Does America Need More Atheists?

An opinion piece on the October 3 website of the Washington Post caught my eye and captured my attention. It was by WaPo’s contributing columnist Kate Cohen and titled “America doesn’t need more God. It needs more atheists.” 

Kate Cohen is a mother, an atheist, and an author. Her book, We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should To), which was also published on Oct. 3, states that being a mother led her to “come out” as an atheist.

Cohen was raised Jewish and married a Jew in a Jewish wedding—but she explains that she never really believed “in that jealous, capricious, and cruel Old Testament God” (p. 12). But she never identified herself as an atheist until she began rearing her children.

In her book, Kate tells how she vowed to teach her children “what I truly thought about everything,” and she “did not let them decide for themselves,” for she strongly believed that “passing on one’s preference for reason, evidence, and honesty…is the truly moral choice” (pp. 13, 14).

Kate was born and reared in Virginia. She graduated from Dartmouth University and married in 1997. She is now in her late 40s, but I was unable to find out how old her children are. They are probably young adults now and it would be interesting to know how they have turned out.*¹

There are positive aspects of Kate Cohen and her book that should be recognized. She is honest in identifying who she is rather than seeking (any longer) to keep her lack of religious faith closeted. And she encourages others to be honest also as intimated in her book’s subtitle.

Even though I have spent most of my life seeking to help people become God-believers, I think those who don’t believe in God should be able to identify themselves openly rather than pretending to be and to believe, what they are not and do not. Honesty, indeed, is the best policy.

Further, Cohen seeks to remove the stigma from those who identify as atheists. She writes, “Like atheism, homosexuality is a difference that can be hidden. Sociologists call it a Concealable Stigmatized Identity” (p. 221), but she claims that that stigma is disappearing more rapidly for LGBTQ people than for atheists.

But as a God-believer—and because I am a God-believer—I certainly think that people need to be respected/accepted regardless of their religious faith or lack thereof. After all, that is what freedom of religion means.

There are also highly questionable aspects of Cohen’s book. While there are some nuanced places, she gives the impression that all atheists are largely the same, and “good,” whereas all who believe in God/religion are also largely the same, and “bad.” (See, for example, p. 228).

In strongly encouraging people who do not believe in God to affirm their atheism, she writes,

If you need a reason to let people know that you don’t believe moral authority derives from a Supreme Being, then I offer you no less than making America a safer, smarter, more just, and more compassionate country.*²

It is because of that belief that the WaPo article was titled “America doesn’t need more God It Needs More Atheists.”

On the previous page, she asserts, “…peel back the layers of discrimination against LGBTQ people and you find religion.”

She further contends that “control over women’s bodies,” as well as “school-library book bans, and even the backlash against acknowledging the racist underpinnings of our nation are motivated by religion.”

To such charges, I can only say “Yes, but….” Yes, there are Christians who are exactly such as Kate mentioned. But, there are Christians who are against discrimination and control as much as she is. And regarding climate change, note what Pope Francis said about in his 10/4 “apostolic exhortation.”*³

Moreover, if truth were known, my guess is that there is a large percentage of atheists who support discrimination and control as well as the (mostly) conservative evangelical Christians she uses as her foil.

So, no, Ms. Cohen, America doesn’t need less God and more atheists. It needs more intellectually honest and intelligent atheists (or whatever) as well as intellectually honest and intelligent God-believers to work together to make our society more compassionate and more just for all.

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*¹ In her book, Cohen says that her children are “engaged, informed, and savvy citizens” (p. 227).

*² These words are in a paragraph that begins with her saying that “anti-atheist sentiment is not a matter of life and death in America. But transphobia is, sexual violence against women is, forced birth is, climate change is, and global pandemics are” (p. 230).

*³ I wrote about this in some detail in my Oct. 13 blog post (see here).

 

TTT #16 Unexamined Faith is Not Worth Having

This article is based on the 16th chapter of Thirty True Things . . . (TTT), the first chapter in the second half of the book. The first half is mostly about theological “true things.” The remainder of the book is about more personal, “close-to-home” issues.

My Personal Experience

In May of 1957, I graduated from junior college and transferred that fall to William Jewell College. One of my courses that first semester was Philosophy of Religion and the textbook was the newly published Philosophy of Religion by the Quaker scholar D. Elton Trueblood.

In the first chapter of his book, Trueblood (1900~94) declares, “Unexamined faith is not worth having” (p. 14). My professor, for good reason, emphasized that statement repeatedly, and I gradually came to realize that it was, indeed, not only an important statement to think about but also something that I badly needed to do. 

That autumn was an uncomfortable time for me. Seeking to examine my faith resulted in a trying period of doubt, reflection, and examination—but that was an extremely valuable experience.

As a result of that process, I came to embrace what seemed then, and still seems to me now, an examined faith very much worth having. Of course, at various times through the decades since then, it has been necessary to re-examine various aspects of my faith.

How Could Faith be Not Worth Having?

If faith is always good, as asserted in my 6/10 article (and in Chapter 15 of TTT), how could faith ever be not worth having?

Well, faith is always good—but it is not always stable. Sometimes it is weak, easily shaken, and even so fragile that it is broken by adversity. In that sense alone it is not worth having: if faith cannot withstand challenges, both those from within and from without, how can it be of great value?

Faith in God is, truly, always good, but people often have insufficient or an erroneous understanding of God. Failing to have an adequate understanding of God can produce a flawed faith.

Moreover, there are many challenges to faith hurled at believers by aggressive atheist or anti-theistic writers. Far more than at the time that Trueblood wrote about unexamined faith not being worth having, in recent years there have been several popular, widely-read authors who have strenuously attacked faith in God and touted an unabashed atheism.

These “New Atheists” represent a belief system that actively opposes faith in God. If a person of unexamined faith is confronted by people such as those militant atheists, that faith may not be strong enough to withstand the attack.

That is part of what I mean by emphasizing that unexamined faith is not worth having.

How Does One Examine One’s Faith?

The process of examining one’s faith is not easy, though. Philosophical and theological thinking rather than the empirical or scientific method must be used. Serious reflecting, analyzing, studying, and, yes, praying must be a part of that process.

In addition, being a part of a community of faith is also invaluable for that important endeavor.

Those who come to realize that unexamined faith is not worth having need to realize that in addition to their personal efforts, they must make an effort to examine their faith by study, thought, and prayer as a part of a supportive faith community.

That community may or may not be a part of “organized religion,” but robust faith often doesn’t last long for people who proclaim to be “spiritual but not religious.”

[Thirty True Things . . . can be purchased at Amazon here.]

Is Sister Joan (and All Others Who Believe in God) Delusional?

Why are people who show the most evidence of firmly believing in and being committed to God not taken more seriously by atheists?

There are many noted people who made significant life changes because of what they resolutely believed was direct experience of God.

Within the Christian tradition, a hastily made “top 10” list would include people such as:
· ** Hildegard of Bingen (from 1141)
· ** Francis of Assisi (from 1205)
· ** Julian of Norwich (from 1373)
· ** Ignatius of Loyola (from 1521)
· ** Teresa of Avila (from 1527)
· ** George Fox (from 1643)
· ** Blaise Pascal (from 1654)
· ** John Wesley (from 1738)
· ** C. S. Lewis (from 1929)
· ** Thomas Merton (from 1941)
  --and many others lesser-known, but perhaps no less changed.

But people such as these are dismissed as superstitious, irrational, or even delusional by those who are ardent atheists—such as Jerry A. Coyne.

Coyne (b. 1949) is a professor of biology at the University of Chicago. His book Why Evolution Is True was on the “Best Sellers” list of the New York Times in 2009. In May of this year his new book, Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, was published.

Back in 2006, Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion was a bestselling book. In it the British biologist argued that belief in a personal God qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.

Dawkins highly recommends Coyne’s book (found here):

The distinguished geneticist Jerry Coyne trains his formidable intellectual firepower on religious faith, and it’s hard to see how any reasonable person can resist the conclusions of his superbly argued book. Though religion will live on in the minds of the unlettered, in educated circles faith is entering its death throes.

But has Coyne been adequately “scientific” in his research? He considers many religious fundamentalists and examples from splinter religious groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientology. But he doesn’t consider people of deep faith based on direct experience of God, such as the people in the list above—or such as Joan Chittister.

This month I have been reading some of Chittister’s writings, especially her superlative Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir (2004). Sister Joan (yes, she is a Catholic nun, born in 1936), has struggled through life questioning dogmatism and institutional religion (Catholicism).

But without question, she is a woman of unflagging faith in God. A biography of Sr. Joan, by Tom Roberts, will be published tomorrow, October 1. Its title: Joan Chittister: Her Journey From Certainty to Faith. 

And Sister Joan certainly has been, and is, a part of “educated circles.” She has a Ph.D. (from Penn State University), is the author of over 50 books, and has been a research associate at Cambridge University.

Coyne doesn’t consider people like her to be worthy dialogue partners, though. He declares that “anything useful will come from a monologue—one in which science does all the talking and religion the listening” (p. 260).

And while he doesn’t say so explicitly, Coyne, like Dawkins, seems to think that Sr. Joan, and all others of us who believe in God, are delusional because of our faith in God, which cannot be adequately authenticated by scientific evidence.

But why does Coyne, or any other militant atheist, have the right to make a judgment about the psychological condition of Sister Joan—or of anyone who claims to have personal and meaningful experience of God?

Why should she have the richness of her experience denigrated by the paucity of his experience?

Balking at Hawking’s Rejection of God

Although it was a temptation, I resisted titling this article “Gawking at Hawking.” June and I have, though, been “gawking” at Hawking some this past couple of weeks.

We first watched “The Theory of Everything,” the engrossing 2014 film of the world-famous cosmologist, who possesses an extraordinarily brilliant mind despite suffering near total paralysis from ALS. That movie was excellent partly because of the tremendous acting by Eddie Redmayne, who won the best actor Oscar this year for his portrayal of Hawking.

Then we watched “A Brief History of Time,” based on Hawking’s bestselling book published under that title in 1988—and with “From the Big Bang to Black Holes” as the subtitle. In that 1992 biographical documentary film much of narrative is by Hawking speaking through his speech synthesizer.

From early in his life, Hawking has sought to discover “the theory of everything” (ToE), a single, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe.

Finding a ToE is one of the major unsolved problems in physics, and Hawking hasn’t made that discovery yet—although just last month he claimed that he’s solved a huge mystery about black holes. (See this article.)

I confess that I don’t understand much that Hawking says. I do, however, have a little expertise on part of what he writes/speaks about: God.

One reviewer calls “The Theory of Everything” a “God-haunted film.” And in A Brief History of Time, Hawkins mentions God more than 20 times.

He concludes that book by asserting that if we humans do find “a complete theory” (the ToE), “it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.”

At the end of the penultimate chapter Hawking states that “our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence.” But is that possible for a physicist as a physicist?

In the movie version, his and Jane’s friend Jonathan asks, “You no longer believe in the Creation?”

Stephen replies, “What one believes – is irrelevant – in physics.”

That may be true for physics, but one’s beliefs may be highly relevant for life, just as feelings or emotions are in a different sort of way.

When Stephen inexplicably divorced Jane in 1995 and married Elaine, he said, “It’s wonderful – I have married the woman I love.”

Like belief in God, love is also, I assume, irrelevant in physics. It was highly relevant in his life, however. But was there any kind of scientific proof that he really loved Elaine or that she loved him?

Can love ever be proven scientifically? Most probably not, even by a great physicist like Stephen Hawking. So, does that mean love is not real or important?

In Brief History, Hawking’s ideas can be correlated with belief in God to a certain degree. But through the years his ideas have become more and more anti-God. But not all of his students/colleagues agree with him.

Don Page was one of Hawking’s associates/helpers back in the 1970s, a few years after he graduated from William Jewell College. (I have heard about him often from his WJC professor, and my good friend, Don Gielker.)

Page, one of Hawking’s colleagues interviewed in the 1992 film, was and has remained a devout Christian believer, evidently seeing no contradiction between being a first-class physicist/cosmologist and a firm believer in God.

Affirming both science and faith in God is always preferable to needlessly choosing either one or the other.

In May 2011, I posted “Hawking on Heaven,” a blog article I invite you to read (again).

Religion and Irreligion: Friends or Foes?

Atheists, agnostics, and other people who profess no religious faith have often been criticized, ostracized, ridiculed, discriminated against, and belittled.

Especially in recent years, such people have begun to fight back. Some of that fight has been rather hostile towards religion.

The writings/talks of the “new atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—are strong attacks on religion and belief in God. (I have read at least one book by each of these.)

But a milder form of irreligion is developing. One key spokesman for this movement is Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College, a not widely-known but highly-rated school in California.

This month I sped-read Zuckerman’s Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion (2012) and read more carefully his Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions (2014).

The latter will be discussed at the September meeting of Vital Conversations here in the Northland (of Kansas City) with Helen Springer as a guest resource person.

Helen is the Executive Director of Oasis, a secular “church” in Kansas City. Their website, which you can access with this link, says, “Here, you’ll find a retreat—an oasis of sorts—for Agnostics, Humanists, Skeptics, Atheists, Freethinkers, Deists, questioning Theists and the like.”

Those are the kind of people Zuckerman writes for or on behalf of.

Although he seems a bit caustic at times (but those of the majority always have to be careful in criticizing the statements of those in a discriminated-against minority), Zuckerman writes mostly in an irenic manner that suggests irreligion and religion can be friends rather than foes.

The secularists he writes about are mostly, like he himself, highly moral people who would rank rather high on Maslow’s scale of self-actualization. On the other hand, the religious people he refers to are mostly narrow-minded conservatives/fundamentalists or hypocrites.

There is little, if any, recognition of the irreligious people who are self-centered, ill-willed, insensitive individuals and detrimental to society.

It is not hard to see that there are good, moral secularists such as those he mentions and such as he himself doubtlessly is. But it is also not hard to see that there are some (many?) secularists who are not so good or moral.

It is also not hard to see that there are some (many?) religious people who are like the unattractive individuals or groups he mentions. But there are also many religious people who do considerable good in society.

To his credit, though, early in the book Zuckerman writes,

Admittedly, secular men and women don’t outshine their religious peers in every way. For example, when it comes to generosity, volunteering, and charitable giving, secular men and women fall short, with religious people being more likely to donate both their time and their money (p. 22).

What he says about Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and author of Good Without God (2005), is something I can appreciate.

In reading the pages following Epstein’s introduction, though, I thought that humanism is probably right in much that it affirms and wrong in much that it denies.

Surely a clearer both/and viewpoint is not only possible but also definitely desirable.

Religious humanists can, and do, work on all the problems of people in this world that secular humanists do. Thus, healthy religion and healthy irreligion can, and should, cooperate as friends; they don’t have to be foes.

Moreover, the limited worldview of secularists should not be touted as superior to the broader worldview of those with mature religious faith.

An Atheist Who Believes in God

Frank Schaeffer is an interesting guy, and I’m looking forward to hearing him again tonight. He has come to Kansas City to promote his new book, “Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God: How to Give Love, Create Beauty and Find Peace.”

The other time I met Frank was when he was in town promoting a previous book, one with an even more arresting title: “Sex, Mom, and God” (2011).

Frank’s “Mom” was Edith, who died last year at the age of 98. And his father, Edith’s husband, was the widely known conservative/fundamentalist theologian and author Francis Schaeffer (1912-84).

Frank is a complex man. You see that in the title of his new book. Some may even say his thinking is perhaps a bit schizophrenic.  

But rather than being schizoid, he just has a paradoxical view of reality. That is one reason I appreciate his views so much. (One chapter in my as yet unpublished book, “Thirty True Things Every Christian Needs To Know Now,” deals with the significance of paradox.)

Early in his book, Frank avers, “Embracing paradox helped me discover that religion is a neurological disorder for which faith is the only cure (p. 13). I like this, for I too often feel negative toward religion but positive about faith.

“With the acceptance of paradox,” Frank writes, “came a new and blessed uncertainty that began to heal the mental illness called certainty” (ibid.).

Later on, Frank advises his readers to “flee from exclusionary certainty.” Then he asserts,

There is only one defense against the rising, worldwide, fear-filled fundamentalist tide engulfing all religions (including the intolerant religion of the New Atheists) which once engulfed me: the embrace of paradox and uncertainty as the virtuoso expression of love (p. 90).

Frank seems to be a very honest man. He shares himself, “warts and all,” quite freely. (I do wonder, though, if the title of his new book was chosen more to sell books than to express accurately his real belief about God.)

Frank is not so much an atheist as he is an afundamentalist. That is, he is not a nonbeliever in God. Rather, he is a nonbeliever in the God of his fundamentalist past.

Actually, he is quite a good apologist for Jesus—and for Christianity as it should be: a religion of love and grace.

While his rhetoric is perhaps exaggerated at times (as was that of the One who spoke about camels going through eyes of needles), his is a vibrant spirituality that probably Jesus would have been, and is, delighted with.

“Jesus’ co-suffering love,” according to Frank, “is the best lens through which to reconsider God” (p. 127). A little later he writes, “Our hope is that when we look at God through the eyes of the loving Christ we will see who God really is “ (p. 138).

So it is because of Jesus that Frank is “an atheist who believes in God.” Blessings on him and his highly significant writing and speaking!
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Frank Schaeffer is in Kansas City this week thanks to the efforts of Thinking Friend Charlie Broomfield. Frank will be speaking at the Community Center in North Kansas City this evening from 7:30 and at the beautiful downtown Kansas City Public Library from 6:30 tomorrow (Thurs.) evening. There is no charge for attending either gathering.