The Challenge of Atheism

The starkest religious alternative to Christian faith is atheism. While it may seem strange to even describe atheism as a religious alternative, doing so is accurate because atheism is the dogma that there is no God, a position that usually requires a great deal of talk and debate about God.

At the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the organization called American Atheists, its 44-year-old president strode to the lectern and opened with the words: “Happy Vernal Equinox and good morning. My name is Ellen Johnson and I am the President of American Atheists.” A very different picture from the previous president, Madalyn Murray O’Hair (who disappeared in 1995 and was recently confirmed murdered for money), Ellen Johnson is a newer picture of atheism. Slender, blonde, a self-described soccer mom, she nonetheless carries on the message of being freed from the restraints of religion and of wanting tolerance in a free society.

After her introduction she went on to say:

I am a second generation Atheist. When my two sisters and I grew up here in New Jersey, we were not taught to be religious. Everything that my parents said and did reflected an Atheistic approach to life. I don’t know if my parents would have called themselves Atheists back then. They just had absolutely no interest in, or use for, religion. . . .

I knew from my earliest recollections that I was an Atheist and my Atheism is something that I hold very dear to my heart. It has enriched my life and made me a better person which is probably why I have spent the last twenty years of my life working to “share the good word or good news of Atheism,” to put a twist on a typical religious phrase. Although my parents are home and not here today, I want to say how deeply grateful I am to them for the Atheist approach to life that they instilled in me. For those of you who rear your children as Atheists I know that someday they will thank you for it as well. It is one of the greatest gifts you can give to them.

American Atheists is not a large organization. Some 2,500 members nationwide are well aware that 95 percent of Americans say they believe in God while only 1 to 2 percent say they absolutely believe there is no God and no afterlife. Yet the issue of atheism goes far beyond those who publicly announce they are atheists.

There are many faces of atheism in the modern world. A person may be an atheist because of his or her socioeconomic view of life or scientific evaluation of reality or political perspectives or because he or she just simply doesn’t want to have to be answerable to anybody. “I want to live my life as I wish, and I don’t need and don’t desire any god to interfere with that” is the sentiment. The idea of being beholden to God is repugnant or tired and lifeless, so a person steps off into the open air of disbelief—no matter how strong are the voices of others or the inner voice that shouts out, Worship! Adore! Seek! Trust! Commit! Atheism shuts down the voice that says, “I want to believe.”

One of the great proponents of atheism in the modern world was Karl Marx, the father of socialism. Marx was a materialist, pure and simple. Materialism as a philosophy of life is not what we’re referring to when we speak about “being too materialistic.” Marx’s problem was not that he spent too much time at the mall or adored his BMWs (if they had had malls and BMWs in late nineteenth-century Germany). No, materialism as a worldview says, “I understand what I can touch, see, taste, smell or hear—in other words, the physical or material world. I can measure it, weigh it, sense it. A scientist can observe it and do experiments on it. The sum totality of the physical universe—rocks, trees, oceans, bison, people, moons, stars and stardust—is all there is.”

Years ago I remember watching the beginning of a television series called Cosmos, done by Carl Sagan, the popular astrophysicist from Cornell University. The first words, intoned by the distinctive voice of Sagan and set against photos of stars, galaxies and fields of flowers, were “The cosmos is all there is or ever was or ever will be.” I remember getting a shiver. The statement sounded almost like a creed, like a statement of faith in the materialistic universe and that alone. And, of course, that is precisely what Sagan meant.

Sagan was a proponent of scientific materialism, the view that reality can only be discovered through scientific investigation: what can be observed, measured and replicated by experiment. Now, nobody will argue that it is not a good thing when scientists can find treatments for diseases by understanding the chemistry and physiology behind ailments. We all want our skyscrapers to be more earthquake-proof and for the local water utility to know best how to purify the water we drink. Reliable empirical knowledge, achieved by scientific observation, analysis and application, is a good thing. More than that, great science is humanity showing some of its very best talents—God-given as they are.

But some people leap from science to scientific materialism, or scientism. Scientism is the view that science is the only means of valid human knowledge. Scientism says, “We are physical creatures in a physical world. Our knowledge comes through our senses, so it is literally non-sense to talk about any kind of supernatural knowledge (that is, knowledge beyond the physical).” That includes, of course, knowledge of God or any kind of spiritual knowledge. The true materialist will tell you that you can speculate about whether there is a God, but there is no way you can ever know, because all knowledge is rooted in sensory experience. “If you could show me God, let me see Him, touch Him, hear Him . . . then I could tell you I believe in Him.”

The Christian response is, first, that God is invisible and there are indeed realities that are above the physical, material world. Love, for instance, is something that can’t be put in a test tube, but we all hope it’s real and hope it’s more than a peaking of hormones. But the Christian also says that this invisible God did make Himself visible in a unique miracle called the Incarnation (literally, “becoming flesh,” the Son of God coming to Earth). Among the disciples of Jesus, there was a doubter by the name of Thomas, who said, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it” (John 20:25). He did see and touch and hear the resurrected Jesus, and he did believe. (More in I Want to Believe, Finding Your Way in an Age of Many Faiths.)

[to be continued]