Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;
1 Timothy 4:1
This week I signed a petition with Richard Dawkins.
As Christian who came of age when The God Delusion was burning up the bestseller lists, this was an unexpected development. Dawkins was always a fun interlocutor, brilliant in his field, relentless, priggish, and a little bit weird. If you were to draw a caricature of an Atheist, it would be hard to find a better image than the high-domed, gray haired Oxford, British Scientist. It’s hard not to pity the august biologist in his old age as the legions who used to praise him for his battle against religion now attack him for his affirmation of biology (the field he’s actually an expert in).
The New Atheists, for all of their noise, had a simple, clear thesis: Humanity needed to retire religion in favor of reason. Religion was a fine framework to explain phenomena before the advent of science. (“Why does it rain? God makes the rain.”) But science is the truth framework that should and must displace religion. After all, what had religion ever gotten us but oppression, inhibition, and witch burnings? What did science give us: the enlightenment, microwaves and moon landings. More of the latter, please.
Today religion in America is in retreat, faithlessness is booming. Whereas in the early aughts we had a devout evangelical president promoting intelligent design, and faith based initiatives, those debates are long over. Questions of faith hardly raise to the surface of our politics anymore. The most religious institutions can muster these days is a plea for “religious freedom”, a clear sign that even they are aware of their fall from grace. These should be the halcyon days for Neo Atheists.
But as the old religion recedes from the west, reason seems to be receding as well. Madness is on the rise. Basic science is being questioned in favor of something akin to magic.
Dawkins could well fret about the risks to Evolution in the Bible Belt but Creation Science never captured international law like Gender Ideology. In the past we couldn’t agree on the sacraments. Today we can’t agree on biology. “Believe the science” is more of a spiritual mantra than an actual logical method.
Why did the victory of the atheists lead to the immediate discrediting of their entire project?
A curious relic from an older age is a phrase that appears at the beginning of my church’s baptismal rite: the exorcism of demons from the candidate before the baptism. In most churches this has been abandoned or incorporated into the less confrontational, “I renounce Satan and all his works”. But the original German liturgy contained a much more direct command: “Depart thou unclean spirit and give room to the Holy Spirit”.
There’s something in this command that I’ve been thinking about more and more lately: the soul abhors abhors a vacuum as much as nature.
When our culture began to secularize, many expected that we would all morph into to something like Spock from Star Trek: highly rational, responding dispassionately to each challenge with logic, retaining our humanity with a deep fidelity to science over superstition. Instead a new spirituality is emerging. We’re haunted by strange, angry spirits. We silenced the old doctrines and now we hear the doctrine of demons.
Where does this leave the atheist? They are like a proud house cat in a cathedral, unaware of how much it depends on the walls for protection and the priests for milk. Now the cathedral has collapsed, the priests have fled, and wolves are on the prowl.
One final thought: Today I caught up with an old friend of mine who I hadn’t spoken with almost a decade. When I knew him he was a typical brash Neo Atheist: fun, witty, irreverent, impossible not to like even if you disagreed with him. Today he is a person of faith. We talked about how much of life is spent trying to fill the void that only God can fill. How once you believe in God, it reorients your place in the universe into something sane and makes you a whole person. It was wonderful to see him ten years older, in more humble circumstances than when I knew him, yet peaceful and joyful.
In the end, maybe it’s not the logical debates that will win the day but the reality of our fundamental dependence on the divine. We have needful souls no matter how hard we try to deny it.
As St. Augustine said, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”