Acts
17:16-34
January 22, 2012
While Paul was
waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was
full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout
persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be
there. Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said,
“What does this babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer
of foreign divinities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about
Jesus and the resurrection.) So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus
and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?
It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.” Now
all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in
nothing but telling or hearing something new.
Then Paul stood in
front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you
are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the
objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To
an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and
earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human
hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life
and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the
whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of
the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps
grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For
‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets
have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we
ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image
formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the
times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent,
because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in
righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given
assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
When they heard of
the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you
again about this.” At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him
and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named
Damaris, and others with them.
For
the past several months, knowing that I’d be doing this sermon this morning, I
began reading what atheists have to say about religion and Christianity. Overwhelmingly, I came across quotes like
these that show little but disdain for those of us who are religions. For
example, Abu’l-Ala-Al-Ma’arri, a tenth-century philosopher wrote this, a quote
that appears on many modern atheism t-shirts, mugs, hats, and websites: "The world holds two classes of men—intelligent
men without religion, and religious men without intelligence." Also,
Douglas Adams, the writer of the popular sci-fi novel, The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy, wrote, "I find the whole business of religion
profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent
people take it seriously."
So,
what do we respond to folks who say things like this? What do we say to people who are this
convinced that we Christians and religious people are all so stupid? What do we say to people whose basic attitude
toward us seems to be that we’re all superstitious, misguided, naïve,
hypocritical, and dumb, and that we don’t even know that we’re so dumb?
I do
understand them a bit because I dabbled with atheism back in college. I had become discouraged with Christianity
specifically and religion in general, although I’m not sure if I was
discouraged because of my own insights, or because I was mimicking the
culture. Back when I was a teen and a
college student, the anti-Christianity and religion movement was beginning to
grow. Today it’s grown to be very strong
among younger people, with it almost becoming an accepted fact that
Christianity and religion are bad things.
What
kept me from becoming a permanent atheist wasn’t that I was getting dumber as I
got older. Instead, it was that as I
studied more and more about everything, I found that I didn’t like limiting my
thinking the way atheism demands that we do.
I had too much curiosity about life to just dismiss everything about
faith and religion as pious nonsense. I
didn’t want to limit my thinking to some sort of rigid, reductionistic way of
thinking that can only see life from one perspective. I wanted to understand life from many perspectives
because I wanted to grow.
Most
atheists would never admit this, but they’re generally the ones who aren’t
open-minded, even though they often see themselves as being brilliantly
open-minded. Because they deny a whole
way of seeing, experiencing, and thinking about life and the cosmos, they shut
down the possibility of knowing and experiencing life in a different way. It would be very similar to saying that we
will no longer listen to music or look at art because they lack
rationality.
What
I’ve noticed is that many atheists, if not most, suffer from three basic
problems when it comes to their thinking about religion. First is that they have put so much of their
faith in human rational thinking that they’ve become what I call rationalist
fundamentalists. To understand
what that means, you have to first understand what it means to be a
fundamentalist. I believe that in our
modern age, fundamentalism is one of the biggest threats we face. Every religion and movement has its
fundamentalists who try to hijack that faith.
Fundamentalism is the attempt to reduce truth to basic “fundamentals”—simplistic
ideals and concepts that give followers a sense of clarity about life and how
to live it. By adhering to basic, simple
fundamentals, and renouncing and diminishing all other beliefs and ways of
thinking, they simplify their lives, even if they do so by creating conflict
with all those who believe differently from them. Fundamentalists always denigrate and diminish those who think differently from
them.
You
find this kind of reductionism and diminishment of all other belief systems
among Christian fundamentalists. They
deny much of scientific thinking, they diminish other religions and their
belief systems, and they denigrate any who disagree with their basic
fundamentals (fundamentalism got its name with the rise of Christian
fundamentalism in the 19th century, which outlined a set of
“fundamental” Christian truths that one must adhere to in order to be
saved). You also have Islamic
fundamentalists, such as the terrorists of 9/11 as well as the Taliban. Like all fundamentalists, they believe so
much in the purity of their thought that it excuses all the violence they
do. You also find Jewish fundamentalists
in Israel, many of whom live in the occupied territories and refuse to leave,
believing that they have a divine right to these territories and that they are actually
hastening the coming of the Messiah by provoking conflict with Muslims.
So
many atheists have become rational fundamentalists who believe religiously in human rational
thinking. They’ve reduced all ways of
knowing to basic rationalistic principles (fundamentals) that become the basis
for all their arguments. Like all
fundamentalists, they demand that we see the world only from their perspective, and that our thinking follow only their lines of logic. As Karen Armstrong, one of the best writers
today on understanding religion, has written in her book, A Case for God, that “Typical
of the fundamentalist mind-set is the belief that there is only one way of
interpreting reality. For the new atheists, scientism alone can lead us to
truth. But science depends upon faith, intuition, and aesthetic vision as well
as on reason.” She’s pointing out
that atheistic faith in rationalism is a religious faith. I think it’s a fundamentalist faith.
Second,
most of the atheists I hear arguing in public (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen
Hawking, Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens—who just died) have little more than
an elementary
school understanding of religion.
When they argue against religion, their understanding of how we think
and live is somewhat juvenile. And to
compound it, they tend to treat all of us as though we are fundamentalists,
too. When they argue against religion,
they assume that all of us are biblical literalists. Ironically, in their arguments they treat the
Bible in a more literalistic way than Christian fundamentalists do.
I
believe that the problems they have with religion is a problem many people have
when they grow up in the church but leave the church after being confirmed. They become like high school dropouts, moving
through life with a ninth-grade religious education. They may go on to college and study business,
science, literature, or engineering, and become very sophisticated in those
fields, their religious knowledge remains at a ninth-grade level. When I hear these atheists argue about
religion, I hear ninth-grade level arguments.
They think they have a sophisticated understanding, but having them
lecture us on religion would be like having a ninth-grade school dropout lecture
a biology class in a college.
As
a person who has studied for nine years of post-graduate education in religious
areas, I can tell you that there is SOOOO much more out there to know about
religion and faith than any of them ever suspect. For my master degrees and Ph.D., it’s not
like we sat around and twiddled our thumbs, waiting to have our degrees
conferred on us. But I hear so many
atheists say, “I grew up in the church, so I know what I’m talking about.” Not really, any more than having taken a
class in Chemistry in high school makes me an expert on discussing the nature
of chemical amalgamations and transformations.
Third,
when arguing against religion, so many atheists tend to present Christianity at it’s
worst, and atheism at its best.
I see this consistently. They
look at the worst things that have been done in the name of religion, and then
generalize this to everything we are and do.
They don’t pay attention to all the good that is done. Even more, they make arguments that from a
rational perspective can’t be supported.
For instance, you’ve heard many atheists say that religion has caused
more wars than any other source.
Really? How do you test that
theory? Do you have a comparison group
that has been persistently non-religious?
And how do you factor out human nature as a cause of war in that
comment? How do you know that religion
is the cause, and not human nature? Is
human nature basically non-violent until it becomes religious?
I do
think there is some comparison we can do.
Let’s look at the record of atheistic nations in terms of violence and
war. For example, look at the how
atheistic Soviet Union treated people under Stalin. He had 25 million people killed (many because
of their religious beliefs), and in war the Soviet Union was particularly
brutal. In atheistic China, Mao had 15
million Chinese killed. In atheistic
Cambodia under Pol Pot, 1.5 million were killed. Nazi Germany, which was run by an atheistic Hitler
and his minions, acting out of their weird nationalistic, atheistic ideology,
exterminated 6 million Jews. If atheists
look to the best of themselves and the worst of ourselves, why shouldn’t we be
able to do the same? By the way, you can
add up all the people who have been killed in supposedly religious wars, and
they don’t come anywhere near the 47.5 million killed under those 4 atheistic
regimes.
What
makes so many atheists limited in their thinking is that they assume that
rational thinking is the only legitimate kind of human thinking and knowing. They criticize us for having faith in
unprovable assumptions, despite their faith in unprovable assumption that they
can achieve objectivity. They can’t, as
the German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg
pointed out in his well-known principle, the uncertainty principle. This
principle is that when observing any kind of experimental event, “the more
precisely one property is measured [such as the position or momentum of a
property of a particle], the less precisely the other can be controlled,
determined, or known” (Wikepedia). In
other words, no matter how objective an observer is, his or her observation
always changes what it being observed.
That’s a very technical way of saying that we can never be purely
objective about anything because once we put our attention to it we become part
of it and change the nature of it.
Atheists can’t be rationally objective about religion because their
beliefs change the nature of how they see religion. In other words, by adopting atheistic
beliefs, they no longer have the ability to be objective about religion. We religious aren’t objective either, but
then we never claim to be. We base our
beliefs on subjective experience, not objectivity.
The
biggest problem among atheist’s criticism of religious people like us is that
they assume we have no legitimate reason for being religious. And
in the process they dismiss the one
reason so many of us are religious and have faith, which is that we have experiences of God and the Holy. Despite what
atheists think about us, most of us aren’t religious because we love religious tradition,
we’re superstitious, or we’re ignorant.
We come to church on Sundays because we’ve experienced God somehow in
the music, in the sermon, in our prayers, or in the sacraments. And we form our faith because we’ve
experienced God and the divine in life—all throughout life. In fact, those who are most committed to
religion generally are those who’ve had the most consistent experiences of God
in their lives.
The
irony among atheists is that they will accept as valid anyone’s experience of
God’s absence, but not their
experiences of God’s presence. Why is it that not experiencing God in
life is a valid experience, but experiencing God in life isn’t? I will tell you that I’m religious and a Christian
because of my experiences of God over the years. I’m a pastor because of my profound and
persistent experiences of God in my life.
These aren’t delusional experiences.
They are deep and transforming ones.
So,
what do we say about atheism? What I’ve learned over the years is that we often
can’t say anything to an atheist because we won’t be heard, but we have a lot
to say about atheism.
First,
we’re not Christian or religious because we are naïve, weak, or stupid. We are Christian and religious because faith
deepens and expands our lives, and we experience that on a constant basis. And we share our faith and evangelize because
we want others to experience what we’ve experienced. It’s kind of like when we see a really good
movie or read a really good book. We
tell others because we want them to share our experiences. Many atheists are similar in this way. They want to share their experience of God’s
absence, although I can honestly say that my experiences of God’s presence are
more energizing and transforming.
Second,
if atheism is going to be true to it’s rationalistic, scientific understanding
of life, it needs to be a bit more empirical in it’s understanding of religion. They need to test their experiences by
getting out of the armchair and empirically testing the validity of religion
from the inside. Something I’ve said to
agnostics and atheists over the years is that if they really want to test
whether God is real or not, run an experiment based on Christian
experience. Take forty days and pray
three times a day. And during that
prayer, ask God to reveal God’s self. If
at the end of forty days nothing happens, so be it. But I will tell you the experience of our
associate pastor, Connie Frierson.
Fourteen years ago she came to Calvin Presbyterian Church as an
agnostic. She met with me, and we talked
about religion and faith. I suggested to
her that she do the forty-day thing, and she did. The result?
She not only experienced God, but felt a need to learn more. It led her eventually to go to seminary, and
from there to become a pastor. This
experiment can be dangerous because you never know what it may lead to.
Paul
called on the Athenians in our passage to do something similar. Paul challenged them to experience God. As we
read in the passage, “When they heard of
the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you
again about this.” At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him
and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named
Damaris, and others with them.”
I’d
like to close by quoting Karen Armstrong again, and to let her have the final
word. She says, “We have become used to thinking that religion should provide us with
information. Is there a God? How did the world come into being? But this is a
modern preoccupation. Religion was never supposed to provide answers to
questions that lay within the reach of human reason… Religion’s task, closely
allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even
joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems
that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the
injustice and cruelty of life.”
Amen.
