The New New Atheism
On July 16th an op-ed piece with the title above appeared in the Wall Street Journal by Peter Berkowitz responding to the upsurge in best-selling books promoting atheism and condemning religion, particularly Christianity. Because it is such a well-reasoned response to the militant atheism that seems rampant today, I want to make it available by eventually publishing it on this blog. Today, however, let me only quote on from one of its ending paragraphs:
Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today, the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great evil pathology, today’s bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America’s destruction.
Got your attention? It got mine. And it led me to ponder anew what is it about the concept of “God” that so stirs men’s emotions, even to the point of committing extreme acts of terrorism in his supposed name? In fact what IS God?
What is God?
My life, or perhaps I should say, my mind changed dramatically beginning in 1967 when Susan & I moved to Chatham, NJ and we began attending Emmanuel Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) in nearby Morristown. There I encountered the Rev. Calvin A. Bush, the pastor, and began attending his Saturday morning studies on the Westminster Confession of Faith, and hearing his weekly sermons every Sunday.
Although I had been a Presbyterian since my teenage years, and throughout my high school, college and graduate school days, and had sat under a number of pastors, it was only under Cal Bush’s tutelage that I finally began to understand—if in fact this is actually possible—what the Reformed & Presbyterian Faith was all about. Of all the topics that Cal led our men’s group through, and which he covered in his preaching, one stood out: Question 4 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
Q4. What is God?
In the first place, I was always struck by the question itself. Why did the writers of the Catechism (the so-called Westminster Divines) use the word “what”? Why didn’t they say “who”? Were they so prescient of discussions taking place in this present century that they didn’t want to presume that their readers knew that God was a Person?
The question itself is thought-provoking, and I don’t (yet) have an answer as to why the Divines used “what” instead of “who”, but the answer they gave is literally one for the ages. Cal usually found a way to get the answer to Question 4 into every sermon I ever heard him preach. To some this might seem boring or repetitious, but there was method to his madness. I found I had memorized the answer without even knowing that I had. By osmosis from his preaching I had had a permanent change in the neurons of my brain where this answer is now residing.
Here is the answer (which I proudly quote from memory):
God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.
Does this answer help? At first it may seem to be an attempt to define an indefinable concept with another indefinable concept. As a scientist and engineer, I might have attempted to answer Question 4 by saying: “God is the Creator of all this stuff we call the universe and us as well.” Of course, that kind of definition just pushes things back one level, since now we have to define “Creator,” or “Designer.” And this definition would probably suit the Greek deities just as well as the Judeo-Christian One. Zeus presumably was a creator, but very unlike Jehovah.
So in attempting to understand the Westminster Divines’ definition of God, I am immediately drawn to the word “Spirit.” There is an implied equation:
GOD = SPIRIT
But notice they use the little word “a” in front of Spirit. God is “one of the spirits.” Here again I might have wanted them to say that God is THE Spirit of all spirits. But apparently they wanted to define God’s “substance.” Their sentence is like this one:
“Wine is a liquid.”
This sentence is telling you the principal nature of the concept “wine.” It’s not a solid or a gas, it’s a liquid. And we all know what a liquid is. Right?
So, likewise, we all know what a “spirit” is. Right? Yes, because we are one, also!
But, there’s the rub in whole debate. The materialists who write the books on the new new atheism don’t believe in the concept of spirit. Particularly as applied to us homo sapiens. We are biochemical machines. Complex machines undoubtedly. But machines nonetheless, obeying strictly the laws of physics and chemistry where law and randomness reign. “Spirit” to them is an illusion created by our highly structured brains whose sole purpose is to produce other brains through the process of Darwinian natural selection and reproduction. This illusion of our being free-willed spirits is simply our brain’s way—shaped by eons of natural selection—to fool us in to making more brains who then reinforce those brains to think they are spirits who want to make more brains, and so on ad infinitum. And since our “spirits” are illusions, so is that Spirit we call God. In fact, to quote the title of Richard Dawkins’ latest book, it’s not just an illusion, it is the God delusion.
Let me attempt to put it starkly. Here are two statements. Take your pick.
Dawkins: Your whole life—everything that seems important to you—is delusion. That warm feeling you get when you see a baby smile. The sense of awe when looking at the Grand Canyon. That emotion we call love between a man and a woman. That sense of injustice when you are wronged by someone, or you see an innocent person wounded or killed by random violence or premeditated murder. Even acts of courage you might perform in which you sacrifice your own well being for that of your child or friend or mate. All of that is delusion, put there by evolutionary forces which act totally randomly on the molecules and electrical circuits of your body and do not care at all about the consequences. Its purpose—if we can even call it that because it is unplanned and simply happens—is to produce another you which if it is a stronger, fitter you will leave more offspring than a competitor to you.
Westminster Divines: Your whole life—everything that seems important to you—is utterly meaningful. It’s meaningful because you have a spirit—independent of but strongly coupled to your body. That spirit first of all is an image of THE Spirit who created it. Because of that when you see a baby smile the emotion you feel is a reflection of your spiritual nature that rejoices (as does the Creator of your spirit) when it sees new life. A life that is starting out with all the potential and richness of experiencing everything it means to be human. And when you sense deeply that a wrong has been done to you, or to someone you care for, that too is an expression of your spirit. Your spirit has been defined to follow—not the laws of physics and chemistry—but a higher law, the moral law which is a direct reflection of the nature and character of the Spirit who created your spirit. And when you are motivated to act against your own interests, and to perform acts of sacrifice in order to help or even save from injury or death another person, that is also a consequence of your being at your very root a spiritual being. And so your very existence is not simply to reproduce your kind, but to “glorify and enjoy” the Spirit who created your spirit (see Q.1 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism).
To choose between those two statements means thinking deeply about which one is more likely to consistent with the facts of life as we observe them. The materialist, as exemplified by Dawkins, is required to explain how strictly materialistic processes acting randomly could produce over time the incredible complexity we see in our biosphere and the universe as a whole and in us thinking, speaking beings. In contrast, the believer in the Spirit we call God must postulate a Creator whose power and intelligence is so great that the complexity is “no problem”!
Enter the man named Michael Behe. How he influences this debate is a discussion for the next entry.