THE REASONING OF FALLEN MAN

Sermon Series: Christianity and World Religions Part 11, (Continue)

Welcome Church,

I continue the series of messages on Christianity and world religions. Today I will discuss Atheism and as is the case in all of these sermons—I want to make this disclaimer. I am not an expert in this religion—this is only a summary of my study and research in this area.

Again before we dive into the material, I want to say something about the nature of this part of the series as with the rest. My purpose in this message is to help us to be as wise as serpents and yet as gentle as doves about the happenings around us these days.

One time in the O.T. King David was assessing the strengths of the people he had with him. And in I Chronicles 12:32 it says this. It says he had with him, “men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do…” – I Chronicles 12:32

That’s what we want to be. People who understand the times we’re living in so we can be responsive and productive members of God’s kingdom.

Another time, in the N.T., the Apostle Paul told first century Christ-followers that they too should be very clear and mature in their thinking and understanding of the events happening around them. He said, “Brothers, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.” – 1 Corinthians 14:20

In other words, like Jesus, he’s saying, “Be informed. Don’t stick your head in the sand and think circumstances will go away. Do not become ugly or hate-filled, be innocent of evil. But be informed.”

As with last Sermon, I want to remind you of our spirit in this series. The purpose for spending time on this is not so we can worry or get angry or figure out how to get revenge, but to be informed so that we can be wise as serpents, gentle as doves. So that we can see things in their proper perspective and respond with the gentleness of Jesus.

So that’s our purpose. To be informed so that we can respond gently, but wisely to our world and its present horrors.

Are we all clear on that?

Okay.

Atheism is the absence of belief in any Gods or spiritual beings. The word Atheism comes from a, meaning without, and theism meaning belief in god or gods.

Atheists don’t use God to explain the existence of the universe.

Atheists say that human beings can devise suitable moral codes to live by without the aid of Gods or scriptures.

People are atheist for many reasons, among them:

They find insufficient evidence to support any religion.

They think that religion is nonsensical.

They once had a religion and have lost faith in it.

They live in a non-religious culture.

Religion doesn’t interest them.

Religion doesn’t seem relevant to their lives.

Religions seem to have done a lot of harm in the world.

The world is such a bad place that there can’t be a God.

Many atheists are also secularist, and are hostile to any special treatment given to organised religion. Although many Atheists are heavily organized! Oxymoron?

It is possible to be both atheist and religious. Virtually all Buddhists manage it, as do some adherents of other religions, such as Judaism and Christianity.

Atheists are as moral (or immoral) as religious people.

In practical terms atheists often follow the same moral code as religious people, but they arrive at the decision of what is good or bad without any help from the idea of God.

What does it mean to be human?

Atheists find their own answers to the question of what it means to be human. This discussion looks at the question from both theological and ethical viewpoints.

Atheist criticisms of religion

The bad

Not all atheists are hostile to religion, but many do think that religion is bad. Here are some of their reasons:

Religion gets people to believe something untrue.

Religion makes people base the way they run their lives on a falsehood.

Religion stops people thinking in a rational and objective way.

Religion forces people to rely on outside authority, rather than becoming self-reliant.

Religion imposes irrational rules of good and bad behaviour.

Religion divides people, and is a cause of conflict and war.

The hierarchical structure of most religions is anti-democratic, and thus offends basic human rights.

Religion doesn’t give equal treatment to women and gay people, and thus offends basic human rights.

Religion obstructs scientific research.

Religion wastes time and money.

The good

Most atheists willingly concede there are some good things about religion, such as:

Religious art and music

Religious charities and good works

Much religious wisdom and scripture

Human fellowship and togetherness

Different reasons for being an atheist

Many people are atheists because of the way they were brought up or educated, or because they have simply adopted the beliefs of the culture in which they grew up, or the parents wanted the child to choose on their own when they grew up. So someone raised in Communist China or America is likely to have no belief in God because the education system and culture make being an atheist the natural thing to do.

Other people are atheists because they just feel that atheism is right.

Note for philosophers

The arguments and counter-arguments are presented in this article in an extremely simplified way and are intended only as a starting point for further reading and exploration.

Reasons focussing on lack of evidence

Law of probabilities

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”

W. K. Clifford (1879)

Many people are atheists because they think there is no evidence for God’s existence – or at least no reliable evidence. They argue that a person should only believe in things for which they have good evidence.

A philosopher might say that they start from the presumption of atheism.

The presumption of Atheism

This is an argument about where to begin the discussion of whether or not God exists.

It says that we should assume that God does not exist, and put the onus on people who believe in God to to prove that God does exist. Why? Because they cannot disprove God exists!

The philosopher Anthony Flew who wrote an article on this said:

“If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so.

Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either the negative atheist or the agnostic.

So the onus of proof has to rest on the proposition.

It must be up to them: first, to give whatever sense they choose to the word ‘God’, meeting any objection that so defined it would relate only to an incoherent pseudo-concept; and, second, to bring forward sufficient reasons to warrant their claim that, in their present sense of the word ‘God’, there is a God.”

Reasons that treat God as unnecessary

Science explains everything, Atheists argue that because everything in the universe can be explained in a satisfactory way without using God as part of the explanation, then there is no point in saying that God exists.

Occam’s Razor

The argument is based on a philosophical idea called Occam’s Razor, popularised by William of Occam in the 14th century.

In Latin it goes Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate or in English… “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily”.

This is usually simplified to say that the simplest answer is the best answer.

Therefore atheists might argue that since the entire universe, and all of creation can be explained by evolution and scientific cosmology, we don’t need the existence of another entity called God.

Therefore God doesn’t exist.

What would William have said?

William of Occam would not have agreed; he was a Franciscan monk who never doubted the existence of God.

But in his century he wasn’t breaking the rule named after him. 14th century science knew nothing about evolution or how the universe came into being. God was the only explanation available.

What William would think if he lived now is another matter…

Arguments for God aren’t convincing.

Weakness of the proofs that God exists,

There are a number of traditional arguments used to prove that God exists; however, none of them convinces atheists. Here they are:

The Argument from Design

The universe is such a beautiful and orderly thing that it must have been designed. Only God could have designed it. Therefore since the universe exists, God must exist.

An atheist might refute this by saying that, actually, the universe is not particularly beautiful and orderly. And even if it was, why should there be a designer? And modern science shows that most of the natural things we think of as designed are just the products of processes like evolution.

The “Ontological” Argument

We think of God as a perfect being. If God didn’t exist he wouldn’t be perfect. God is perfect, therefore God exists.

Most atheists think this argument is so feeble they don’t bother dealing with it.

Professional philosophers usually reject it on the grounds that existence is not a property of beings.

The First Cause Argument

Everything that happens has a cause. Therefore the universe must have had a cause. That cause must have been God. Therefore since the universe exists, God must exist in order to have caused it to exist.

An atheist might respond by asking what caused God. (And what caused the cause of God, and so on.) The argument might proceed that if God didn’t need a cause, then maybe the universe didn’t need a cause either. If God was already perfect before he created the universe, why did he create it? How did it benefit him? Why would he bother? And if the universe was caused, perhaps something other than God caused it?

The problem of evil

The Argument from Evil

The existence of evil seems inconsistent with the existence of a God who is wholly good, and can do anything.

The argument goes like this:

Most religions say that God is completely good, knows everything, and is all-powerful. But the world is full of wickedness and bad things keep happening. This can only happen if…

God is unwilling to prevent evil, in which case he is not good or

God doesn’t know about evil, in which case he does not know everything or

God can’t prevent evil, in which case he is not all powerful or

Some combination of the above.

And so there is no being that is completely good, knows everything, and is all powerful. And so, there is no God.

Theologians and philosophers have provided various answers to this argument. They all agree that it gives useful insights into the nature of God, evil, and belief.

Reasons to do with science and the history of thought, The best explanation.

For most of human history God was the best explanation for the existence and nature of the physical universe.

But during the last few centuries, scientists have developed solutions that are much more logical, more consistent, and better supported by evidence.

Atheists say that these explain the world so much better than the existence of God.They also say that far from God being a good explanation for the world, it’s God that now requires explaining.

Before science.

In olden times – and still today in some traditional societies – natural phenomena that people didn’t understand, such as the weather, sunrise and sunset, and so on, were seen as the work of gods or spirits.

Bible times

The Old Testament portrays the world as something controlled by God.

Where we would see the weather as obeying meteorological principles, people in those days saw it as demonstrating God at work. And it was the same with all the other natural phenomena, they just showed God doing things.

The Greeks

Everything is full of Gods

Thales (624-546 BCE), Greek philosopher

The Greek philosopher Thales moved things on by suggesting that the gods were actually an essential part of things, rather than external puppeteers pulling strings to make the world work.

Myth and magic

But there was more to these ancient explanations than gods doing things in or to the world. People saw the whole universe in a religiously structured way; they had no other way to see it at that time.

For the ancients, God provided the power that made the universe work, and God provided the structure within which the universe worked and human beings lived.

Astrology

Ideas like that survive in modern astrology. Many people believe that their lives are in some way influenced by the movements of heavenly bodies. And the heavenly bodies concerned have names taken from mythology and religion.

Modern religion

And you’ll find similar ideas in most popular religious thinking. Many people still believe, or want to believe, in the idea of God as puppeteer.

They believe that God is able to do things in the world: he can divide the waters of the Red Sea to save the Israelites from Pharaoh, he can respond to prayer by healing an illness or getting someone through an exam.

Cosmology

Cosmology is the study of the origin and nature of the universe.

Nowadays it’s a branch of astronomy and physics, but in pre-scientific times it was a religious subject, organising the universe in terms of almost military ranks of beings. God was at the top, and human beings came pretty much at the bottom.

In some cosmologies there was also an inverted hierarchy of evil beings going down from humanity to the source of wickedness, the devil, at the bottom.

Power

These religious cosmologies were rigid; each being had its place worked out for it in the structure that God had provided, and that was where it stayed.

Looking at the universe like this provided great support for the hierarchical power structures of earthly nations and tribes: Everyone in a nation or tribe had their place, and the power came from the top.

And if God had decided to organise the universe in such a hierarchy, this provided a strong argument against anyone who wanted to suggest that society could be organised in a fairer and more equal way – God had shown us the perfect way to organise things, and those who were ruling did so by a right given by God.

It was also very good news for whichever religion was followed in a particular nation: since the power all came from God, religion was bound to be given high status.

The mechanical universe.

The idea that God steered everything in the universe as he saw fit was demolished by the discovery that there were natural laws obeyed by objects in the universe.

Galileo, for example, discovered that the universe followed laws that could be written down mathematically.

This suggested that there was logic and engineering throughout creation. The universe behaved in a consistent manner and was not subject to gods pulling a string here and there, or some unexplained influences from astrological bodies.

This didn’t give Galileo any religious problems (although it annoyed the church greatly and they eventually made him keep quiet about some of his conclusions) because he believed that God had written the scientific rules.

And around this time scientists began to come up with new ways of assessing whether certain things were true. Things were expected to happen in a repeatable, testable way, that could be written down in equations.

God the engineer

Although scientific discovery began to explain more and more, it didn’t cause large numbers of people to become less religious.

Even many – probably most – scientists still had a place for God in the universe. At the very least, he had started the whole thing going, and he had created the rules that his universe was shown to obey.

This half-way house between religion and science still had problems for the faithful, since it didn’t seem to leave much room for God to intervene in the universe – and certainly it didn’t need God to keep things ticking over.

God the creator

But the half-way house also provided some support for the faithful. They could look at the universe and see how beautifuly made it was, and be reassured that God had demonstrated his existence by creating such a wonderful place.

And since science, until the late 18th, and 19th centuries, hadn’t produced any good explanation of how things began, religion still had an important place in explaining how the world was the way it was.

God takes a back seat

God’s role as an explanation for the way things are took a serious knock from the sciences of geology and evolution.

Geologists discovered that the earth was hundreds of millions of years old, and not just 6,000 years old as was generally believed at that time.

They showed that the rocks that make up the earth had been laid down in layers at different times; a deeper layer (by and large) came from an earlier time than a shallow layer.

In each layer were fossils that showed that different species of animals had lived in different eras. Not only were many no longer in existence but some didn’t appear until relatively recent times.

This was incompatible with the idea that God completely created the world in 6 days and so scientists with a faith came up with another compromise – the 6 days of biblical creation were a poetic way of describing long periods of millions of years during which God worked on the world.

The theory of evolution

Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

The theory of evolution explains the variety of life forms on earth without any reference to God.

It says that from very simple beginnings, processes of genetic variation and selection (i.e. new forms of life keep appearing, and some forms of life don’t survive and become extinct), working for hundreds of millions of years, generated the range of plants and animals that exist today. (Although there is no evidence of genetic variation going on today, example: is their a monkee man walking around today?)

These processes are not directed by any being, they are just the way the world works; God is unnecessary.

The result of this for God has been explained by Stephen Jay Gould:

“No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature (though Newton’s clock-winding god might have set up the machinery at the beginning of time and then let it run). No vital forces propel evolutionary change. And whatever we think of God, his existence is not manifest in the products of nature.”

Reasons that treat God as meaningless, Relative philosophy.

Some philosophers think that religious language doesn’t mean anything at all, and therefore that there’s no point in asking whether God exists.

They would say that a sentence like “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is neither true or false, it’s meaningless; in the same way that “colourless green ideas sleep furiously” is meaningless.

Logical Positivism, or Verificationism.

Logical Positivists argued that a sentence was meaningless if it wasn’t either true or false, and they said that a sentence would only be true or false if it could be tested by an experiment, or if it was true by definition.

A more accurate version of this idea can be found here:

Since you couldn’t verify the existence of God by any sort of “sense experience”, and it wasn’t true by definition (eg in the way “a triangle has 3 sides” is true), the logical positivists argued that it was pointless asking the question since it could not be answered true or false.

These particular philosophers didn’t only say that religious talk was meaningless, they thought that much of philosophical discussion, metaphysics for example, was meaningless too. This philosophical theory is no longer popular, and attention has returned to the issues of what “God” means and whether “God” exists.

Note for philosophers

This is how one prominent philosopher put it:

“We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express – that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject is as being false.” A. J. Ayer

Ayer actually preferred a weaker version of the theory, because since no empirical proof could be totally conclusive, almost every statement about the world would have to be regarded as meaningless.

A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established in experience. But it is verifiable, in the weak sense, if it is possible for experience to render it probable.

And this led Ayer to dispose of the God question rather brusquely:

“…There can be no way of proving that the existence of a god…is even probable.

For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. And in that case it would be possible to deduce from it, and other empirical hypotheses, certain experiential propositions which were not deducible from those other hypotheses alone.

But in fact this is not possible…For to say that “God Exists” is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false.” A. J. Ayer

Reasons that treat God as a psychological factor, Psychological explanations of religon.

Psychologists have long been fascinated by religion as something that exists in all societies.

They ask whether ‘religion’ is actually a name given to various psychological drives, rather than a response to the existence of God or gods.

Such a belief is clearly atheistic.

Religion, to the common man, is a:

“system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here.” Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.

Religion comes from emotions, Human beings believe in God because they want:

A father figure to protect them from this frightening world

Someone who gives their lives meaning and purpose

Something that stops death being the end

To believe that they are an important part of the universe, and that some component of the universe (God) cares for and respects them

These beliefs are strongly held because they enable human beings to cope with some of their most basic fears and as a crutch.

Atheists argue that since religion is just a psychological fantasy, human beings should abandon it so that they can grow to respond appropriately to deal with the world as it is.

Freud

Sigmund Freud tackled religion in great detail and had several ideas about it.

One of his theories was that religion stems from the individual’s experience of having been a helpless baby totally dependent on its parents. The infant sees its parents as all-powerful beings who show it great love and satisfy all its needs. This experience is almost identical to the way human beings portray their relationship with God.

Freud also suggested that childhood experiences caused people to have very complex feelings about their parents and themselves, and religion and religious rituals provide a respectable mechanism for working these out.

Freud also described religion as a mass-delusion that reshaped reality to provide a certainty of happiness and a protection from suffering.

Reasons that treat God as a social function, Sociological explanations of religion

Some people think that religions and belief in God fulfil functions in human society, rather than being the result of God actually existing.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Ludwig Feuerbach was a 19th century German philosopher who proposed that religion was just a human being’s consciousness of the infinite.

He said that human ideas about God were no more than the projection of humanity’s ideas about man onto an imaginary supernatural being.

Emile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), a French sociologist, thought that religion was something produced by human society, and had nothing supernatural about it.

“Religious force is nothing other than the collective and anonymous force of the clan.” Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.

He believed that religion existed, but he did not agree that the reality that lay behind it was the same reality that believers thought existed.

Religion helped people to form close knit groups, in which they could find a place in society. Religious rituals created mental states in those taking part which were helpful to the group.

To put it another way; religious rituals do not do anything other than strengthen the beliefs of the group taking part and reinforce the collective consciousness.

Religion fulfilled the functions of:

Giving a meaning and purpose to life

Binding people together in groups

Supporting the moral code of the group

Supporting the social code of the group

Durkheim thought that this was enough to give people a feeling that there was something supernatural going on.

Since it is in spiritual ways that social pressure exercises itself, it could not fail to give men the idea that outside themselves there exist one or several powers, both moral and, at the same time, efficacious, upon which they depend.

The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,

Durkheim said that religious beliefs divided experiences into the profane and the sacred – the profane were the routine experiences of everyday life, while the sacred were beyond the everyday and likely to inspire reverence.

Objects could become sacred, not because of any inherent supernatural resonance but because the group fixed certain ‘collective ideals’ on an object.

Karl Marx’s criticisms of religion, Marx’s view of religion.

Karl Marx thought that religion was an illusion, with no real God or supernatural reality standing in the background. Religion was a force that stopped human societies from changing.

A social institution

Marx believed that religion was a social institution, and reflected and sustained the particular society in which it flourished.

He went further. Religion was a tool used by the capitalists to keep the working-class under control.

Religion provided the working-class with comfort in their miserable oppressed circumstances, and by focussing attention on the joys to come after death, it distracted the workers from trying to make this life better.

Religion cheats human beings

Furthermore, it took the noblest human ideals and gave them to a non-existent God, thus cheating human beings of realising their own greatness and potential.

Religion disguises the true wrongs

Marx argued that the illusory happiness provided by religion should be eliminated by putting right the economic conditions that caused people to need this illusion to make their lives bearable.

Religion was like a pain-killer (hence Marx’s famous reference to it as “the opium of the people”), but what was needed was to cure the sickness, not sedate the patient.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Target: Christianity

The Marxist analysis of religion was principally aimed at Christianity as Christianity was the dominant faith in the industrial societies which Marx was criticising.

God is not apparent.

God is Loving.

This is one of the more unusual arguments used to show that God can’t exist:

God is perfectly loving.

God knows that human beings would be happier if they were aware of the existence of a loving God.

So if such a God existed, he would make sure that everyone knew it.

There are lots of people who aren’t aware of the existence of a loving God. Therefore such a God does not exist.

First atheist writers

Most histories of atheism choose the Greek and Roman philosophers Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius as the first atheist writers. While these writers certainly changed the idea of God, they didn’t entirely deny that gods could exist.

Epicurus

Epicurus put forward the theory of “materialism”: The only things that exist are bodies and the space between them.

Epicurus taught that the soul is also made of material objects, and so when the body dies the soul dies with it. There is no afterlife.

Epicurus thought that gods might exist, but if they did, they did not have anything to do with human beings.

Religion was the human activity of trying to live in the way such noble (but unknowable) gods might live.

The soul cannot survive separation from the body, since it is necessary to understand that it too is a part.

By itself the soul cannot ever either exist (even though Plato and the Stoics talk a great deal of nonsense on the subject) or experience movement, just as the body does not possess sensation when the soul is released from it.

Lucretius

Lucretius did not deny the existence of gods either, but he felt that human ideas about gods combined with the fear of death to make human beings unhappy.

He followed the same materialist lines as Epicurus, and by denying that the gods had any way of influencing our world he said that humankind had no need to fear the supernatural.

Quotations on The Nature of Things

“This terror, then, this darkness of the mind,

Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,

Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,

But only Nature’s aspect and her law,

Which, teaching us, hath this exordium:

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

Fear holds dominion over mortality

Only because, seeing in land and sky

So much the cause whereof no wise they know,

Men think Divinities are working there.

Meantime, when once we know from nothing still

Nothing can be create, we shall divine

More clearly what we seek: those elements

From which alone all things created are,

And how accomplished by no tool of Gods.”

“Whilst human kind

Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed

Before all eyes beneath Religion- who

Would show her head along the region skies,

Glowering on mortals with her hideous face-

A Greek it was who first opposing dared

Raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand,

Whom nor the fame of Gods nor lightning’s stroke

Nor threatening thunder of the ominous sky

Abashed; but rather chafed to angry zest

His dauntless heart to be the first to rend

The crossbars at the gates of Nature old.

And thus his will and hardy wisdom won;

And forward thus he fared afar, beyond

The flaming ramparts of the world, until

He wandered the unmeasurable All.

Whence he to us, a conqueror, reports

What things can rise to being, what cannot,

And by what law to each its scope prescribed,

Its boundary stone that clings so deep in Time.

Wherefore Religion now is under foot,

And us his victory now exalts to heaven.”

Morality and secularism, Christianity is pronounced immoral

A powerful, but rather unexpected attack on Christianity came from a group of people, including the writer George Eliot, who thought that Christianity was immoral.

They said that there was something totally unethical in the behaviour of a God who behaved like a “revengeful tyrant”.

According to the doctrine of original sin, God was prepared to punish people for a wrong that was not their fault, just because they were human beings. What sort of God was it, they wondered, who then decided to let us off this unfair punishment because he had punished his son instead of us?

One of the first to argue this was James Froude in 1849:

“I would sooner perish for ever than stoop down before a Being who may have power to crush me, but whom my heart forbids me to reverence.” James Froude, 1849

The philosopher John Stuart Mill said in 1872, “I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures, and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.”

Campaigning atheists used a less subtle attack on the Bible’s morality, complaining that it contained far too much violence and improper behaviour to be a suitable read for young people! (Church think about this for a moment!)

Secularism

The 19th century saw a serious campaign against the Churches by the secularist movement.

Their particular target was the state church, the Church of England, which was highly privileged.

Until 1828 no-one could hold a public office without signing up to the beliefs of the Church.

Until 1836 only Church of England ministers could conduct marriages.

Until 1871 only members of the Church of England could teach at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Blasphemy: The law against blasphemy was strict in Victorian Britain.

George Holyoake (1817-1906) was the last person in England to be imprisoned (in 1842) for being an atheist. He was jailed for 6 months for a speech which included the line: “For myself, I flee the Bible as a viper, and revolt at the touch of a Christian.”

Charles Bradlaugh

Bradlaugh (1833-1891) was one of the most prominent of the Victorian atheists. He edited the National Reformer, which itself was prosecuted for blasphemy, and in 1866 was one of the founders of the National Secular Society.

Bradlaugh was elected to Parliament in 1880, but was not allowed to take his seat because he would not swear a religious oath but wanted to affirm. He was re-elected several times over five years, but did not take his seat until 1886.

When he eventually took his seat he became Britain’s first openly atheist member of Parliament.

The discovery of evolution, Science begins to undermine religion.

In the second half of the 19th century the theory of evolution put forward by Charles Darwin, and other scientific discoveries, undermined the value of religion as a way of explaining the nature and existence of the world.

Theology and Bible scholarship

During the 18th and 19th centuries, academic research began to undermine the literal truths of religion and throw doubt on the existence of God as a separate supernatural being.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes had noted even earlier, in 1651, that Moses could not actually have written all the books of the Bible that were attributed to him.

In 1779 J G Eichhorn suggested that the stories in the Book of Genesis, were not actual history, but were myths, like the stories of Greek and Roman mythology. Furthermore, he said, these stories should no longer be read as if they were the actual word of God.

Other theologians began to work with the ideas of Hegel to portray religion, and religious stories and beliefs in general, as symbolic ways of demonstrating truths about the spiritual life of humankind.

Literary analysis of the text began to cast great doubt on the Bible itself as a reliable historical document.

The German, D F Strauss, said in 1835 that the New Testament stories about Christ should not be interpreted as literally true, but as a dress of religious symbolism clothing the life of of a Jewish teacher, as the Jews and muslems do today.

God is a human invention

In 1841 Ludwig Feuerbach argued that God was a human invention, a spiritual device to help us deal with our fears and aspirations.

This was bad news, because human beings projected all their good qualities onto God and saw him as compassionate, wise, loving and so on, while they saw themselves as greatly inferior. Thus humanity alienated itself from its true self.

Anthropology, Anthropologists, too, were casting doubt on previous certainties.

Research into comparative religion revealed that there was a great deal of similarity between the rituals and stories of many religions – even tribal religions seemed to have elements in common with Christianity.

This posed the big problem of how Christianity (or any other religion) could claim that it was the only true faith, and how any religion could claim to be the unique result of God’s revelation, since all religions seemed to share so much in common.

Nietzsche

At the end of the 19th century the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) announced that God was dead, and that humanity had killed him.

Nietzsche said that it was no longer possible to believe in the Christian God. Modern people, he thought, did not really believe in God any more and it was this unbelief that had killed off God as if He was like fairies.

This had serious ethical consequences. Western society’s entire moral code was based on Judaeo-Christian ethics, and sooner or later people would realise that if they no longer believed in God, they could not live by a moral code that was based on God.

Nietzsche wasn’t just proclaiming the death of God, but something even more radical – for Nietzsche there was nothing left to believe in, certainly not God, but not even any external world that might provide a source of meaning and purpose for humanity.

Nietzsche was particularly critical of Christianity. He thought that it was not only false but depraved and corrupt, a “contradiction of life”.

5 Types of atheists.

Humanism: While atheism is merely the absence of belief, humanism is a positive attitude to the world, centred on human experience, thought, and hopes.

The British Humanist Association and The International Humanist and Ethical Union use similar emblems showing a stylised human figure reaching out to achieve its full potential.

Humanists believe that human experience and rational thinking provide the only source of both knowledge and a moral code to live by.

They reject the idea of knowledge ‘revealed’ to human beings by gods, or in special books.

Postmodernism: Postmodernism does away with many of the things that religious people regard as essential.

For postmodernists every society is in a state of constant change; there are no absolute values, only relative ones; nor are there any absolute truths.

This promotes the value of individual religious impulses, but weakens the strength of ‘religions’ which claim to deal with truths that are presented from ‘outside’, and given as objective realities.

In a postmodern world there are no universal religious or ethical laws, everything is shaped by the cultural context of a particular time and place and community.

In a postmodern world individuals work with their religious impulses, by selecting the bits of various spiritualities that ‘speak to them’ and create their own internal spiritual world. The ‘theology of the pub’ becomes as valid as that of the priest, or say, murder yesterday was bad, but today it ‘feels right’ so just do it.

The inevitable conclusion is that religion is an entirely human-made phenomenon.

Rationalism: Rationalism is an approach to life based on reason and evidence.

Rationalism encourages ethical and philosophical ideas that can be tested by experience and rejects authority that cannot be proved by experience.

Because rationalism encourages people to think for themselves, rationalists have many different and diverse ideas and continue in a tradition from the nineteenth century known as freethought.

However, most rationalists would agree that:

There is no evidence for any arbitrary supernatural authority e.g. God or Gods.

The best explanation so far for why the natural world looks the way it does is the theory of evolution first put forward by Charles Darwin.

All human beings should have fundamental rights. Some rationalists and humanists go further and argue that animals should also have rights as they are living, sensate beings.

Society is should be an “open society”, where each individual is able to live “freely and equally practise their chosen life stance, and in which human potential is realised to the benefit of the individual and the community at large.” (Levi Fragell, President of International Humanist and Ethical Union, 2001)

Secularism: Secularists oppose religion or the religious being afforded privileges, which – put another way – means others are disadvantaged.

They believe that the reduced numbers attending church show that people have chosen to give up faith. They say this underlines the unfairness of giving any special privileges or rights to faiths.

Secularists are particularly concerned about education. They think that religious schools are divisive, and damage the prospects of a harmonious and diverse society.

Secularists are not against the right of individuals to have a religious faith. What they oppose is special treatment for religious beliefs and organisations.

They think that the protection already given by the law, including human rights legislation, should be sufficient to protect believers from assault or discrimination.

You may be surprised to know that while most secularists are atheists, someSome Atheist Symbols

secularists are actually believers in a faith. While they believe, they don’t think that belief is a reason for special treatment.

Charles Bradlaugh was one of the founders of Britain’s National Secular Society. His political activism kept the atheist point of view in the limelight during Victorian times.

Some secularists go further; they want religion to be regarded as a private matter for the home and place of worship – and that the state should be blind to religion.

They also seek to separate those bits of our present-day culture that originated in religion from the religions that inspired them.

Unitarian Universalism: is not an atheist movement, but a religious movement into which some atheists may comfortably fit. The movement proclaims the importance of individual freedom of belief, and it includes members from a wide spectrum of beliefs.

Unitarianism and Universalism began in the 18th century as a reaction against some Christian doctrines. The movements joined together in 1961.

Is it atheist?

The movement does not have an official definition of God, but allows members to “develop individual concepts of God that are meaningful to them.” Members are entirely free to “reject the term and concept altogether.” (Continued on next Sermon) Name(required) Email(required) Comment(required) Related articlesJEHOVAHS WITNESSES (Part 2) (whatshotn.wordpress.com)Jehovahs Witnesses (whatshotn.wordpress.com)Questions Thinking People Ask (whatshotn.wordpress.com)Islam (Part 2) (whatshotn.wordpress.com)Islam (whatshotn.wordpress.com)Judaism (whatshotn.wordpress.com)Hinduism (whatshotn.wordpress.com)Questions Thinking People Ask (Part 2) (whatshotn.wordpress.com)What Do Jews Believe? (whatshotn.wordpress.com)