David Cowles
Oct 15, 2024
“God is dead, and we have killed him…who will wipe this blood from us?” (Nietzsche)
Since the 16th century, the West’s overarching intellectual project has been its effort to rid the World of God! “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him (Voltaire); (but) if God did exist it would be necessary to abolish him (Bakunin); (so) if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. (Zen Koan). God is dead, and we have killed him…who will wipe this blood from us?” (Nietzsche)
Science hopes one day to explain all phenomena in purely physical terms, supposedly eliminating any need to hypothesize a ‘transcendent agency’ (aka God). Big Bang has already proven we don’t need a Creator; the universe is sui generis. Apparently Negative Vacuum Pressure does the trick. Cosmogenesis is still ex nihilo…because ‘nothing’ is not exactly nothing!
Do you have a ‘singularity phobia’? Relax. Roger Penrose tells us that Universe is an endless cycle of Big Bangs and Heat Deaths. (CCC) Hugh Everett tells us that everything that can happen does happen…in its own universe. (MWI of QM) And if a single universe makes you uncomfortable, try the Multiverse!
Bottom line: the phenomenal Universe is infinite and eternal; there’s no need for God. But what about life? For that we have Chemistry. Evolution? Biology. Consciousness? Neurology.
Now, all that we’ve discovered in this Age of Reason is not necessarily wrong. What’s wrong is letting a pre-determined conclusion set the agenda and fix the guard rails for our inquiry… and thinking that any of these ‘discoveries’ has any bearing on the God Hypothesis.
For centuries, intellectual inquiry has been driven by a felt need to liberate humanity from its ‘primitive’ belief in a Supreme Being that transcends the phenomenal world. “Religion is the opiate of the people.” (Marx) But why?
The God Hypothesis has led to the rise of various religions, some of which have given birth to institutions (e.g. Churches) that have been complicit in horrendous physical and intellectual atrocities, from child sacrifice to the Inquisition.
But these same religions have motivated countless acts of charity, stimulated much legitimate intellectual inquiry, inspired magnificent works of art, architecture and music, and brokered peace between individuals, groups, and even nations.
The God Hypothesis has been used to motivate, justify and even bless brutal, bloody conflicts (wars) between various ethnic groups and nation states; but religious institutions and religiously motivated individuals have also played a major role in resolving such conflicts.
The God Hypothesis has been associated with various moral codes, some of which promote practices abhorrent to our modern sensibilities. But religions have also contributed to civilizing human society by condemning the unjust depravation of life or property and by contributing cultural memes like the Great Commandment and the Golden Rule.
Religious institutions have sought to influence and even control folks’ thought and actions, but often in conjunction with providing essential public services, like healthcare and education, that secular society was unable or unwilling to deliver.
Religious organizations have provided opportunity and ‘cover’ for individuals, often in positions of authority, to exploit the vulnerable in their orbits. Of course, no major faith condones pedophilia or any form of sexual abuse. In cultures where it is still widely practiced, it is practiced despite explicit, if ineffective, condemnation by local faiths.
Any temptation to try to smooth over the atrocities visited on society by religious institutions would be misguided. Evil needs to be named and rooted out wherever it occurs. But institutions are human artifacts that, unfortunately, incorporate all the flaws (and virtues) of the people who form them.
That said, religious institutions have been complicit in such evil practices no more, but sadly no less, than other human institutions. Bottom line: Individual cases notwithstanding, belief in God is ‘weakly correlated’ with either benevolent or malevolent behavior. People are who they’ve chosen to be, no matter what they say they believe.
So then, why the insatiable need to rid the world of ‘divinity’? Hubris (pride): we are the tip of evolution’s arrow. The universe is ours to manage. Of course, our precious science tells us otherwise: evolution has no arrow, we are what we are by sheer accident (mutation and natural selection), and there is no way of knowing what will become of homo sapiens down the road.
Apparently, we ‘follow the science’…but only when it suits us. Hmm, sounds just like some ‘religious’ people I know. In any event, we confidently affirm, “There is no higher power! We make the rules (in conjunction with the laws of physics). No one, no thing tells us what to do. Nobody puts Baby in a corner! (Dirty Dancing) We are the captains of our ship, the masters of our fate. In short, we are the Champions!” (Queen)
How ridiculous all this sounds! Yet I fear this is how we will be remembered by Intellectual Historians in the future. “How could those people have been this naïve, this clueless?”
Truth to tell, we have absolutely no control over the long term consequences of our actions. Philosophy has created a paradigm to celebrate our alienation: ‘thesis → antithesis → synthesis’. (Dialectics) Every action entails an equal and opposite reaction. (Newton)
Whatever we do is almost certain to provoke a consequence that runs counter to our intent; at best, we can hope that our original motivation is reflected, however dimly, somewhere down the road. “Long I stood and looked down one (road) as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth. Then took the other just as fair...” (Frost) In truth, we act blindly and hope for the best.
We know these things; so why do we believe otherwise? Where does our collective megalomania come from? From religion, of course! ‘Bad religion’. We accept that we are made in the image and likeness of the Omnipotent, but we deny that our behavior is subject to any higher authority. The logic is enough to baffle any Aristotelean:
Religion tells us that we are the King’s X. We reject such religion as ‘mere superstition - fairy tales for children’. But we cling to the sense of importance that religion confers on us. We scaled the mountain; now we can afford to cut the ropes that got us here!
Less poetically, we accept the conclusions of religion but not the process of theology. We are like the 5th grader who writes down what she thinks is the correct answer but refuses to ‘show her work’.
We call ourselves ‘empiricists’: Really? Look around! The universe is a horror show - not fit even for today’s big screen. Based solely on the evidence of our senses, we have no choice but to say, “Better dead than alive, but better still…never to be born at all!” (Ecclesiastes)
Yet we continue to have children. Why? Because we hate them? After all, we know that they will one day die and that they will suffer horribly along the way. No! We have children because we cling to eschatological hope for “a peace that the world cannot give”. (Gospel of John)
We cling to a hope that can only come from some sort of religious faith…which of course we reject. We have recreated Plato’s Cave (The Republic): we mistake religion’s disembodied shadows for ‘reality’. Like Peter Pan, we have separated our shadow (hope) from its source (God). We are adrift, believing one way, acting another.
Fortunately, we seem to be entering a new age. The Age of Aquarius? In the 20th century, all hopes for a mechanistic solution to the puzzle of Being were systematically dashed. We are coming once again to recognize the potential need for ‘transcendent agency’. I will not live to see whether this new bud blooms, but you, dear reader, may! Send a message back in time to let me know, ok?
David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com
ress, Literary Journal Spring 2023.
