A recent UPI article-essay by Uwe Siemon-Netto appears under the headline “God Not So Dead: Atheism in Decline Worldwide” and opens with what sounds like excellent news for Christendom:
There seems to be a growing consensus around the globe that godlessness is in trouble.
“Atheism as a theoretical position is in decline worldwide,” Munich theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg told United Press International Tuesday.
His Oxford colleague Alister McGrath agrees. Atheism’s “future seems increasingly to lie in the private beliefs of individuals rather than in the great public domain it once regarded as its habitat,” he wrote in the U.S. magazine, Christianity Today.
Professor McGrath’s essay, “The Twilight of Atheism”, a precis of his book of the same name, looks back at the factors that made atheism attractive and those that caused that attraction to wane:
Atheism was once new, exciting, and liberating, and for those reasons held to be devoid of the vices of the faiths it displaced. With time, it turned out to have just as many frauds, psychopaths, and careerists as religion does. Many have now concluded that these personality types are endemic to all human groups, rather than being the peculiar preserve of religious folks. With Stalin and Madalyn Murray O’Hair, atheism seems to have ended up mimicking the vices of the Spanish Inquisition and the worst televangelists,respectively. . . .
With the breakdown of social cohesion in recent decades, creating a sense of community has become an increasingly important political issue in many Western cultures. The question of how community can be recovered invites a comparison of religious and atheistic approaches.
One of the most obvious indicators of the ongoing importance of religion is the well-documented tendency of immigrant communities to define themselves in religious terms—Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim communities in Great Britain, and in France, Muslims from Algeria and other North African nations.
Christian churches have long been the centers of community life in the West. People want to belong, not just believe.
This sociological analysis has its place, but it is, to my mind, less interesting and important than atheism’s intellectual retreat, dramatically signaled by the defection to theism – albeit the theism of an unlovable, impersonal God – of Antony Flew, formerly a thoroughgoing skeptic. Professor Flew’s convictions were overthrown by the absurdity at the root of all atheist systems: the idea of a self-created universe. At a fundamental level, disbelief in a Creator requires a larger “leap of faith” than belief.
Developments like these are heartening to contemplate. Nonetheless, before we rejoice too unreservedly at atheism’s loss, we need to ponder to what extent it represents Christianity’s gain. On that point, Uwe Siemon-Netto offers sobering words:
The Rev. Paul M. Zulehner, dean of Vienna University’s divinity school and one of the world’s most distinguished sociologists of religion, told UPI Tuesday: “True atheists in Europe have become an infinitesimally small group. There are not enough of them to be used for sociologicalresearch.” . . .
Zulehner cautions, however, that in the rest of Europe re-Christianization is by no means occurring. “What we are observing instead is a re-paganization,” he went on, and this worries Christian theologians such as Munich’s Pannenberg and the Rev. Gerald McDermott, an Episcopal priest and professor of religion and philosophy at Roanoke College in Salem, Va.
For although in every major European city except Paris spirituality is booming, according to Zulehner, this only proves the emergence of a diffuse belief system, Pannenberg said, but not the revitalization of traditional Christian religious faith.
Observing a similar phenomenon in the United States, McDermott stated that the “rise of all sorts of paganism is creating a false spirituality that proves to be a more dangerous rival to the Christian faith than atheism.”
Atheism has the virtue of its vice: It aspires (leaving aside charlatans like the late Mrs. O’Hair) to be purely rational. Christianity, the most rationalistic of faiths, can debate it on common ground. The neo-pagan “spiritualities”, by contrast, have no use for reason. They begin with the same self-contradiction as atheism, the uncreated universe, but are not interested in thinking through the implications of that position. “Feelings” reign supreme, meaning that the followers of these invented faiths ultimately abase themselves before their own irrational impulses. The quality of their actions depends on the soundness of their constitutions and amiability of their characters. If they start to go wrong, reason is not there to arrest the decline.
For this reason, we Christians may eventually pine for a recrudescence of atheism. It is a worthier opponent than many of those that we must now confront.
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