Faith returning with a vengeance

Atheism has fallen on hard times.

Most people today no longer explicitly deny the divine or think the existence of spiritual powers to be illusionary. Supernatural beings and a transcendent realm beyond our own are now commonly accepted, says Alister McGrath, himself a one-time atheist.

In just a few decades a major religious reversal has occurred.

McGrath, an articulate and prolific writer, is a professor of historical theology at Oxford University and a leading evangelical Christian scholar. His book, The Twilight of Atheism, charts the rise and fall of a once powerful “empire of the mind” and the recovery of another. Atheism is out, he says. Faith is returning with a vengeance.

After reaching its high-water mark during the early 1970s, says the author, classic secularization began to fade as a cultural influence. In spite of dire declarations that God had died (at least for intelligent moderns) there has been a phenomenal postmodern global religious resurgence.

Evidence of a change is reflected in popular New Age “spirituality,” for example; or the global rise of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. There has been a revival of Orthodox Judaism, and significant growth in militant Islam. All of these spiritual expressions, in their own unique ways, indicate a dramatic contemporary rebirth of belief and a corresponding decline in unbelief.

The truth is, says McGrath, that in spite of the continuing strength of secularization in the West, religion remains important to a lot of people. For many modern secularization includes God, and acknowledges the divine and the supernatural.

McGrath divides his book into two parts. The first, entitled “The High Noon of Atheism,” shows how and why atheism once flourished. The second he labels “Twilight,” a description of atheistic demise. His survey originates with the French revolution of 1789 continues through the fall of the Berlin Wall 200 years later and concludes with an assessment of the current situation.

In the heyday of atheism, the human and the material were considered the ultimate measure of things. God was removed from the equation of reality, or at least deemed unnecessary. Religion was portrayed as a prop used by immature people who needed a parent to look after them, a drug to dull the pain of an unjust world. It was even portrayed as an illusion, to help persons claim their desires.

The sciences viewed themselves as liberators; invalidating the need for God. The biologist Charles Darwin (1809-1882), for example, while not rejecting the possibility of God’s existence, believed that evolution was the means by which God guided creation to its present state.

Those who take a rather grim view of Darwin’s famous theory need to know that during his own lifetime he worked to reconcile science and faith. It was not evolution that made him question the existence of God. Darwin simply could not accept the popular evangelical Christian doctrine that souls of unbelievers were eternally condemned to hell.

McGrath states that early in his career he too had been an atheist who rejected God’s existence and believed that life was what humans themselves make of it. In time, though, he “moved on” from what he called dead-ended thinking.

The classic atheistic and theistic beliefs no longer ring true. Atheism foundered on the shoals of rigidity and orthodoxy, two of the very elements it had rejected in religion. Churches mired in rational, moralistic, belief-based thinking will themselves crash like atheism.

The church listens to its critics—atheistic and otherwise—who raise honest questions.

Will the current spiritual resurgence continue? We live today, McGrath concludes, not at a time of the twilight of the gods but in the twilight of atheism. Just as political empires rise and fall, so too do empires of the mind. Just as the coming of twilight does not portend the inevitability of night, rather a time of ambiguity, the current twilight could turn into something quite unexpected.

The modern battle between faith and unfaith is for believers to lose, not for atheists to win.

Wayne A. Holst is a parish educator at St. David’s United Church, Calgary. He has taught religion and culture at the University of Calgary.