Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (6 page)

Buddhism goes even further, referring to the divine with terms such as
the Void
or
Nothingness
. That’s why, odd as it may sound, Buddhism is sometimes called an atheistic religion. So are Taoism and Confucianism. As one philosopher explains, the founders of these religions are “not gods themselves; they identify with no deity, no revelation, no personal or transcendent Creator of any sort.”
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Religion without Morality

If a personal deity is not required to qualify as a religion, what about morality? No, again. Many Eastern religions are
a
moral. They teach that everything must be accepted as parts of the One, the Whole—both yin and yang, both good and evil. The goal is the balance or union of opposites. The rituals associated with these religions do not aim at achieving holiness but enlightenment: the recognition that everything is equally part of the Whole.

When I was a college student during the countercultural 1970s, I was deeply impressed by Hermann Hesse’s novel
Siddhartha
, about a Brahmin’s son who undergoes a search for spiritual wisdom. In the end, he learns that “everything that exists is good—death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly.”
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Pantheism teaches that it is a mistake to draw any moral distinctions. Everything merges into the One. The end result, however, is that you cannot distinguish good from evil—which means you have no basis for fighting against evil.
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The same pantheism is promoted today in movies like
Avatar
. On the mythical planet Pandora, all the flora and fauna are connected by a vast neural network that functions as a kind of collective unconscious, personified by a Gaia-like goddess called Eywa. Significantly, Eywa is portrayed as beyond good and evil. One of the natives says, “Our great mother does not take sides. She protects only the balance of life.”

What about pagan or polytheistic religions? They, too, are typically amoral. Polytheistic religions may demand rituals to appease the gods and guarantee good health and good harvests, but often they say nothing about morality. Anthropologist Mary Douglas discovered in her research that there is no “inherent relation between religion and morality: There are primitives who can be religious without being moral and moral without being religious.”
14

Indeed, pagan gods are often outright
im
moral. The Greek and Roman gods were prone to greed, adultery, quarreling, jealousy, and deception. The philosopher Xenophanes complained that “Homer and Hesiod ascribed to the gods all [acts] that are to people disgraceful and shameful: stealing, committing adultery, and deceiving one another.” Augustine echoed the same criticism of the pagan gods: “Their habit is to be instigators and instructors in vice, not its avengers.”
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Some religions even require worshippers to engage in rituals that are immoral, such as temple prostitution or child sacrifice. In ancient Carthage, parents sacrificed their children as burnt offerings to the gods. Archaeologists have uncovered graves containing the tiny charred bones of infants buried under tombstones with inscriptions thanking the gods that they “heard my voice and blessed me.”
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Do all theologies at least involve some kind of worship ritual then? No again. In ancient Greece, the Epicureans taught that the gods exist but take no interest in human affairs. They do not care if they are feared or worshipped. Aristotle conceived of the Prime Mover as a perfect and unchangeable mind, which therefore thinks only about what is perfect and unchangeable—namely, itself. It neither knows nor cares what humans do. Other religions that practice no worship include Brahmin Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism.

Search for the Divine

Are there
any
features shared by all religions, then? Surprisingly, only one. According to Clouser, the only feature shared by all religions is that they acknowledge something as divine—using that word to mean the self-existent, eternal reality that is the origin of everything else. Obviously, they do not agree on
what
qualifies as divine; they agree only that
something
is divine. No other factor is genuinely universal among religions.
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As a result, religions are a lot more like philosophies than most people think. And philosophies are a lot like religions. Structurally, both start with a set of postulates about what is ultimately real or divine.

Think of the divine as whatever is furthest back, beyond or behind everything else. For example, in polytheism, the personal gods and goddesses are not the ultimate reality because they derive from some pre-existing primordial substance—and
that
is what actually functions as the divine (even if the term is not used).

For example, in ancient Greek mythology where did the gods come from? The essential story line is that the universe began as a divine primeval substance called chaos—an undefined, unbounded nothingness. Out of this initial state arose the first gods. The earth goddess (Gaia) mated with the sky god (Uranus) to produce the Titans, and from the mating of two Titans came the gods of Mount Olympus—Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Poseidon, and all the rest.
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Today it is crucial for Christians to understand paganism, and not just for historical reasons. In Western nations, paganism is growing in popularity again: Wicca, Druidism, Shamanism, and Native American religions. In Iceland, which converted to Christianity in the eleventh century, “Heathenry” has once again become a nationally recognized religion. In Britain, some public schools now teach paganism in their religious education courses, including “witchcraft, druidism and the worship of ancient gods such as Thor.”
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Only weeks ago, as I write, a mother contacted me, desperate to learn how to talk with her son who had joined a Wiccan group.

Most revived versions of paganism involve some form of pantheism combined with polytheism, in which the gods are regarded as aspects or emanations of a universal earth spirit. Consult a typical Wiccan website, for example, and you will read texts like this: “Divinity manifests itself through all living beings. Nature itself is divine.”
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The idol in paganism is Nature itself, or a spiritual substance interconnecting all of nature.

Philosophers and Their Gods

Identifying the idol gets to the core of any religion, whether ancient or modern. It also cuts to the heart of any philosophy. The earliest philosophers in the West, the pre-Socratics, ignored the Olympian gods and went back to the original primordial substance—which they called the
arché
, the source or first cause. At the time, four elements were recognized (water, fire, air, earth), and many of the early philosophers selected one of them as the most basic, then reduced everything else to that single element to arrive at a fundamental unity.

Thales observed that all living things need water, and he proposed that the fundamental starting principle, the
arché
, was water. Heraclitus noted that all living things generate heat and proposed that the
arché
was fire. For Anaximenes, the divine substance was air: “Air is God.” Others went beyond the four elements. Pythagoras discovered that the order in nature can be represented by geometry and mathematics, and he concluded that the
arché
was number: “God is number; number is God.”
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Does the Greek concept of the
arché
fit the biblical definition of an idol? Clearly. Whereas Scripture asserts that “all things hold together” in Christ (Col. 1:17), the early philosophers sought to identify some principle immanent within the cosmos that provided an underlying unity—that functioned as their ultimate explainer. Though they rejected the Olympian gods, the pre-Socratics still held a concept of the divine.

The most familiar names among the Greek philosophers are Plato and Aristotle. They taught that the ultimate formative principle within the universe was what they called rational forms. You can think of forms as abstract concepts that make it possible to categorize the world. Though there is vast variety among domestic dogs, from the Great Dane to the tiny Chihuahua, we recognize that they belong to the same category because they fit the abstract concept of “Dog.”

Plato taught that the forms exist in an ideal realm separate from matter, whereas Aristotle argued that they inhere in matter. Yet both conceived the forms as eternal, uncreated, unchangeable, universal, and self-existent. Is this a divinity claim? Certainly. The forms were invoked to explain the nature of things—why things are what they are. Human nature is the form shared by all human beings, and it is what makes them human. Justice is the form shared by all just actions, and it is what makes them just.
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Forms are the ultimate explainer.

Both philosophers even used the language of divinity. Speaking of the realm of the forms, Aristotle says, “Here must surely be the divine, and this must be the first and most dominant principle [the
arché
].” For Plato, the pre-eminent form is the form of the good; to see the good, involves “a conversion, a turning of the soul” from darkness to light. The true philosopher is the person who contemplates this “divine order.”
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In Romans 1 we learn that idols result from divinizing something immanent within the cosmic order. That description certainly applies to the forms. They are not personal. And though they transcend the
material
world, they do not transcend the cosmic order as a whole. As one theologian explains, “Plato’s Form of the Good is not divine” in the Christian sense; it “is divine because it is the highest being
in
the cosmos.” Aristotle even defined God as pure form, which means that he (or it) is one pole in the form/matter dialectic that constitutes the cosmos.
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The Church of Physics: Idol of Matter

What about modern philosophies? Do they qualify as idols, too? The prevailing view among the New Atheists, along with much of the academic world, is scientific materialism. What is ultimately real is matter—molecules in motion. Materialism is committed to the dogma that physics explains all of chemistry, chemistry explains all of biology, and biology explains the human mind, with nothing left over. Therefore, physics alone explains the human mind. Physics is the ultimate explainer.

Not surprisingly, this view is sometimes called physicalism. A prominent spokesperson is biologist E. O. Wilson of Harvard, who insists that all phenomena, “from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible … to the laws of physics.” Biologist Jerry Coyne defines physicalism as “the view that all sciences are
in principle
reducible to the laws of physics.” This view, he says, “must be true unless you’re religious.”
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But is this view itself religious? Is it a divinity claim? Without a doubt.

Some materialists admit as much. John Searle says, “There is a sense in which materialism is the religion of our time.” A science journalist writing in
The Scientist
is equally candid. In an article about the origin of life, he says, “I believe a material explanation will be found, but that confidence comes from my faith that science is up to the task of explaining, in purely material or naturalistic terms, the whole history of life.” He concludes: “My faith is well founded, but it is still faith.”

The materialist creed was captured nicely by the late philosopher Dallas Willard: “There is one reality, the natural world, and physics is its prophet.”
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The now-classic expression of that creed was the popular television series
Cosmos
. It opened with Carl Sagan intoning, in liturgical cadences, “The Cosmos is all there is, or ever was, or ever will be.” When the series was reinitiated in 2014 with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson as the new host, fans created a Facebook page to promote what they call “Tysonism,” defined as “a secular religion based on the philosophy of astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.” The page is listed under the category of “Church/Religious Organization.”
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As we saw earlier, materialism is really a cluster or family of related philosophies. It is a religion, we might say, with several denominations. For example, when applied to the economic realm, materialism gives rise to theories like Marxism. What are the logical steps that lead from materialism to Marxism, with its economic determinism? Bear in mind that human nature is always defined by its relationship to ultimate reality. If the ultimate is matter, then humans are defined by the way they relate to matter. And how
do
people relate to matter? They make things out of it. They mold and manipulate it to manufacture the items they need to survive—clothing, houses, tables, cars.

In Marxism, the tools we use to shape matter are called “the means of production.” Thus the history of civilizations hinges on who owns the means of production. The ownership class maintains its control and protects its interests by shaping the rest of society in its favor—laws, politics, morality, religion, and so on. In this way, economic relations determine everything else in a society. In Marxism, economic conditions are the ultimate explainer.
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Hume Meets the Klingons: Idol of the Senses

Another widely held idol today is empiricism, the claim that the only valid form of knowledge consists of empirically verified facts. You may not meet many people who say, “Hi, I’m an empiricist.” Yet among those who have gone through the public education system, many hold empiricism as a kind of unexamined background assumption. They assume that what we can really rely on are empirical facts—what we can see, feel, weigh, and measure. They relegate everything else to the realm of personal opinion or preference. After all, moral and theological concepts cannot be stuffed into a test tube or studied under a microscope. As a result, empiricism does not consider those concepts to be truths at all, but merely individual values and preferences.