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God
The case against God
As religion continues to dominate the national and international news, contemporary western society attempts to be both secular and pluralist: sympathetic to all religions but subservient to none.
These two ought to be incompatible. A more thoroughgoing secularism would be actively anti-religious, denouncing all religions alike for the harm they have done in the world. A more confident pluralism would be actively pro-religious, praising all religions together and promoting their united public role. With an intuitive wisdom, the contemporary social consensus takes the common theme from the two – that all religions are essentially the same – and reserves judgement on whether religion as a whole has done more harm than good, or more good than harm.
Behind the question of religion lies the more significant question of God. Contemporary society attempts to be equally diffident, but common ground between theism and atheism is more difficult to define.
A simplistic theism tends to maintain not only that God exists, but that God intervenes regularly in world affairs, from the global to the trivial, and has the right to demand obedience on threat of punishment. The greater presumption ahead of this detail is that there is only one such being, and that it has recognisable human attributes such as personhood and will. The whole package might be called not just theism but presumptive monotheism.
It is against this presumptive monotheism that the atheist case is made. The atheist argues that there is nothing in the observable universe that requires, or even suggests, the existence of such a God. Everything has been or will be explained by the sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology and anthropology. The universe is a self-perpetuating, self-organising system: it needs no God to guide the planets in their courses, turn the acorn into an oak tree, open flowers in the meadow, or plan each human birth and death. It needs no God to make a parent love a child: that bond is a perfect example of the selfish gene looking after its own. Even altruism can evolve, as a population containing altruists is better equipped for survival than a population without. It was fashionable for a while to look for gaps in scientific explanations and place God there, but the gaps will diminish to nothing in time: a God in the gaps has no future. And there is a more emotive and assertive side to atheism: it refuses, as a matter of principle, to acknowledge a God who is all-powerful, yet allows unjust suffering, or who presumes to demand obedience on threat of punishment; even if such a God does exist, it has no right to our pathetic acquiescence.
The potential theist must come to terms with the truth of the atheist analysis. The wonders of the universe have all been explained, dependent on nothing but the big bang and a few simple constants; and there is no omnipotent God intervening to prevent human suffering or avenge every human injustice, at least not on the terms that we demand. Stripped of its mythology and metaphor, reduced to the bare historic facts of the case, the death by crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth can serve as an icon for the absence of any interventionist God of justice. As we stand in the shadow of the cross, with the blood of the Nazarene dripping on the ground, God has forsaken the Christ, and forsaken us all.
The atheist case is sound, but is not the last word. The case is made against a very particular image of God, the God of presumptive monotheism, a God promoted by western kings and emperors in their own over-glorified self-image: autonomous, all-powerful, autocratic, wrathful, vengeful and demanding, with moments of random benevolence supposedly justifying the rest. For most of its history the papacy has been a secular power with all the same motivations for promoting the same false image of God, but theologians well away from the medieval Vatican, and all who live by faith, have a different understanding and experience of God, outside and beyond those images the atheist rightly rejects. Religion may have been used to justify wars, manipulate individuals, and crush the human spirit, but there remains a profound unity embracing the whole of humankind when the individual stands with open honesty before the mysteries of life and eternity.
God without God sets out to explore what happens to the western spiritual tradition when the God of presumptive monotheism – the wrathful king – is removed. Far from being destroyed or diminished, it flourishes in its liberation. It emerges from its captivity as an egalitarian, humanistic spirituality that challenges and defies all earthly powers in its celebration of the realm of the spirit, the realm of the divine.