My attention was recently drawn to an article from the USA entitled, “Campus Atheist Groups Double in Size in Two Years” by Angela Abbamonte, Religion News Service, September 18, 2009
Apparently the number of atheist or agnostic student groups on U.S. campuses has more than doubled in the past two years – from 80 to 162 – according to the Secular Student Alliance (SSA), the national organization for the secular student movement.
It seems that it is okay to be “godless” now on American Campuses. I have a feeling it has always been this way on Australian University Campuses. Hans Mol, the well known professor in the sociology of religion, once claimed that there were 10 times the number of atheists and agnostics on the staffs of Australian universities in comparison with the Australian population generally.
In some recent interviews on Light FM radio, Fr. Themi, our Australian missionary friend working with the poor and needy in Sierra Leone mentioned that he picked up atheism while at university in Australia. But eventually, after being a successful guitarist with the pop group “The Flies” he was converted to Christianity. You can listen to his interview on http://www.yourmorning.mypodcast.com/ Great listening.
Outside the ivory towers of the university environment it is heartening to know that only 17% (1) of people do not accept the existence of God, which strikes down any idea that “most Australians are godless.”
Then another article came to my attention about an atheist in the USA who had become a Christian entitled; Suicidal atheist says “Your ministry truly saved my life.” His letter to the ministry that ’saved his life’ explains very clearly why he switched from atheism to Christianity.
The article is worth a read and can be found at; http://creation.com/suicidal-atheist-converts-to-christ
Who wouldn’t want to leave atheism after reading his letter?
Many people are atheists because they believe that evil and suffering in the world proves that God does not exist. Looking back on his own intellectual and spiritual journey from atheism to Christian belief, however, C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963) (2) argued quite the opposite. Whilst the suffering he experienced in his youth (the death of his mother, unhappy schooldays, and the traumas of service in the First World War) destroyed the simple faith of his childhood, he eventually came to realize that atheism is a superficial and inconsistent response to the problem of evil. For how, he argued, can anyone explain the presence within them of that very moral standard which alone enables them to complain about the existence of evil and use it as an argument against God? Where does this moral standard come from? Moreover, if there is no God and human beings are only accidental by-products of a random and purposeless universe, how can atheists attach any significance to their thoughts and values? These points were summarized most effectively for a popular audience in this extract from one of C. S. Lewis’s famous BBC radio broadcasts during World War II.
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing the universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too – for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.” (3)
In recent years Great Britain’s chief export to the U.S. has been a payload of books by atheist authors such as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and literary critic Christopher Hitchens. They contend that faith is irrational in the face of modern science.
However, other prominent British atheists seem to be having second thoughts. These people are examining the rationality of Christianity, the very beliefs Dawkins and others are so profitably engaging, but are coming to opposite conclusions.
Well-known scholar Antony Flew was the first, saying he had to go “where the evidence [led].” Evolutionary theory, he concluded, has no reasonable explanation for the origin of life. Flew has not yet come to believe in the biblical God, but has concluded that atheism is not logically sustainable.
More recently, A. N. Wilson, once thought to be the next C. S. Lewis who then renounced his faith and spent years mocking Christianity, returned to faith. The reason, he said in an interview with New Statesman, was that atheists “are missing out on some very basic experiences of life.” Listening to Bach and reading the works of religious authors, he realized that their worldview or “perception of life was deeper, wiser, and more rounded than my own.”
He noticed that the people who insist we are “simply anthropoid apes” cannot account for things as basic as language, love, and music. That, along with the “even stronger argument” of how the “Christian faith transforms individual lives,” convinced Wilson that “the religion of the incarnation … is simply true.”
A long history of prominent atheists, interestingly concentrated in Britain, have traveled back to faith. These doubters began to examine the rationality of Christianity’s claims. Whether in the Victorian era, with Thomas Cooper, George Sexton, and Joseph Barker, or in the 20th century, with T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and C. S. Lewis, all of them concluded that the Bible speaks most accurately to the human condition—the very definition of a rational choice. It is rational to choose the worldview that provides the best choice for living, consistent with the way life works.
A strong empirical case can be made to show that Christianity is the only rational explanation of life.
Footnotes:
(1) Quoted by the Roman Catholic archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, in a talk entitled “Without God We Are Nothing,” which he gave to a packed Sydney Opera House studio on Sunday evening 4th October 2009 at the first ever Festival of Dangerous Ideas. https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=f2d809cf5a&view=att&th=1242853ee67a3f9d&attid=0.1&disp=vah&zw
(2) For those who don’t know; C. S. Lewis was a brilliant academic who began his career as an undergraduate student at Oxford, where he won a triple first, the highest honours in three areas of study. He then taught as a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, for nearly thirty years, (1925 to 1954), and later was the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
(3) C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 38-39.
