The Ruin of Christianity

Christianity was once a part of the nuts and bolts of our society; now science and philosophy are seeking to eliminate God. But is a quality life possible without Him? Steve Thompson looks for some answers.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory and, in a sense, it possibly is, but our civilisation really has been subjected to a vast and risky experiment involving huge numbers of unknowing human guinea pigs.

The aim of the “experiment” was to observe what happens when an entire civilisation grows up without God. While the basic hypothesis of the experiment date back several centuries, it really “took off” during the 19th century in western Europe, plus those parts of the world, such as America and Australia, with close cultural and religious ties.

The experiment addressed the question of whether people actually need God, and whether they can live contentedly without Him. It was initially conducted by persons enamoured with the spectacular scientific advancements swirling around them. Nearly every day natural, or “scientific,” explanations of a range of events replaced older explanations that had attributed unexplainable phenomena to God’s involvement in the world.

Everything from contagious diseases to the hostile weather and falling stars (phenomena with explanations that involved God) were replaced with natural law, scientific explanations, which ignored Him.

And having liberated themselves from God, some thought leaders began convincing ordinary people to do the same.

Their ideas caught on.

Philosophers, enamoured with scientific explanations of the universe, made life easier for their colleagues in the sciences by declaring the question of God’s involvement in the universe off-limits to objective philosophical thought, and urged the “thinking” public to do the same. Leading 19th-century writers joined the cause.

Through influence exerted by novels, essays and poems, they depicted God’s withdrawal from life. One prominent literary critic, documenting this trend among authors, summed up their support of the experiment in the phrase, “this mirroring of philosophy by literature” (see J Hillis Miller, T he D isappearance of G od ). He applies William Thackeray’s expression “a set of people living without God in the world” to describe God’s disappearance depicted in the pages of influential books, leaving their characters to figure out how to live in His absence.

What I’m describing was not the stark pronouncement of the death of God made by Marx and Nietzsche, but by the end of the 19th century, the experiment had lurched in an unexpected direction. Instead of “living without God in the world” as the experimenters anticipated, people responded to their God-shaped void by inventing substitute gods. What they failed to foresee is that genuine agnosticism is an unstable state that quickly reverts back to “belief”—in God or God substitutes.

The most popular of the God substitutes, embraced by millions, were evolutionism and Marxism. In the words of British philosopher Mary Midgley, they are “the two great secular faiths of our day” ( E volution as a R eligion ). In the 20th century, several other secular “faiths” competed successfully for followers: science, reason, medicine and politics.

But secular faiths fail the crucial test of genuine religion, that is, a satisfactory explanation of the self. There is, amazingly, no satisfactory scientific explanation of the self, a situation that French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard brought to public attention with devastating effectiveness ( T he P ostmodern C ondition: a R eport on K nowledge ).

Scientists can explain the brain but not the mind ; hormones but not feelings ; appetite but not ambition ; reproduction but not the wish for children of one’s own ; isolation, but not loneliness . They can trace subatomic particles and forces at work in bodies, but are utterly unable to give an integrated account of what makes for “person-hood” and why we exist.

The risky experiment and its by-product secular faith have let humankind down, and badly. Science and reason are wonderful servants, but, like fire, make terrible masters. And blind faith in them has led to gross misuse of the technical benefits they have provided.

The 20th century has been badly contaminated by the destructiveness brought on through faith’s misuse. And the contamination is seeping into this new century.

We, the children and grandchildren of victims of the failed risky experiment, need the God our parents tried to live without.

Where is He?

The best-known visionary of the ancient world, whose closeness to God landed him in exile on a tiny island in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, received a vision, which he recorded. This account is preserved in the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible. It is also known as the Apocalypse.

The word apocalypse has been hijacked by Hollywood and forced into the unnatural task of describing an all-out battle, which brings our world to an end. But until a few years ago it referred to God revealing something humans could not discover on their own through the use of investigation and reason.

This vision of John the revelator answers the question, “Where is God?” Note the following: “I saw another angel flying in midair, and he had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth— to every nation, tribe, language and people.

He said in a loud voice, ‘Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water’” (Revelation 14: 6, 7).

The setting of this part of the vision is a time of collapse of illegitimate political and religious systems. God makes a final appeal to earth’s inhabitants; it consists of three imperatives, which outline appropriate human response to God: fear God, give glory to God and worship God.

Here, amid the collapsing ruins brought about by the widespread human devotion to false gods, God urges people to abandon the risky experiment, acknowledge its failure and turn to Him before it’s too late.

But how do people, blinded by secular faith, recognise God? The answer is in the next passage: “Worship Him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea. . . .” Here is the key to God’s identity. He is Creator. If He is Creator, He is also the source of the self, the One who weaves body and soul, physical and spiritual, together into the miracle fabric of living creatures. He alone fills the God-shaped void in our lives.

This is famously stated in the prayer of Augustine, the greatest theologian of early Christianty: “You have made us for Yourself; and our souls are restless until they find their rest in You.” The evidence of the reality of God has always been there, but it has been misinterpreted as illustrated by the letters GODISNOWHERE. In a sense the leaders of the great experiment were arguing, based on the evidence, that this reads GOD-IS-NOWHERE. But viewed from a different perspective, the letters boldly declare GOD-IS-NOW-HERE.

And the message of Revelation 14 is, make your choice.

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