The God-haters can’t drive out God, because knowledge of him is built into the human mind!

Earlier today I wrote: “The atheists have become evangels…. ” I’m not the only one to whom that image has occurred. John D. has just sent me an article by Roger Scruton in which he speaks of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris et al. as “evangelical atheists.” Scruton, an atheist, though not of the evangelical kind, seems to be moving toward an affirmation of an irreducible Something, or rather Someone, the belief in Whom the evangelical atheists will never, he says, succeed in extirpating from the human soul, because the belief arises from our irreducible experience of our own consciousness. Here is the last part of the article, slightly cut by me:

It is this mystery [of consciousness] which brings people back to religion. They may have no clear conception of science; no theological aptitude, and no knowledge of the arguments, down the ages, that have persuaded people that the fabric of contingency must be supported by a “necessary being.” The subtleties of the medieval schools for the most part make little contact with the thinking of believers today. Modern people are drawn to religion by their consciousness of consciousness, by their awareness of a light shining in the centre of their being…. The “I” defines the starting point of all practical reasoning and contains an intimation of the thing that distinguishes people from the rest of nature, namely their freedom…. All those goals, like justice, community and love, which make human life into a thing of intrinsic value, have their origin in the mutual accountability of persons, who respond to each other “I” to “I.” Not surprisingly, therefore, people are satisfied that they understand the world and know its meaning, when they can see it as the outward form of another “I”—the “I” of God, in which we all stand judged, and from which love and freedom flow.

That thought may be poured out in verse, as in the Veni Creator Spiritus of the Catholic Church, in the rhapsodic words of Krishna in the Baghavad Gita, in the great Psalms that are the glory of the Hebrew Bible. But for most people it is simply there, a dense nugget of meaning in the centre of their lives, which weighs heavily when they find no way to express it in communal forms. People continue to look for the places where they can stand, as it were, at the window of our empirical world and gaze out towards the transcendental—the places from which breezes from that other sphere waft over them. Not so long ago, God was in residence. You could open a door and discover him, and join with those who sang and prayed in his presence. Now he, like us, has no fixed abode. But from this experience a new kind of religious consciousness is being born: a turning of the inner eye towards the transcendental and a constant invocation of “we know not what.”

Distrust of organised religion therefore goes hand in hand with a mourning for the loss of it. We are distressed by the evangelical atheists, who are stamping on the coffin in which they imagine God’s corpse to lie and telling us to bury it quickly before it begins to smell. These characters have a violent and untidy air: it is very obvious that something is missing from their lives, something which would bring order and completeness in the place of random disgust. And yet we are uncertain how to answer them. Nowhere in our world is the door that we might open, so as to stand again in the breath of God.

Yet human beings have an innate need to conceptualise their world in terms of the transcendental, and to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane…. Those experiences are the root of human as opposed to merely animal society, and we need to affirm them, self-knowingly to possess them, if we are to be at ease with our kind. Religions satisfy this need. For they provide the social endorsement and the theological infrastructure that will hold the concepts of the transcendental and the sacred in place. The insecurity and disorder of Western societies comes from the tension in which people are held when they cannot attach their inner awareness of the transcendental to the outward forms of religious ritual. People have turned away from organised religion, as they have turned away from organised everything else. But the atheists who dance on the coffin of the old religions will never persuade them to live as though the thing inside were dead. God has fled, but he is not dead. He is biding his time, waiting for us to make room for him. That, at least, is how I read the growing obsession with religion and the nostalgia for what we lost when the congregations shut their Bibles and their hymn books, broke asunder and went silently home.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 01, 2009 08:54 PM | Send