Atheism and a secular society

Kinds of unbelief

Unbelief is not one thing. Atheism says that there is no God, though many atheists today put it more modestly: they find no good reason to believe in one. Agnosticism, a word coined by the Victorian biologist T. H. Huxley, says that we do not or cannot know whether God exists. Commonest of all, perhaps, is indifference: life goes on whether God exists or not, so why ask?

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, himself a Catholic, sets out in A Secular Age (2007) to explain a change: around 1500 hardly anyone in the West could avoid believing in God, while by 2000 many found unbelief easy and even the natural view Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. A secular age, in his sense, is not one in which faith has vanished, but one in which faith is one option among several and no longer taken for granted, and believers know it too. Korea seems to be on a similar road. Many surveys find that the younger people are, the more often they say they have no religion, and many of them are less hostile to faith than unconcerned by it.

What does Scripture say of unbelief? One verse is quoted often:

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt; their acts are vile. There is no one who does good.

Psalm 14:1

It needs careful reading. The Hebrew naval is not the dull or the uneducated but the morally senseless, the one who treats God and neighbour with contempt; Nabal, who bore the word as his name, repaid David's kindness with insult (1 Samuel 25:25). The psalm is less about a theory than about a life lived as if there were no God to reckon with (Psalm 10:4). And Paul quotes it of everyone, Jew and Gentile alike (Romans 3:10-12). So it is not a label to pin on unbelieving neighbours. It is a mirror held up to every heart that would live without God, ours included. Many atheists are honest and morally serious, and they should be met as such.

Nietzsche and Russell

In The Gay Science (1882) Friedrich Nietzsche tells of a madman who lights a lantern one bright morning, seeks God in the marketplace, and cries that God is dead and that we have killed him Nietzsche, The Gay Science 125. It is a diagnosis, not a proof. Europe had stopped believing in God without counting the cost: the morality, truth and meaning built on him would go too. Of those who gave up God but kept Christian morals, he wrote that whoever gives up the faith loses the ground on which that morality stands Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. He scorned a comfortable unbelief and asked for the courage to create values without God. Christians can learn from his honesty: everything does turn on whether God is. The theme is taken further in Pascal and Nietzsche.

Bertrand Russell's 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian rejects the arguments for God one by one Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian. If everything must have a cause, he asks, why not God too? Religion, he holds, rests mainly on fear, of the unknown and of death, and he urges us to face the world instead with knowledge, kindliness and courage. His wish to believe only as far as the evidence goes deserves respect. But the classical arguments do not say that everything has a cause. They speak of what begins to exist, or of what does not exist of itself (The cosmological and design arguments). And a belief that comes from fear is not false for that reason. The point grows plainer with Freud.

Freud and Dawkins

Sigmund Freud, who founded psychoanalysis, argued in The Future of an Illusion (1927) that belief in God fulfils a wish: the child's longing for a protecting father, cast upon the sky Freud, The Future of an Illusion. He granted that an illusion, so understood, is not necessarily false. And the argument cuts both ways. One may wish that God exists; one may equally wish that no one will ever call us to account. Where a belief comes from does not settle whether it is true, for the believer or for the unbeliever, and so the question returns to reasons.

In The God Delusion (2006) Richard Dawkins argued that God, taken as a scientific hypothesis, almost certainly does not exist Dawkins, The God Delusion. A designer able to design a universe would be more complex than what he explains, and would need explaining himself, while natural selection shows how the complex comes from the simple. With Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens he was called a new atheist, and together they charged religion with violence and oppression. Behind the charge lie a concern for evidence and a concern for religion's victims, and both deserve a hearing.

Christians reply in three ways. The God of the creeds is not a complex thing within the universe but the one by whom anything exists at all, so to ask who designed him is to ask a different kind of question (Does God exist?). Science shows how nature works; whether nature is all there is, is a question for philosophy, not for science (Science and faith). And wrongs done in Christ's name must be owned honestly; yet the same faith has moved people to care for the sick and the poor, and to call anything harmful we need a standard of good (The moral and ontological arguments).

In a secular society

To the exiles in Babylon, Jeremiah wrote:

Seek the prosperity of the city to which I have sent you as exiles. Pray to the LORD on its behalf, for if it prospers, you too will prosper.

Jeremiah 29:7

They were, as Matthew Henry puts it, "directed to seek the good of the country where they were captives" Matthew Henry. Where faith is no longer taken for granted, Christians neither hide nor try to rule. They seek their neighbours' good and pray for them. Jesus told his disciples to let their light shine, so that others "may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5:16), and Peter asked slandered believers to live honourably among unbelievers (1 Peter 2:12). In a secular society the first apologetic is a life.

Then come questions. To an indifferent friend, rather than open with an argument, we can ask what gives her life its meaning (Why do we exist?); what makes right right; why reason should be trusted if it arose from blind processes. These are not traps but an invitation to think together, and thoughtful atheists have answers of their own to each. Hear them out. The next lesson, Before Korea's religions and culture, turns to the faiths that stand beside us.

Practice