Sermon for 6 March 2011, 1st Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois

 

GOD, ATHEISM, AND THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

Ronald Glossop

 

 I.  Introduction

    A.  This sermon is a very personal statement of my own beliefs about God and religion.

    B.  A great thing about our Unitarian-Universalist religion is the commitment to the freedom of the pulpit.  The preacher can openly say whatever he or she believes without worrying about reactions to it since everyone in the congregation knows that they are not obliged to agree.

    C.  At the same time the preacher hopes that the sermon will be helpful in some way, that maybe some of the ideas will be useful to at least part of the congregation.

 

II.  The nature of God

    A.  The traditional Christian view of God, technically called “theism,” is that God is a mind without a body, a personal being capable of knowing what is happening in the world even though He has no body and thus no sense organs. God has a will, that is, He wants some things to happen and is even capable of causing miracles to happen, especially in answer to prayers, even though no one understands how He as an immaterial being could cause such changes.

    B.  In my own religious development the part of the traditional Christian view that seemed most central to me was the story about the resurrection of Jesus three days after he died on the cross, killed by the Romans because he was defying their political authority by declaring that he was “King of the Jews.”  Whether such a miraculous event really occurred is critical to traditional Christian beliefs.  If such a resurrection didn’t really happen, there would be no basis for believing that Jesus was God.  There would also be considerable doubt whether any of the miracles mentioned in the Bible really occurred and whether there was any kind of life after death.  My studying convinced me that there was no actual resurrection even though some of the first disciples may have believed that there was.  It is just very unlikely that any such event actually occurred.  The fact that Jesus is reported to have ascended into the sky and also said that he would soon return to meet the disciples adds to the improbability.  Since almost two thousand years have passed, it seems that Jesus was wrong about returning “soon.”    

    C.  Once any basis for belief in the resurrection of Jesus is gone, there is no reason to believe in supernaturalistic parts of the Bible or the beliefs of Christianity, including the theistic view that there is a God who can perform miracles and cares about what happens to humans.

    D.  Modern science makes it virtually impossible to believe that miracles occur.   Purported miracles and purported evidence of life-after-death are regularly shown to be frauds. Also there is now no longer any way to even conceive of a theistic God or life-after-death. Can there be any kind of personal mind or consciousness without a brain?  Before Copernicus in the 16th century and the notion that the Earth is just another planet circling the sun, it was widely believed that God and Heaven exist out beyond the fixed stars, but modern astronomy has left no place or time where a theistic God or a Heaven with resurrected bodies could exist.

    E.  Some religious thinkers in the Western world who took this new knowledge seriously were the 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers in France and England called Deists.  Deists saw that modern scientific findings made miracles impossible and belief in a God who could cause such miracles absurd. The only concept of God that was acceptable was the watch-maker view of God, that God creates the universe and the laws of nature by which it operates but then lets it run on its own.  No one can even conceive of how there could be such supernaturally caused events as miracles. The only prayer that makes any sense is “Thy will be done.” A good book presenting the Deist viewpoint is Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.  But the Deists still adopted the questionable view that there could somehow be a mind without a brain.

    F.  Another kind of philosophical/religious response to the new discoveries of science, one that didn’t make that kind of mistake, was pantheism.  This was the view of the famous philosopher Spinoza (1632-1667).  For him “God” and “Nature” are two different terms that refer to the same thing.  For pantheists to say that something happens in accord with the will of God and to say that something happens in accord with the laws of nature are just two ways of saying the same thing. God is not something separate from the universe but simply another way of talking about the universe and the forces operating in it.

   G.  As a matter of fact pantheism had also been championed by the Stoic philosophers before and during the time of Jesus.  Paul’s statement quoted in the Bible that “in God we live and move and have our being” is a quotation from the Stoic poet Aratus.  Stoics viewed Zeus or God as both creator of the universe and as the World-soul which moves and orders the world from within.  Their view sought to combine the deistic view of God as creator with pantheism. They also believed that God is the source of rationality and morality in humans.  The notion of the Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man comes from the Stoics, who believed that there is a fragment of the divine in every human being. On that basis they became the first philosophers to oppose slavery and to support the ideas of natural rights and the natural law.

     H. Besides the ideas of theism, deism, and pantheism we need to mention the view that the word “God” or “gods” is used to refer to supernatural forces at work in the world.  Animism is the view that all things, even inanimate ones, have a soul and can make things happen. It is a view found among most primitive peoples.  It seems to come from the unsophisticated belief that all other things in the world have feelings and thoughts and a will just as we humans do.

     I. The familiar polytheism of the ancient Greeks and Romans is really the personification of the forces of nature.  Sailors would make sacrifices to Poseidon, the god of the forces of the ocean, to procure their safety on vojages.  People would pray and sacrifice to Aphrodite, goddess of erotic love, to cause the object of their affection to also fall in love with them.

     J.  I think that we should move beyond theism, deism, pantheism, animism, and polytheism, to a concept of God appropriate for our modern scientific age but which also does justice to our Judaeo-Christian religious tradition. For me “God” should be thought of as “a force working for good.”  This definition takes account of the fact that whatever we worship should be something that unites power and goodness.  A “god” which never does anything--which has no power--is not worthy of worship, and a force which is not good is not worthy of admiration.

     K.  The God of traditional Christianity is viewed as not only powerful and good, but as all-powerful and perfectly good.  But that is going too far.  It generates the greatest problem for religion, the Problem of Evil.  If God is all-powerful and perfectly good, how can there be any evil in the world?  If God is all-powerful, He should be able to eliminate the evil in the world, and if He is perfectly good, He should want to eliminate it?  If He is also all-knowing as Christians claim, then He must know how to eliminate evil, but nevertheless He doesn’t.

    L.  Theologians have made many attempts to deal with this problem of evil. The response that makes most sense to me in view of the developments of modern science is to stop viewing God as a conscious personal being and stop maintaining that God is all-powerful. Thus I come to my definition of “God” as “a force working for good.”          

 

III.  Working with this definition of God, we can turn to the question of whether God exists. 

    A.  I would begin by noting that there is no doubt that people are often moved to help other people who are in distress. If anyone asks “Where is God?”, my answer is “Wherever people are helping other people who need help.” Is there anything that is more “religious” than that? And I think that I am not alone in this sentiment.  To put this observation in the usual Christian terms, “God is love.” One could say that those who help others are “moved by the Holy Spirit.”

    B.  When humans help one another, they are moved to do so by God, and thus we can know that God exists.  But does God, a force working for good, also exist outside of humans?  If not, our view could be called “religious humanism.”  I am not opposed to that term for my view. 

    C.  But on the issue of whether there is any force working for good besides in humans, I am an agnostic.  Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t.  It seems at least possible that the evolution of life forms is not just a coincidence but the result of a force working for good.  On the other hand, if we consider the vastness of the universe, the evolution of life forms that we know here on Earth could be just a coincidence that seems to be a somewhat miraculous occurrence just because we happen to be at a place in the huge universe where it seems to have occurred.  

 

IV.  The issue of whether the view I am espousing should be called “atheistic” is itself worth a comment, partly because it is also relevant to the issue of whether Thomas Jefferson was an “atheist,” an accusation brought against him when he was running for President in 1800.

    A. The word “atheist” is a prime example of a critically ambiguous word.

           1.  One possible meaning of “atheist” is “not a theist.”  As already noted, a theist is a person who believes in a supernatural personal God who can perform miracles and thus change the course of the natural world.  In this sense, Deist Thomas Jefferson was an “atheist.”  My own view, that “God is a force working for good” is also an “atheist” view in this sense.

           2.  Another possible meaning of “atheist” is “a person who does not believe in any kind of God.”  In this sense, Jefferson was correct in arguing that it was inappropriate to label him an “atheist” because he did believe in a Deistic God.  It would also be inappropriate to say that my view is an “atheist” view in this sense because I am ready to use the word “God” and to affirm that “there is a force working for good,” though possibly only within humans.   

 

V.  Let me add a word here about my own view of how religion has evolved. 

    A.  I think that religion begins with the worship of supernatural powers in order to get help in pursuit of one’s goals.  For over a million years humans were generally ignorant about why they got sick or why the weather changed as it did or why some people prospered while others didn’t.  They hoped that supernatural deities would help them get what they wanted, and they thought that they could bribe the gods by making the right offerings and sacrifices to them.

    B.  It is interesting to me that modern science is on the way to giving humans everything that they once hoped the supernatural gods would give them.  As sometimes popularly expressed, especially with regard to the successes of modern medicine, we are now “playing God.”               

    C.  A great shift occurred when the religion of Zoroastrianism viewed their god Ahura Mazda as concerned about moral behavior.  Thus good behavior would be rewarded and bad behavior would be punished not only by those who ruled the society but also by Ahura Mazda.  Zoroastrians developed the ideas of Heaven and Hell and the “Day of Judgment” to support the idea that such rewards and punishments could come in the afterlife as well as in this life.

    D. The Jewish prophets advanced the idea that their god Yahweh was more interested in moral behavior than anything else. The goodness of God became as important as His power.

    E.  Christians tended to think that God must be all-powerful as well as completely good.  Why?  Because they needed assurance that good would prevail in the end.  In fact, the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that people needed the assurance that the universe itself was a moral universe or they would ask, “Why should I be moral if the universe itself is indifferent to morality--if no guarantee exists that goodness and justice will ultimately prevail.”

    F.  But I think Kant was mistaken.  I think we humans can decide that we will be morally good even if the universe ultimately is not, even if it is “a tale told by an idiot.” For me that is the core of religious faith.  I am going to do what seems right regardless of consequences for myself or what others may think.  Let the power of goodness live through me, even if the universe is amoral.  Let me work with God whether goodness will ultimately prevail or not.      

 

VI.  When I am moved to work for good, to help others, to improve the human situation, I feel that I am allowing God, a force working for good, to work through me.  This viewpoint is more appropriate than being proud that I have done something good. Why? Because ultimately I have been shaped to be however morally good I happen to be by forces outside of my control.   Therefore I can freely and wholeheartedly sing, “Spirit of love, come unto me.  Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion. . . . Roots hold me close; wings set me free; Spirit of Love, come to me, come to me.”