about 10,000

members a year since it began in 2004 and now is about one third

the size of MySpace’s largest Christian group, says Bryan J.

Pesta, an assistant professor of management at Cleveland State

University, who moderates the group.

Also:

Here in the United States, where atheism remains a relatively

weak current against the tides of religion, the rising interest

in Godlessness is most visible on college campuses and among

recent graduates. Many of them regard religion as the

perpetuation of superstitions and mythology and see the world’s

largest faiths as sowing division and enmity more than the peace

they profess.

The university context is also important. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard who was named “Humanist of the Year” by the American Humanist Association last year, argues that science is progressively taking over all of religion’s domain. Secularism and unbelief are the coming reality, he advises. In his words, “More and more of what used to be the domain of religion has been ceded to science. It’s the trend of modernity. I think this is a tide. We’ve seen it happen everywhere else in the developed world. This is the direction of history.”

There can be no doubt that unbelief is seeing a resurgence of sorts on many college and university campuses. Of course, many thriving evangelical ministries exist within those same precincts. Measuring the actual growth of atheist numbers and influence remains difficult.

Meanwhile, Epstein has become something of a controversial figure himself. It seems that not all nonbelievers are pleased with his approach. Epstein has challenged some of the more strident voices within the secularist movement, angering the more ideological among them. R. Joseph Hoffman of the humanist Center for Inquiry called Epstein’s approach “Gen-X humanism for the Passionately Confused.”

This is how Abel describes part of the funeral service performed by Epstein:

Then he addresses death by quoting Sherwin Wine, a humanist

Epstein considered a mentor. “It is so overwhelmingly final that

it fills our lives with dread and anxious fear,” Epstein says.

“We cry out at the injustice of destiny and wait for answers that

never seem to come.”

To cope with it, he says, humanists need a certain courage.

“Courage is loving life, even in the face of death. It is

sharing our strength with others, even when we feel weak. It is

embracing our family and friends, even when we fear to lose them.

It is opening ourselves to love.”

Before closing with a meditation on the precariousness of life,

Epstein offers lines adapted from a familiar Christian burial

rite.

“His body we commit to be burned and returned to the cycles of

nature,” he says. “Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.”

Even in attempting a humanist and non-supernatural funeral service, Epstein draws upon the language of the Christian tradition.

Joseph Hoffman may call this “Gen-X humanism for the Passionately Confused,” but it sounds more like a humanism that knows it needs help -- an anti-supernaturalism that craves the supernatural.

Atheism is the church of defiant unbelief, but many like Greg Epstein seem less defiant than confused. As a matter of fact, very little separates these unbelievers from the unbelievers in so many liberal churches who still claim a Christian identity but reject the truths central to Christianity. Like Rev. Epstein, they want the candles and liturgy -- just leave out the truth stuff, please.

It is telling that the article in THE BOSTON GLOBE begins and ends with a funeral service. As Sherwin Wine rightly observed, at a funeral all an atheist can do is “wait for answers that never seem to come.”

Joy Davidman, a brilliant writer, was at the time of her death the wife of C. S. Lewis. She was raised by parents who were militant nonbelievers. She graduated with top honors from Hunter College and began her adult life with a kind of cynical sophistication and skepticism that expects the worst and believes the least. She disdained religion and morality. In her arrogant, intellectual pride, she conceived of them as havens for the neurotic, ideas on which only the untutored would depend. Peak experiences of poetic insight were dismissed as some glandular disturbance that science would in time explain.

Then one day her husband, who had been growing more and more depressed, called from another city and told her that he was losing his mind, that life no longer mattered to him, and then sent her into shock and despair by abruptly hanging up and saying no more. Joy Davidman was in the country with her children. She didn’t know where her husband was in the city, so she was desperate, hopeless. All she could do was telephone some friends in the city to help, and then wait in quiet desperation and despair.

Then something happened. In her words, “There was another person with me in the room - a presence so real that all my previous life was by comparison mere shadowplay. . . . I think I must have been the world’s most astonished atheist. My awareness of Christ’s presence was not conjured up to bolster me about my husband. No, it was terror - terror, and ecstasy, repentance and rebirth.”

Even in the life of a supposed atheist, God works with loving patience and long-suffering grace to reveal Himself as the one who cares for each one of us, who is concerned about our coming out and our going in, who notes the fall of a sparrow.

====================

A different version from The Rev. Ed Hird, Rector, St. Simon’s Church, North Vancouver, Canada:

Joy Davidman, a self-declared atheistic Communist of Jewish heritage, loved to read the NARNIA CHRONICLES to her sons. In the process, she came to faith in Aslan, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah (Revelation 5:5). Looking back, Joy Davidman commented: “My first published poem was called “Resurrection” — a sort of private argument with Jesus, attempting to convince him (and myself) that he had never risen. I wrote it at Easter, of all possible seasons, and never guessed why.”

As Joy Davidman wrote in ‘The Longest Way Round’, God “had been stalking me for a very long time, waiting for his moment; he crept nearer so silently that I never knew he was there. Then, all at once, he sprang. For the first time in my life I felt helpless; for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, ‘the master of my fate’. All my defenses — the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God — went down momentarily. And God came in. Since childhood, I had been pouring half my energy into the task of keeping him out. When it was over I found myself on my knees, praying. I think I must have been the world’s most astonished atheist.”

YES VIRGINIA, THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS!

Editorial Page, New York Sun, 1897

We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

Dear Editor---

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no

Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.”

Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies.

You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there.

Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond.

Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

More than 70 percent of unbelievers agree that “Jesus makes a difference,” but more than 70 percent also see the church as “full of hypocrites,” according to a LifeWay Research study released earlier this year.

“They almost have to feel that way,” said Tim Keller, author of a New York Times bestseller, “The Reason for God: Belief in an age of skepticism,” “because the view from the outside is that if you aren’t living like Jesus Christ you won’t go to heaven.”

Keller’s comments were voiced in a new Inside LifeWay podcast with Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research, a division of LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“When they see Christians saying they are born again and they don’t see an incredibly changed life, they assume you are a hypocrite,” said Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. “[A]nd the fact that they are critical of us, we have to say partly that’s our fault. But on the other hand, it’s partly their inability to understand the Gospel. We have to be patient with that.”

Though unbelievers have been buoyed by the growing prominence of such books as Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion,” Keller said is it relatively easy to challenge the belief that there is no God or that all gods are the same.

“Of all the objections to Christianity, saying God is the same as all the others is the weakest and easiest to disprove,” Keller said. “There are two ways to go about it. The practical way is that all other religions have someone who says, ‘I am a prophet come to show you the way to God.’ Only Christianity was founded by a man who said, ‘I’m God come to find you.’ Now if Jesus said that ... [then] Christianity is either a superior or inferior way to God, but it can’t be equal [to all the others]. You ask any rabbi or imam or anybody who knows anything about their religion they’d say the same thing.

“So when somebody says they are all equal it shows they haven’t really learned anything about any of them and it is arrogant. It is as if somebody says, ‘All you people of the same race look alike.’ It is remarkably patronizing.”

Keller added that a philosophical way to disprove skeptics’ beliefs is to point out the hypocrisy in their approach, showing them that to believe there is no God, or that all gods are equal, is in fact a belief system based on a faith that can’t be empirically proved, as is often demanded of Christians and belief in Christianity.

Stetzer pointed out that one of the findings in the study was that 52 percent agreed somewhat or strongly that Jesus died and was resurrected, and among those 30 years of age and younger, 66 percent responded likewise.

“Chris Smith talks about this in his book, ‘Soul Searching,’” Keller said. “The average young person has adopted Christian beliefs. Smith calls it moral therapeutic deism. Moral being, ‘I’m going to heaven because I’m good.’ Therapeutic means ‘my purpose in life is to be happy and fulfilled and satisfied.’ Deism is that ‘God isn’t part of my day but somebody I bring in when I have a need.’ The resurrection clobbers all three of those. The resurrection means this world matters, you’re here to serve and God is rehabilitating the world and dealing with the results of sin.”

Keller said when witnessing to unbelievers it is important to move quickly to the resurrection because there is a lot of evidence for it. He said it is important to confront people with Jesus and His claims, His life and His resurrection. It shows how different the God of the Bible is. Too often Christians stick with traditional arguments trying to convince skeptical nonbelievers of a biblical God, Keller said, when they should use those points as clues that believing in God makes more sense than not believing in God.

“The real issue isn’t so much, ‘Is there a God?’ as much as ‘Is Jesus really who He says He is?’” Keller said.

Stetzer pointed out that even though there are skeptics, 78 percent of those surveyed said they are willing to listen to a Christian talk about faith and are open to having conversations about God. “If that’s the case,” he asked, “how do we become better at proclaiming the Gospel?”

Keller responded, “Almost everybody who doubts does so for personal reasons, mainly because they have had bad experiences with the church, Christianity or Christians. [As a Christian] you can’t just say, ‘I’m going to give you the Gospel and you’re going to hear it.’ You have to embody a different kind of Christianity than the one they have experienced in the past or they are simply not going to hear it. It has to do with tone, graciousness, consistency of your own behavior. It’s all stuff we know but it is absolutely true.

“People are not used to Christians being patient with them, sympathetic with them and their doubts,” Keller said. “They are not used to that. They are used to propaganda, criticism and being talked down to. Your demeanor, facial expressions and tone of voice is way more important than you think in evangelism.”

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #6501]

JACKSONVILLE, Florida (BP) -- When one thinks about the meaning and message of Christmas, the miracle that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ must immediately come to mind. The Apostle John declared, "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14, NASB).

Apart from the incarnation, there really isn't anything special about Christmas. In fact, without the incarnation there is no Christmas.

One way to explain the miracle that God became man is to say that God is thinking about humanity. Roger Rosenblatt of Time magazine disagrees: "This is the season when one tends to think about God (if one thinks about God at all), and I would like to offer the opinion that God is not thinking about us. Or if he is (I'll stay with he), one has no way of knowing that -- unless, of course, one is like Mohamed Atta, who had a pathological view of faith, or Jerry Falwell, whose mind is Taliban minus the bloodlust" (Dec. 17, 2001).

It's very sad that someone of Mr. Rosenblatt's prominence and ability could hold the view that God is not thinking about us. The logical outcome of Rosenblatt's impersonal view of God is found in his belief that, "So indefinite is my idea of God that I do not connect it to morality." (It's also quite disturbing that he would so casually equate an evangelical Christian and an Islamic terrorist -- this has become commonplace in recent months. But that's the subject of a future commentary.)

One of the central messages of the entire Bible is that God is thinking about us. Starting with the creation of humanity with Adam and Eve, continuing in God's call of Abraham and his election of a people to be his own for the purpose of being a light to all the nations, and ultimately bringing human history to its culmination as predicted in the Book of Revelation -- the whole of the biblical record is that God is thinking about us for the purpose of glorifying himself in his Son, Jesus Christ.

The birth of Jesus as recorded in the Scriptures most brilliantly demonstrates that God does indeed think about us. In the incarnation, we have God's clearest explanation of who he is and what he expects of us. John says, "No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him" (John 1:18). The angel of the Lord told Joseph that Mary's child was conceived of the Holy Spirit and instructed him to "call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins" which fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah (7:14): "The virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son and they shall His name Immanuel" -- "God with us" (Matt. 1:20-23).

E.Y. Mullins, Baptist theologian and highly influential leader in the Southern Baptist Convention at the turn of the 20th century, ties the incarnation of Jesus to the sovereignty of God. Writing in his most famous work, "The Axioms of Religion," Mullins says,

"Now sovereignty expressed in terms of love and righteousness is the outstanding fact of the Gospel. The incarnation of God in Christ is the greatest of all conceivable expressions of that sovereignty. It is the expression of a sovereignty of power, indeed, but it is most of all an expression of the sovereignty of character, the sovereignty of holy and loving fatherhood. Its very essence is that the Father gave the Son, and that the Son came to reveal the Father. Thus God manifests His sovereignty in the first instance by taking the initiative in salvation, and this initial expression of sovereignty in which He approaches man and reveals Himself and pleads with man to be reconciled unto Himself through the revealing Son is the index to all His sovereignty -- a sample, so to speak, which reveals what sovereignty is in it deepest essence."

At the dawn of the third millennium of human history, let's remember that a central message of Christmas is that God does indeed think about us, notwithstanding the skepticism of a Time magazine columnist. We can have confidence in this because of the incarnation reported to us in God's Holy Word.

Let us join with the heavenly host in declaring: "Glory to God in the highest" (Luke 2:14). Amen.

____________________

Smith is executive editor of the Florida Baptist Witness newsjournal.

*

In the documentary “Marlene” about the famous German actress Marlene Dietrich, Director Maximillian Schell, who once acted in a movie with her, asked her for her thoughts on what happens after you die. She replied, “Once you’re dead, that’s it! It’s all over.” Schell was somewhat taken aback. “You don’t believe in an afterlife?” Dietrich said, “Well, really! What rubbish. Terrible. You can’t believe they’re all flying about up there. Well, can you? It’s impossible.”

Schell wasn’t ready to give up. “Still, a lot of philosophers have racked their brains about it.” Dietrich: “Yes, yes. That’s just to console us. It all comes from the Bible. They say she’s just flitting about up there it’s just to console people. But one can’t believe that, now, can one?”

“But don’t we all sometimes wonder during our lives what comes afterwards or how it all ends?” Schell then asked. Dietrich responded plainly, “No, I only worry about what I have to do today. It’s as simple as that. But you’re not going to tell me they’re all still alive. Well, it must be terribly overcrowded up there, with all those people flitting about. But if you’d lived during the war and seen all the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed, they can’t possibly be flitting about up there. Besides, I don’t believe in a superior power. Or if there is one, then it’s crazy.”

A scientist once asked author Dorothy Sayers to write a letter to his scientific organization, setting forth her reasons for believing in the Christian faith. The letter was not at all what the scientist had expected. It said:

"Why do you want a letter from me? Why don't you take the trouble to find out for yourselves what Christianity is? You take time to learn technical terms about electricity. Why don't you do as much for theology? Why do you never read the great writings on the subject, but take your information from the secular 'experts' who have picked it up as accurately as you? Why don't you learn the facts in this field as honestly as in your own field? Why do you accept mildewed old heresies as the language of the church, when any handbook of church history will tell you where they came from?

"Why do you balk at the doctrine of the Trinity - God the Three in One - yet meekly acquiesce when Einstein tells you E=MC2? What makes you suppose that the expression 'God ordains' is narrow and bigoted, while your own expression 'Science demands' is taken as an objective statement of fact? You would be ashamed to know as little about internal combustion as you know about Christian beliefs.

"I admit," she continued, "you can practice Christianity without knowing much theology, just as you can drive a car without knowing much about internal combustion. But when something breaks down in the car, you go humbly to the man who understands the works; whereas, if something goes wrong with religion, you merely throw the works away and tell the theologian he is a liar.

Why do you want a letter from me telling you about God? You will never bother to check on it or find out whether I'm giving you personal opinions or Christian doctrines. Don't bother with me. Go away and do some work and let me get on with mine."

*

WOODY ALLEN, director/actor/writer

“I do occasionally envy the person who is religious naturally, without being brainwashed into it or suckered into it by all the organized hustles.” [Rolling Stone magazine, 1987]

DAVE BARRY, humorist / syndicated columnist

Dave Barry reportedly said, “I decided I was an atheist early on” in a 25 Nov 2001 interview with the Dallas Star-Telegram profile.

BILL BLASS, fashion designer

“I have a firm belief in such things as, you know, the water, the Earth, the trees and sky. And I'm wondering, it is increasingly difficult to find those elements in nature, because it's nature I believe in rather than some spiritual thing.”

MARLON BRANDO, actor

At his son Christian's murder trial a few years ago, Brando refused to take a religious oath, stating that he is an atheist.

GEORGE CARLIN, comedian

“And for those of you who look to The Bible for moral lessons and literary qualities, I might suggest a couple of other stories for you. You might want to look at the Three Little Pigs, that's a good one. Has a nice happy ending, I'm sure you'll like that. Then there's Little Red Riding Hood, although it does have that part where the Big Bad Wolf actually eats the grandmother. And finally, I've always drawn a great deal of moral comfort from Humpty Dumpty. The part I like the best? “All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” That's because there is no Humpty Dumpty, and there is no God. None, not one, no God, never was.”

FIDEL CASTRO, Cuban leader

A wire service story writes of his audience with the pope: “Castro was educated by Jesuit priests as a young man, but later shed his religion for revolution, Marxism and atheism. Nonetheless, he bowed slightly when he met the pope and told him it was a 'great honor' to be in the Vatican.”

DICK CAVETT, talk show host

“This is my religious problem: it would be wonderful to believe in the most fundamental way. It would make life easier, it would explain everything, it would give meaning where none is apparent, it would make tragedies bearable. If I went to a revival meeting, I have no doubt I could be one of the first to go down on his knees. It seems as if the only religion worth having is the simplest possible religion. But something about the fact that all it takes to make it so is deciding it IS so puts me off. Knowing it could instantly make me much happier makes it somehow unworthy of having.”

MICKY DOLENZ, Producer and founding member of The Monkees.

Is there a God? Micky Dolenz: “No. God is a verb, not a noun.”

PATRICK DUFFY, Actor & Practicing Buddhist

On Buddhism: “And it deals with the fact, in essence, you know, come right out and say it, that there is no God, that the individual is God. Buddha is a teacher. Which was what Christ was, in my opinion, in terms of historical relevance.”

JODIE FOSTER, actress

“I absolutely believe that there is no direct evidence, so how could you ask me to believe in God when there's absolutely no evidence that I can see? I do believe in the beauty and the awe-inspiring mystery of the science that's out there that we haven't discovered yet, that there are scientific explanations for phenomena that we call mystical because we don't know any better.”

JANEANE GAROFALO, actress/comedian

“God seems very man-made to me. There are so many theories, and not everyone can be right. It's human nature to need a religious crutch, and I don't begrudge anyone that. I just don't need one.”

“The Bible, I've said it before, is a beautifully written work of fiction.”

“Organized religions and their dogmas only serve to indoctrinate the participants into sheeplike common behaviors. This type of blind assimilation promotes the popularity of top-forty count down radio stations and movie sequels. Skepticism towards groups, holy or otherwise, is enriching and makes you a far more entertaining person.”

BILL GATES, Microsoft chairman

“In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.”

“Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”

BOB GELDOF, recording artist / humanitarian activist

Geldof was interviewed live on the 19 Oct 2001 edition of “The Late Late Show” on RTÉ (Irish national television). When asked if he was an atheist/agnostic (the presenter used both terms) Geldof said yes; he then confirmed that he doesn't believe in an afterlife.

SETH GREEN, actor (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the Austin Powers movies)

“God is, to me, pretty much an idea. God is, to me, pretty much a myth created over time to deny the idea that we're all responsible for our own actions.”

KATHARINE HEPBURN, actress

In an interview in the October 1991 Ladies' Home Journal that was advertised as her “most candid” ever, Hepburn said, “I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for each other.”

PENN JILLETTE, magician/author

Penn is the loud half of Penn & Teller. They perform their irreverent magic act regularly in Las Vegas and major venues around the world. Both are very outspoken about being atheists and skeptics. They use it as part of the act. Penn recounts a 1998 appearance on Donny and Marie Osmond's syndicated talkshow: We were asked to do autographs for Donny and Marie. I wrote, “There is no god,” and Teller wrote, “He's right.”

ANGELINA JOLIE, actor

Is there a God? Angelina Jolie: “Hmm... For some people. I hope so, for them. For the people who believe in it, I hope so. There doesn't need to be a God for me. There's something in people that's spiritual, that's godlike. I don't feel like doing things just because people say things, but I also don't really know if it's better to just not believe in anything, either.”

MARGOT KIDDER, actor

“I went through millions of dollars -- I have no idea how much. I'd buy things for friends, take people to Paris. Once I stayed up for three weeks in a row because I felt like I was called upon to write a new religion for women. I was reading all these books, including the Bible -- and I'm an atheist.”

RICHARD LEAKEY, paleontologist/author/Kenyan politician

“I myself do not believe in a god who has or had a human form and to whom I owe an existence. I believe it is man who created God in his image and not the other away around; also I see no reason to believe in life after death.”

JOHN MALKOVICH, actor

“I also particularly like him (Sigmund Freud) because he was an atheist, and I grew tired of religion some time not long after birth. I believe in people, I believe in humans, I believe in a car, but I don't believe something I can't have absolutely no evidence of for millenniums. And it's funny -- people think analysis or psychiatry is mad, and THEY go to CHURCH...”

BARRY MANILOW, recording artist

Q: Do you believe in God?

A: Yes. His name is Clive Davis, and he's the head of my record company.

Q: How important is your Judaism to you?

A: It isn't. My humanism is.

RANDY NEWMAN, recording artist

“I never had faith,” said Newman. “But I have respect for the idea. There's no joy being an atheist.”

MIKE NICHOLS, FILM DIRECTOR (Silkwood, Catch-22, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate for which he won an Oscar for Best Director).

“I never consider what comes after this life, I have no interest in heaven, hell, god, etc...”

JACK NICHOLSON, actor

“I don't believe in God now,” but he added, “I can still work up an envy for someone who has a faith. I can see how that could be a deeply soothing experience.”

PAULA POUNDSTONE, comedian

“Although raised a conservative Methodist, I am, in fact, a liberal atheist.”

“I'm an atheist, so I don't really know where spirituality fits in for me ... a devout atheist.”

JAMES RANDI, conjurer/investigator/author

“I hereby state my opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition and that there is no evidence for the existence of any god(s). Further, devils, demons, angels and saints are myths; there is no life after death, no heaven or hell; the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and the Holy Ghost is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision. I accuse the Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place -- not to mention the 'ethnic cleansing' presently being performed by Christians in our world -- and I condemn and vilify this mythical deity for encouraging racial prejudice and commanding the degradation of women.”

CHRISTOPHER REEVE, director/actor

Q: Do you believe in the Lord?

A: “Even though I don't personally believe in the Lord, I try to behave as though He was watching.”

“Well, believe it or not, I think that, y'know, God is not an entity that you find when you go to church and pray to God almighty, you know, and I always remembered that going to church as a kid, you know, and they talk about the vengeance of His terrible swift sword and His army, I said, “well that's kind of a scary guy.” But I think that -- while I don't believe in God, per se, I believe in spirituality. And I believe that spirituality actually is automatically within ourselves, but we have to learn how to access it, and what that is, is realizing there is a higher power; there is...”

SALMAN RUSHDIE, novelist

“God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith...and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. [...] From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.”

ANNIKA SÖRENSTAM, professional golfer

Question: Religious or atheist?

“I believe in the good message that you can find in religion. But whether there is some ruler up there, above the clouds, I doubt.”

HOWARD STERN, radio personality/author/actor

On April 23, 1999, in the wake of the Colorado school killings, Stern got really frustrated with a caller: “Please with the God talk. Hate to break it to you, but there is no God.”

During the July 23, 1999 show, a caller repeatedly claimed that “Jesus Christ will hold [Howard Stern] responsible for his wickedness.” Howard responded by saying that “man created god” and questioned whether Christ actually ever existed.

DONALD SUTHERLAND, actor

Q. “If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you are at the Pearly Gates?”

Sutherland chuckled and replied: “Oh, you know something? I'm so far away from believing that it exists, and the only thing I know are jokes about it.”

TED TURNER, media mogul

The New Yorker published an interview with Turner in which the 62-year-old media mogul said he and Jane Fonda split up partly because of her decision to become a Christian. “She just came home and said 'I've become a Christian,'" Turner told the magazine. “Before that, she was not a religious person. That's a pretty big change for your wife of many years to tell you. That's a shock.”

Replied Fonda: “My becoming a Christian upset him very much -- for good reason. He's my husband and I chose not to discuss it with him -- because he would have talked me out of it. He's a debating champion.”

Turner -- an atheist who previously questioned whether prohibiting adultery should've been one of the 10 Commandments -- also acknowledged that he had become suicidal after his breakup with Fonda, and after losing of control over Turner Broadcasting when AOL Time Warner was reorganized.

EDDIE VEDDER, recording artist (Pearl Jam)

“The word 'religion' has such bad connotations for me, that it's been responsible for wars, and it shouldn't be that way at all, it's just the way the meaning of the word has evolved to me. I have to wonder what we did on this planet before religion.”

“All I really believe in is this moment, like right now.”

At a July 22, 1998 Pearl Jam concert in Seattle's Memorial Stadium, Vedder said about the unusually beautiful weather, “I would thank God, but I don't believe in it.”

GORE VIDAL, author

“Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.”

“I'm a born-again atheist.”

KURT VONNEGUT JR., author

INTERVIEWER asks something about how he was affected by his study of anthropology.

VONNEGUT: Yes, it confirmed my atheism, which was the religion of my fathers anyway.

STEVE WOZNIAK, cofounder of Apple Computer

Q. ”I was reading that Gates, Linus T. and Larry Ellison are all atheist or agnostic. The article made no mention of you or Steve Jobs. My question is, are you a man of faith and do you think that Mr. Jobs believes in God?”

Wozniak: “I am also atheist or agnostic (I don't even know the difference). I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself. I do believe that religions stand for good things, and that if you make irrational sacrifices for a religion, then everyone can tell that your religion is important to you and can trust that your most important inner faiths are strong.”

“Steve Jobs may be an informal fan of Eastern religions but it's never obvious in him and I never heard of him regularly attending a church. That's only a guess."

*

Jim Holt, in The New York Times book review of "The God Delusion" by scientist and skeptic Richard Dawkins, writes:

“As long as there are no decisive arguments for or against the existence of God, a certain number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective values, or the existence of other minds.

“Richard Dawkins asserts that ‘the presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.’ But what possible evidence could verify or falsify the God hypothesis? The doctrine that we are presided over by a loving deity has become so rounded and elastic that no earthly evil or natural disaster, it seems, can come into collision with it.

“Nor is it obvious what sort of event might unsettle an atheist’s conviction to the contrary. [Famous atheist Bertrand] Russell, when asked about this by a Look magazine interviewer in 1953, said he might be convinced there was a God ‘if I heard a voice from the sky predicting all that was going to happen to me during the next 24 hours.’ Short of such a miraculous occurrence, the only thing that might resolve the matter is an experience beyond the grave -- what theologians used to call, rather pompously, ‘eschatological verification.’

“If the after-death options are either a beatific vision (God) or oblivion (no God), then it is poignant to think that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right.”

I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do. You can’t prove that there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word “elephant” includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.

But, this “This I Believe” thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life’s big picture, some rules to live by. So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God.”

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Believing there’s no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I’m wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don’t travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that’s always fun. It means I’m learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

________

Penn Jillette is the taller, louder half of the magic and comedy act Penn and Teller. He is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and has lectured at Oxford and MIT. Penn has co-authored three best-selling books and is executive producer of the documentary film THE ARISTOCRATS.

Atheism has been on a roll. The book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins has been on The New York Times best-seller list for 22 weeks and “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris can be found in virtually every airport bookstore, even in Texas.

So why is the new wave of books on atheism getting such a drubbing? The criticism is not primarily, it should be pointed out, from the pious, which would hardly be noteworthy, but from avowed atheists as well as scientists and philosophers writing in publications like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, not known as cells in the vast God-fearing conspiracy.

The mother of these reviews was published last October in The London Review of Books, when Terry Eagleton, better known as a Marxist literary scholar than as a defender of faith, took on “The God Delusion.”

“Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds,” Mr. Eagleton wrote, “and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” That was only the first sentence.

James Wood’s review of “Letter to a Christian Nation” in the Dec. 18, 2006, issue of The New Republic began, “I have not believed in God since I was fifteen.” Mr. Wood, a formidable writer who keeps picking the scab of religion in his criticism and fiction, confessed that his “inner atheist” appreciated the “hygienic function” of Mr. Harris’s and Mr. Dawkins’s ridiculing of religion and enjoyed “the ‘naughtiness’ of this disrespect, even if a little of it goes a long way.”

But, he continued, “there is a limit to how many times one can stub one’s toe on the thick idiocy of some mullah or pastor” or be told that “Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of really nasty things.”

H. Allen Orr is an evolutionary biologist who once called Mr. Dawkins a “professional atheist.” But now, Mr. Orr wrote in the Jan. 11, 2007, issue of The New York Review of Books, “I’m forced, after reading his new book, to conclude that he’s actually more of an amateur.”

It seems that these critics hold several odd ideas, the first being that anyone attacking theology should actually know some.

“The most disappointing feature of ‘The God Delusion,’” Mr. Orr wrote, “is Dawkins’s failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology” and “no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions.”

Mr. Eagleton surmised that if “card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins” were asked “to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Africa, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could.” He continued, “When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.”

Naturally, critics so fussy as to imagine that serious thought about religion exists, making esoteric references to Aquinas and Wittgenstein, inevitably gripe about Mr. Harris’s and Mr. Dawkins’s equation of religion with fundamentalism and of all faith with unquestioning faith.

“Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that,” Mr. Eagleton wrote.

In The New Republic last October, Thomas Nagel, a philosopher who calls himself “as much an outsider to religion” as Mr. Dawkins, was much more patient. Extracting a theoretical kernel of argument from the thumb-your-nose-at-religion chaff, Mr. Nagel nonetheless had to point out that what was meant by God was not, as Mr. Dawkins’s argument seemed to assume, “a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world.” (Mr. Eagleton had less politely characterized the Dawkins understanding of God “as some kind of chap, however supersized.”)

Nor was belief in God, Mr. Wood explained two months later, analogous to belief in a Celestial Teapot, the comic example Mr. Dawkins borrowed from Bertrand Russell.

If this insistence on theology beyond the level of Pat Robertson and biblical literalism was not enough, several reviews went on to carp about double standards.

Mr. Orr, for example, noted the contrast between Mr. Dawkins’s skepticism toward traditional proofs for God’s existence and Mr. Dawkins’s confidence that his own “Ultimate Boeing 747” proof demonstrated scientifically that God’s existence was highly improbable.

Mr. Eagleton compared Mr. Dawkins’s volubility about religion’s vast wrongs with his silence “on the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity” and the good that religion has produced.

“In a book of almost 400 pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false,” Mr. Eagleton wrote. “The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history — and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.”

In Mr. Orr’s view, “No decent person can fail to be repulsed by the sins committed in the name of religion,” but atheism has to be held to the same standard: “Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual fact that (1) the 20th century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.”

Finally, these critics stubbornly rejected the idea that rational meant scientific. “The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism,” Mr. Nagel wrote.

“We have more than one form of understanding,” he continued. “The great achievements of physical science do not make it capable of encompassing everything, from mathematics to ethics to the experiences of a living animal. We have no reason to dismiss moral reasoning, introspection or conceptual analysis as ways of discovering the truth just because they are not physics.”

So what is the beleaguered atheist to do? One possibility: take pride in the fact that this astringent criticism comes from people and places that honor the honest skeptic’s commitment to full-throated questioning.

Harvard University’s humanist chaplain considers himself something of a ministerial vanguard -- a help and inspiration to fellow unbelievers. Furthermore, he is evangelistic in his promotion of unbelief as a foundation for meaning. Preparing to preside over a funeral service, he carries a book of readings appropriately titled FUNERALS WITHOUT GOD.

David Abel of THE BOSTON GLOBE describes the chaplain, Greg Epstein, age 30, as “a kind of ministerial paradox, a member of the local clergy who disavows God, preaches to atheists and agnostics, and seeks to build the equivalent of a church for nonbelievers and others skeptical of or alienated by religion.”

The fascinating aspect of this story is the fact that humanists would need chaplains. Why do atheists and agnostics need clergy? The reason is quite simple -- they can’t get around the big questions. A funeral requires us to face those questions as much as some might like to avoid them. Even if an atheist has no ground for hope in a life to come, he can at least be comforted by the knowledge that someone with ministerial credentials is there to commemorate his death.

As the paper explains:

In a world where zealots crash planes into buildings in the name

of God and politicians use the Bible to craft public policy,

Epstein sees himself as in the vanguard of an emerging movement

fueled by the rise of skepticism, advances in science and

technology, and a spreading aversion toward radical religious

ideologies and traditions. He and other humanists, who also call

themselves atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, secularists, or

brights, point to a survey published in January by the Pew

Research Center for the People & the Press, which found that 20

percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 say they have

no religious affiliation or consider themselves atheists or

agnostics – nearly double those who said that in a similar survey

20 years ago. Another Pew survey in March concluded the nation

is witnessing a “reversal of increased religiosity observed in

the mid-1990s.” Today, 12 percent of Americans surveyed age 20

and older describe themselves as not religious, up from 8 percent

in 1987. “This change,” the survey’s authors wrote, “appears to

be generational in nature, with each new generation displaying

lower levels of religious commitment than the preceding one.”

There is reason to believe that Epstein may indeed be the vanguard of an emerging movement. Unbelief is all the rage these days, with best-selling books promoting atheism and secularists newly emboldened to trumpet their numbers and influence. An academic community like Harvard University, while far from completely secular, does offer a far more secularized environment than would be found in the heartland. Given the tenor and worldview of the academic elites, a humanist chaplain at Harvard makes sense.

Epstein prefers to call himself a humanist rather than an atheist because humanism is a more positive term, he explains. “Atheism is what I don’t believe in; humanism is what I do believe in,” he says. He defines humanism as a “philosophy of life without supernaturalism that affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment aspiring to the greater good of humanity.”

Of course, non-supernaturalism is the very heart of atheism. So it is hard to see why affirming non-supernaturalism is more positive than affirming atheism. Either way, the point is to create or find some meaning for life without God.

The report in The Boston Globe does make the point about the generational dimension here. As Abel reports:

Students on college campuses and others have begun to organize

nonbelievers. The number of campus groups affiliated with the

Secular Student Alliance, for example, has increased by more than

50 percent in the past two years, to more than 80 groups, says

August E. Brunsman IV, executive director of the Albany, New

York-based alliance. Since January, the Center for Inquiry in

Amherst, New York, a science-promoting umbrella group, has

sponsored or helped organize more than 50 atheist outfits on

campuses from the University of Georgia Law School to the

University of Texas at Austin to Kent State University in Ohio,

says D.J. Grothe, the center’s vice president of outreach. The

MySpace atheist and agnostic group has grown by about 10,000

members a year since it began in 2004 and now is about one third

the size of MySpace’s largest Christian group, says Bryan J.

Pesta, an assistant professor of management at Cleveland State

University, who moderates the group.

Also:

Here in the United States, where atheism remains a relatively

weak current against the tides of religion, the rising interest

in Godlessness is most visible on college campuses and among

recent graduates. Many of them regard religion as the

perpetuation of superstitions and mythology and see the world’s

largest faiths as sowing division and enmity more than the peace

they profess.

The university context is also important. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard who was named “Humanist of the Year” by the American Humanist Association last year, argues that science is progressively taking over all of religion’s domain. Secularism and unbelief are the coming reality, he advises. In his words, “More and more of what used to be the domain of religion has been ceded to science. It’s the trend of modernity. I think this is a tide. We’ve seen it happen everywhere else in the developed world. This is the direction of history.”

There can be no doubt that unbelief is seeing a resurgence of sorts on many college and university campuses. Of course, many thriving evangelical ministries exist within those same precincts. Measuring the actual growth of atheist numbers and influence remains difficult.

Meanwhile, Epstein has become something of a controversial figure himself. It seems that not all nonbelievers are pleased with his approach. Epstein has challenged some of the more strident voices within the secularist movement, angering the more ideological among them. R. Joseph Hoffman of the humanist Center for Inquiry called Epstein’s approach “Gen-X humanism for the Passionately Confused.”

This is how Abel describes part of the funeral service performed by Epstein:

Then he addresses death by quoting Sherwin Wine, a humanist

Epstein considered a mentor. “It is so overwhelmingly final that

it fills our lives with dread and anxious fear,” Epstein says.

“We cry out at the injustice of destiny and wait for answers that

never seem to come.”

To cope with it, he says, humanists need a certain courage.

“Courage is loving life, even in the face of death. It is

sharing our strength with others, even when we feel weak. It is

embracing our family and friends, even when we fear to lose them.

It is opening ourselves to love.”

Before closing with a meditation on the precariousness of life,

Epstein offers lines adapted from a familiar Christian burial

rite.

“His body we commit to be burned and returned to the cycles of

nature,” he says. “Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.”

Even in attempting a humanist and non-supernatural funeral service, Epstein draws upon the language of the Christian tradition.

Joseph Hoffman may call this “Gen-X humanism for the Passionately Confused,” but it sounds more like a humanism that knows it needs help -- an anti-supernaturalism that craves the supernatural.

Atheism is the church of defiant unbelief, but many like Greg Epstein seem less defiant than confused. As a matter of fact, very little separates these unbelievers from the unbelievers in so many liberal churches who still claim a Christian identity but reject the truths central to Christianity. Like Rev. Epstein, they want the candles and liturgy -- just leave out the truth stuff, please.

It is telling that the article in THE BOSTON GLOBE begins and ends with a funeral service. As Sherwin Wine rightly observed, at a funeral all an atheist can do is “wait for answers that never seem to come.”

In the documentary “Marlene” about the famous German actress Marlene Dietrich, Director Maximillian Schell, who once acted in a movie with her, asked her for her thoughts on what happens after you die. She replied, “Once you’re dead, that’s it! It’s all over.” Schell was somewhat taken aback. “You don’t believe in an afterlife?” Dietrich said, “Well, really! What rubbish. Terrible. You can’t believe they’re all flying about up there. Well, can you? It’s impossible.”

Schell wasn’t ready to give up. “Still, a lot of philosophers have racked their brains about it.” Dietrich: “Yes, yes. That’s just to console us. It all comes from the Bible. They say she’s just flitting about up there it’s just to console people. But one can’t believe that, now, can one?”

“But don’t we all sometimes wonder during our lives what comes afterwards or how it all ends?” Schell then asked. Dietrich responded plainly, “No, I only worry about what I have to do today. It’s as simple as that. But you’re not going to tell me they’re all still alive. Well, it must be terribly overcrowded up there, with all those people flitting about. But if you’d lived during the war and seen all the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed, they can’t possibly be flitting about up there. Besides, I don’t believe in a superior power. Or if there is one, then it’s crazy.”

The question of religious belief among U.S. scientists has been debated since early in the century. Our latest survey finds that, among the top natural scientists, disbelief is greater than ever — almost total.

Research on this topic began with the eminent U.S. psychologist James H. Leuba and his landmark survey of 1914. He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected U.S. scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 “greater” scientists within his sample [1]. Leuba repeated his survey in somewhat different form 20 years later, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively [2].

In 1996, we repeated Leuba’s 1914 survey and reported our results in Nature [3]. We found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. This year, we closely imitated the second phase of Leuba’s 1914 survey to gauge belief among “greater” scientists, and find the rate of belief lower than ever — a mere 7% of respondents.

Leuba attributed the higher level of disbelief and doubt among “greater” scientists to their “superior knowledge, understanding, and experience” [3]. Similarly, Oxford University scientist Peter Atkins commented on our 1996 survey, “You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don’t think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge.” [4] Such comments led us to repeat the second phase of Leuba’s study for an up-to-date comparison of the religious beliefs of “greater” and “lesser” scientists.

Our chosen group of “greater” scientists were members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Our survey found near universal rejection of the transcendent by NAS natural scientists. Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality). Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality). Overall comparison figures for the 1914, 1933 and 1998 surveys:

Belief in personal God 1914 1933 1998

Personal belief 27.7 15 7.0

Personal disbelief 52.7 68 72.2

Doubt or agnosticism 20.9 17 20.8

Belief in human immortality 1914 1933 1998

Personal belief 35.2 18 7.9

Personal disbelief 25.4 53 76.7

Doubt or agnosticism 43.7 29 23.3

Figures are percentages.

Repeating Leuba’s methods presented challenges. For his general surveys, he randomly polled scientists listed in the standard reference work, American Men of Science (AMS). We used the current edition. In Leuba’s day, AMS editors designated the “great scientists” among their entries, and Leuba used these to identify his “greater” scientists [1,2]. The AMS no longer makes these designations, so we chose as our “greater” scientists members of the NAS, a status that once assured designation as “great scientists” in the early AMS. Our method surely generated a more elite sample than Leuba’s method, which (if the quoted comments by Leuba and Atkins are correct) may explain the extremely low level of belief among our respondents.

For the 1914 survey, Leuba mailed his brief questionnaire to a random sample of 400 AMS “great scientists”. It asked about the respondent’s belief in “a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind” and in “personal immortality”. Respondents had the options of affirming belief, disbelief or agnosticism on each question [1]. Our survey contained precisely the same questions and also asked for anonymous responses.

Leuba sent the 1914 survey to 400 “biological and physical scientists”, with the latter group including mathematicians as well as physicists and astronomers [1]. Because of the relatively small size of NAS membership, we sent our survey to all 517 NAS members in those core disciplines. Leuba obtained a return rate of about 70% in 1914 and more than 75% in 1933 whereas our returns stood at about 60% for the 1996 survey and slightly over 50% from NAS members [1,2].

As we compiled our findings, the NAS issued a booklet encouraging the teaching of evolution in public schools, an ongoing source of friction between the scientific community and some conservative Christians in the United States. The booklet assures readers, “Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral”[5]. NAS president Bruce Alberts said: “There are many very outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists.” Our survey suggests otherwise.

Edward J. Larson

Department of History, University of Georgia,

Athens, Georgia 30602-6012, USA

e-mail:edlarson@uga.edu

Larry Witham

3816 Lansdale Court, Burtonsville,

Maryland 20866, USA

References

Leuba, J. H. The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study (Sherman, French & Co., Boston, 1916).

Leuba, J. H. Harper’s Magazine 169, 291-300 (1934).

Larson, E. J. & Witham, L. Nature 386, 435-436 (1997).

Highfield, R. The Daily Telegraph 3 April, p. 4 (1997).

National Academy of Sciences Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science (Natl Acad. Press, Washington DC, 1998).

________

Nature, Vol. 394, No. 6691, p. 313 (1998) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Christianity stands or falls with the bodily resurrection of Jesus. The Apostle Paul certainly understood this to be the case.

In that great resurrection chapter, 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says, “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is without foundation, and so is your faith. In addition, we are found to be false witnesses about God, because we have testified about God that He raised up Christ -– whom He did not raise up.... And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:14-15, 17).

It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain the birth of the church and its Gospel message apart from the resurrection of Jesus. The Christian faith orbits about the confession and conviction that the crucified Jesus is the Son of God, established and vindicated “by the resurrection from the dead according to the Spirit of holiness” (Romans 1:4).

It is not surprising that skeptics outside the church have attacked the bodily resurrection from the very beginning. However, it is disappointing that attacks launched against the truth of Jesus’ bodily resurrection come from those who claim to be a part of the Christian community.

For example, the infamous Jesus Seminar says, “The body of Jesus probably decayed as do all corpses. The resurrection of Jesus was not something that happened on the first Easter Sunday; it was not an event that could have been captured by a video camera.”

Bill Phipps, moderator of the United Church of Canada says, “I don’t believe Jesus was God, but I’m no theologian. I don’t believe Jesus is the only way to God. I don’t believe he rose from the dead as scientific fact. I don’t know whether these things happened. It’s an irrelevant question.”

When one approaches the issue of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, those of us who affirm its truth acknowledge that we bear the burden of proof. After all, we are making the claim that Jesus did what no other person has ever done in all of human history. He died, rose from the dead and remains alive until this day.

So, the question naturally arises: why should anyone believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth? Is not the claim itself simply incredible and unbelievable from the start? After all, we are making a one-of-a-kind claim that has never been duplicated at any time, in any place, by any other person. I believe we can marshal a strong case of compelling evidence that Christ did indeed rise from the dead. Let me quickly summarize 15 lines of evidence.

-- Naturalistic theories fail to explain the event. Naturalistic arguments (swoon, wrong tomb, hallucination, etc.) of the previous centuries did not stand up to careful analysis. Highly selective in the biblical data, they chose that which helped their theory and jettisoned what did not. Such arbitrary methods were doomed to fail from the beginning.

-- The creation of faith in the disciples and the radical change in their lives. Something happened that caused the followers of Jesus to believe they had real and genuine encounters with the risen Lord. These encounters with Jesus changed them from timid and fearful cowards to bold and courageous witnesses of the resurrected Christ. In addition, each of the disciples, with the possible exception of John, died the death of a martyr. And, each of them died alone, and yet each died still proclaiming Jesus as the risen Lord with their last dying breath. The importance of this can scarcely be overstated. While it is the case that persons will die for a lie -- consider the terrorists of 9-11 and what they believed awaited them following death -- it is not the case that persons will die for what they know to be a lie.

-- The empty tomb and the discarded grave clothes. The Christian movement could have been quickly crushed and brought to an end by one act: producing the dead corpse of Jesus. Evidently, based on the evidence, no one was able to do this.

-- Jesus was testified to have been seen by women first. In the Jewish culture of the first century women were not qualified to be witnesses in a major legal proceeding. Given this fact, it is amazing, even astonishing, that the Bible records that women saw the risen Jesus first.

-- Change in the day of worship by Jews from the Sabbath to Sunday.

Something happened around A.D. 30 that caused a large group of Jews in Jerusalem to change their day of worship from the Sabbath to Sunday. Whatever happened would have to have been extraordinary. It was, they claimed, the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

-- Unlikely nature of mass hallucination. Mass hallucination is not simply unlikely. It is impossible. Hallucinations are inner, subjective experiences of the mind. The repeated appearances of Jesus at different times and to different people is a death knell to this theory.

-- Numerous and varied resurrection appearances which lasted for 40 days and then abruptly ended. The New Testament records at least 10 occasions on which Jesus appeared to his followers shortly following His resurrection.

-- The 50-day interval between the resurrection and the proclamation of the Gospel at Pentecost (Acts 2) in Jerusalem. For some reason the disciples of Jesus did not go about proclaiming the Gospel of the risen Lord for 50 days after the event took place. Why? The biblical witness is clear and compelling. They waited until Jesus had ascended (Luke 24, Acts 1) and the Holy Spirit had come to empower them for witness (Acts 2).

-- The Jewish leaders nor the Romans could disprove the message of the empty tomb. It is an undeniable fact of history that those who opposed and crucified Jesus could not disprove His resurrection. All they had to do was produce the body of Jesus and the Christian movement was dead. Again, it appears there was no body to produce.

-- The unexpected nature of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. The disciples did not anticipate that Jesus would rise from the dead, though He had predicted it on several occasions. Mark 9:32 tells us they did not understand. Perhaps they thought He was again speaking in parables. There was no expectancy or anticipation on their part that Jesus would rise from the dead. All the evidence strongly affirms it came as a complete surprise.

-- The conversion of two skeptics: James the half brother of Jesus and Saul of Tarsus. James was an unbeliever in Jesus as Messiah prior to His crucifixion. John 7:5 makes this clear. Yet something happened that transformed the half-brother of Jesus from a doubter to a believer, from a skeptic to a leader in the church at Jerusalem. Saul was a persecutor of the church. However, something happened in Saul’s life that changed him from a persecutor of Christ to a missionary/evangelist for Christ. His own confession and testimony, recorded several times in Scripture, is that he saw the resurrected Christ (Acts 9:3-6; 22:6-10; 26:12-19; 1 Corinthians 15:8; Galatians 1:15-16).

-- The moral character of the eyewitnesses. The New Testament provides the greatest teachings found in any literature on love, truth, honesty, hope, faithfulness, kindness, and the list goes on. These teachings come from the pens of men like Matthew, John, Paul, James and Peter: all of whom claim to have been eyewitnesses of the risen Jesus.

-- The early creedal witness of 1 Corinthians 15:3-7. The resurrection was the heart of the earliest Christian teaching. This is based on 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, where Paul recorded a very early creed concerning Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Some scholars date Paul’s receiving of this creed within a decade of the crucifixion itself, about A.D. 35-40. This is deadly to any type of mythical, fable, or embellishment theory. First, there is not enough time. Second, there are eyewitnesses who can provide a check and balance to any inaccurate or exaggerated claims.

-- The accepted character and claims of Jesus. Jesus on numerous occasions spoke of His crucifixion and resurrection. He claimed He was God (John 8:58; 10:30; 14:9) and He said He would come back from the dead (Matt. 16:21). To claim Jesus as a great religious figure and moral teacher and yet believe He was mistaken on the prediction of His resurrection will not do. If He did not rise He was either a liar or a lunatic.

-- Reliable eyewitness documents recording the events. The New Testament is the most well-authenticated document of antiquity. There are more Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, over 5300, of an earlier date and more reliable nature than any other work of antiquity.

The hope of the Gospel and the resurrection is at the core of the Christian Gospel and Christian Theology. It tells us that the God who raised Jesus from the dead exists. It establishes Jesus’ Lordship. It is the greatest event in history. Why should you believe it? Because it really did happen!

________

Daniel L. Akin is president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #27393]

In response to an online article that defended belief in the resurrection of Jesus, a reader named "Anonymous" wrote the following to Rev. Simon Bickersteth:

Is this meant to be proof???? You obviously have never

experienced an hallucination. Perhaps you should come out from

your secure little ivory tower and talk to some people who have.

I have. I know what I’m talking about. And you have no idea. I

used to ‘believe’ and had ‘experiences’ to back it up. Then I

took anti-psychotics for my depressive illness. Not only did

they get rid of the hallucinations, they got rid of the ‘godly’

experiences too. Know that feeling that god is near? That

‘feeling the need to pray’? It’s all in your head. It’s all

psychological. That’s why the anti-psychotics make it go away.

Wake up! Religious experience is all in the head. Bury yours in

the sand if you have to, but get off the internet and stop

feeding the religious frenzy that will eventually lead to

fanatics blowing up the planet. Religious faith is a mental

anomaly, nothing more. Don’t believe me? Ask your doc for

trifluoperazine. Then wake up!

C.S. Lewis once wrote to a friend,

“The trouble with me is lack of faith. I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God’s existence: but the irrational deadweight of my own skeptical habits, and the spirit of this age, and the care of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address. Mind you I don’t think so – the whole of my reasonable mind is convinced: but I often feel so.”

________

Letters to Arthur Greeves, Dec. 24, 1930, 398-399

In response to an online article that defended belief in the resurrection of Jesus, a reader named "Anonymous" wrote the following to Rev. Simon Bickersteth:

Is this meant to be proof???? You obviously have never

experienced an hallucination. Perhaps you should come out from

your secure little ivory tower and talk to some people who have.

I have. I know what I’m talking about. And you have no idea. I

used to ‘believe’ and had ‘experiences’ to back it up. Then I

took anti-psychotics for my depressive illness. Not only did

they get rid of the hallucinations, they got rid of the ‘godly’

experiences too. Know that feeling that god is near? That

‘feeling the need to pray’? It’s all in your head. It’s all

psychological. That’s why the anti-psychotics make it go away.

Wake up! Religious experience is all in the head. Bury yours in

the sand if you have to, but get off the internet and stop

feeding the religious frenzy that will eventually lead to

fanatics blowing up the planet. Religious faith is a mental

anomaly, nothing more. Don’t believe me? Ask your doc for

trifluoperazine. Then wake up!