British atheists have paid to have buses carry advertisements
saying: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy
your life.” Professor of Atheism Richard Dawkins, a geneticist by
training, is a major supporter of this campaign and has put quite
a lot of his own money into it. (A much humbler figure, a bus
driver, has possibly made a bigger sacrifice by refusing to drive
buses bearing the message, but that’s another story.)
In America a similar campaign of bus ads reads: “”Why believe in
a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake!” while leaving the
definition of what would be “good” in a world without a god
rather unclear (though it is true that Marxism and Nazism gave us
some idea).
Writing
in the Daily Express, former British Conservative
government minister and Catholic Ann Widdecombe has remarked that
this advertisement is strange. She says:
To most believers that is baffling because the existence of God
is the main reason why we do enjoy our lives and expect to go on
enjoying life, in a different form, for all eternity, but let us
lay that aside and concentrate on other aspects of this very odd
message.
What exactly are we to stop worrying about? And what is the joy
that belief kills? Presumably the answer to the first is judgment
and the second is undue indulgence. In other words this
advertisement is urging a society already steeped in selfishness,
materialism and cheap celebrity towards even greater hedonism and
moral anarchy.… No real joy is banned by belief. What is
prohibited is lack of restraint: casual and promiscuous sex,
obsession with money and drunkenness, but not healthy
relationships, material well-being and a glass or two of wine…The
essence of the message is “lay aside conscience and do what you
like,” but even non-believers recognize that if we lived by the
Ten Commandments, life for all would be better.
If my neighbour believes “Thou shall not steal” I can leave my
door open… the bus campaign…is advocating a selfish lifestyle at
a time when we all need the opposite.
If, as C. S. Lewis said in The
Weight of Glory, we believe that we and our neighbors
were created by God to live forever, we will treat ourselves and
one another differently. But it actually goes further than this.
If man had in the past taken to heart the injunction that
“There’s probably no God,” not only would there be no hope of
eternal Salvation, and no fixed ground for morality, but there
would also be no art, science or civilization.
Western art grew from our religion and a striving to illuminate
and understand mankind’s relationship with God. So did
non-Western art — the pyramids, the Norse sagas, the statues of
Easter Island and a number of other things that enrich our lives.
Even cave-art was almost certainly related to the supernatural.
Belief produced Michelangelo’s Pieta and the Sistine Chapel,
Leonardo’s The Last Supper, the great Cathedrals of Europe, the
works of Dante, Shakespeare, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and
virtually every great masterpiece.
Modern atheist art has produced the pickled cows and sharks of
Damien Hirst, the soiled bed-linen of Professor Tracey Emin, and,
in literature, the mumblings and ravings of Samuel Beckett and
Harold Pinter, attempts to portray a meaningless world. Socrates
and Plato, pagans but believers in a god, laid the foundations of
Western philosophy, including its humanistic aspects. Atheism
produced the meaninglessness and worse of Nietzsche, an
unintentional progenitor of Nazism, and then of Sartre, spiritual
father of the Pol Pot Genocide, as atheism produced Communism in
general, responsible for about 100 million deaths and ruined
lives beyond count.
Supernatural aspects aside, what these bus ads seem to actually
promise and hold out to us is at best a world and a vision of
dullness and drabness, from which color, splendor and even
interest has been largely excluded, at worst something a great
deal more terrible.
Further, and as is not emphasized enough, not only Western art
and thought, but also Western sciences and technology, are the
products of Judaism and Christianity, the one religious tradition
which welcomed and exalted reason, as it exalted art, for the
greater glory of God.
The first industrialization of Europe, with water wheels
replacing slaves driven by the lash, was the work of monks. The
Romans knew of water wheels, but made only a small number, even
at times when they were apparently short of slave labor. By the
Middle Ages, thanks to the monasteries, there were thousands of
water-wheels and windmills, helping free humans, and indeed some
animals, from lives of dull and torturous drudgery. One medieval
monk wrote a poem celebrating the fact that, with the harnessing
of water-power, horses’ backs no longer need be broken.
Monks also put books into their modern form, replacing scrolls,
and making possible printing. They designed and instituted public
clocks and raised agriculture to a science. They preserved the
heritage of the classical world through the Dark Ages: the art
and science of Greece and the technology of Rome. Previously,
when in ancient times civilizations had fallen, all the small
store of knowledge which they had painfully scraped together had
been lost with them (the Greeks of Homer’s time and of classical
antiquity had no idea that civilizations had existed in the
Mediterranean before them). The monks of Europe were responsible
for not only innumerable inventions but for their application to
improve life, and on an organized, institutional basis, making
the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages the first great era of rapid
human advancement.
Christianity, which, with its obvious close links to the Jewish
Rabbinical tradition and ethic, had been founded by a carpenter,
and whose first leading figures included a tent-maker, a doctor
and fishermen, was a religion, and created a culture, which
honored men who did things. This was a great change from the
great civilizations of the past, including Egypt, Greece and
Rome, where the artisan was despised and had a status little if
any better than a slave. Greek science tended to concentrate on
gentlemanly occupations like astronomy and geometry, though
astronomy could not progress far because it was beneath them to
make lenses. (One can imagine Archimedes holding his nose as he
made war-engines.) Saint Paul, with the injunction to use the
things that are visible to discover the things that are
invisible, may be seen to have specifically endorsed science and
technology, one of many things which made Christianity radically
unlike any preceding religions or ethical systems.
At Glastonbury in England and elsewhere the monks pioneered
metallurgy. There is strong archeological evidence that at the
time when Henry VIII destroyed the English monasteries the monks
of Britain had begun to develop blast furnaces. The Church set up
and nurtured the University system to not only preserve but, for
the first time, to accumulate knowledge, lifting mankind for the
first and only time above the “ceiling” of slave labor, animal
power, and sails, and, eventually, above an average
life-expectancy of about 30 years.
Professor Dawkins’s own discipline of genetics was created by
Gregor Mendel, a 19th century abbot. It was the glory of God that
inspired and drove onwards Copernicus (a priest), Newton, Boyle,
Max Planck and countless other great scientists, as well as,
later, the likes of the lay preacher Buzz Aldrin. Even many of
those scientists and other geniuses not conventional believers
were Deists of one kind or another. Adam Smith, probably the
world’s greatest creator of prosperity, said relatively little
about religion, but he said enough, including on his death bed,
to show he believed. His friend Edmund Burke made the point that
without religion men reverted to barbarous and degrading
superstition.
The Catholic Church was, for most of history, a greater patron of
astronomy than all other institutions combined, for it took
knowledge seriously.
In the 18th and 19th centuries men of religion, Catholic and
Protestant, continued to play major roles. Among the many great
Catholic clerical astronomers might be mentioned Giuseppe Piazzi,
who discovered the first asteroid, Ceres, in 1801, and
established the observatory at Palermo. Piazzi also obtained
modern equipment and instruments for it, and converted Palermo
from a backwater in poverty-stricken and ignorant Sicily to a
great center for astronomy, a position it has maintained ever
since, later being involved with the first imaging X-ray
astrophysics. Despite being a Catholic priest and indeed a
professor of dogmatic theology in Rome, in 1788 Piazzi traveled
to England to work with the astronomer Nevil Maskelyne, a
Protestant minister, and the famous instrument-maker Ramsden. A
little before this a Jesuit mathematician, R. G. Boscovich, had
played a key role in charting the way to modern nuclear physics.
Charles Babbage, who designed the forerunner of the modern
computer, and was a distinguished scientist and inventor in other
fields as well as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge
from 1828 to 1839, was also a keen theologian and author of
theological writings, including the 1837 treatise On the Power,
Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation. In the
20th century another Catholic priest was responsible for probably
the greatest astronomical discovery possible to be made: the Big
Bang.
It is still the church as an institution — far more, I think,
than any atheistic scientists — which stands against the coming
together of bad religion, bad reason and bad science in the
so-called “New Age.”
There was, as Chesterton put it, a certain inevitability in the
fact that the civilization that believed in the Trinity also
discovered steam.
One of the great ironies of atheism is that by denying God it
insults man. Atheists often call themselves “humanists,” but it
is religious belief that is the only true humanism, for it is
only religious belief which holds that man is something more than
dust, and holds the human brain to be more than a chance assembly
of atoms. For another odd thing is that if you believe in God,
you get belief in man added in.
