Perhaps one of the main stumbling blocks to religious faith, even going back to Psalm 14’s “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God’”, could lie in an individual’s inability to conceive of the existence of and relationship with something immeasurably bigger than ourselves and totally beyond our comprehension. Can we accept transcendence, and a vast, all-creating, all-loving reality beyond our individual personal psyches? St Paul called faith a “gift”, and I think that it is. But a gift that all can have for the asking.
Yet why do some people not ask for it, and even, for the most sincere and honest of reasons, doubt that the gift exists, or is worth having? I have always found this a fascinating subject. As a hard-nosed, sceptical pragmatist myself, I have never, strangely enough, found it a problem; yet I know instinctively mystical, even other-worldly, people who simply cannot see the purpose of faith in a personal God. Indeed, it is a bit like believing in miracles: some people (myself included) have no problem with God being greater than his creation, and greater than anything that our minds can conceive of. Whereas others, with the very best of intentions, can only think of miracles as the products of delusion or error.
Indeed, I often wonder why this is so. And I have no real explanation. Suffice it to say that I cannot for the life of me believe that a loving God would ever punish or condemn – let alone consign to hell – an “honest doubter” who tries, even desires, but simply cannot believe. One can only pray and trust that once we have all passed through that gateway which some see as the portal of heaven and others as the entry into dreamless oblivion, our doubts will be resolved.
But while I respect “honest doubt”, I am much more wary of those who overtly push the atheism and oblivion argument. As was shown in previous chapters, and as David Hume was aware, there is no more solid experimental or philosophical proof against the existence of God than there is for. Yet quite apart from an individual’s personal tendency to faith or otherwise, I would argue that, from a purely pragmatic point of view, a belief in God gives us more options than does atheism. As we saw in Chapter 10, we are cause-, effect-, and purpose-seeking beings; and while belief in God supplies imaginative and creative possibilities of thought and explanation, atheism is just a blank. It offers us nothing. An empty space, for tidy-minded people who hate the idea of having anyone bigger and perhaps messier than themselves on the scene. But at least agnosticism contains growth potential.
What is unfortunate is that the Christian church across the denominations has allowed aggressive atheists to get away with so many things largely unchallenged, in the sphere beyond the university seminar, and has certainly had little influence on the perceptions of what might be called “ordinary people”. It has let the atheists tie the “no God” argument to key points in scientific explanation to create a “scientistic naturalism”, while failing to clearly inform the pullers of this “fast one” that their argument has no more evidential weight than do theistic explanations of nature. This is, indeed, an aspect of how twentieth-century Christendom has allowed itself to be hoodwinked, and to some degree has lost its intellectual nerve, in the face of atheistical onslaught.
But it is essential that in the twenty-first century Christians learn to engage dynamically and critically with this sleight of hand, and force the atheists to face and acknowledge their own slippery intellectual habits. Like it or not, the belief in a transcendent reality has probably done more than any other single concept in history to inspire, focus, and energize the human race. And to deny this simply means that we are letting ourselves be taken in by yet another myth.