It seems some notable historians and social observers have been bumping into Christianity of late. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens’ brother, Peter, started it some time ago. [i] Although I do remember a theologian excitedly pointing me to Antony Flew’s There is a God. [ii] Greg Sheridan did a Christmas / New Year article summarising similar more recent turns of belief, [iii] commenting on the likes of Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Some give themselves interesting labels, like ‘Christian atheist’, but all seem to have looked at Christianity more seriously, and now cannot ignore it.
I rarely look at comments after articles, but I did scan across those that followed the Sheridan article. What I am interested in is the kinds of responses, not necessarily just the responses themselves. For example, there are those who are thankful and in wholehearted agreement; others are respectful but disagree with some aspect or more fully; and then there are those who label any such talk of religious belief as ‘non-empirical subjective projected fantasy,’ or some such descriptor.
The last category fascinates me, probably because I have heard it since my high school days, and then of course, amplified during my undergraduate days in the 1970’s. Back then I found myself in discussions that tried to explore life through this lens of ‘what you see is all that is there.’ I learnt to call this ‘nothing buttery’ – life is nothing but time + matter + chance (and I think that concept first came to me from early Christian psychology authors like Mark Cosgrove, Paul Vitz, John White and Gary Collins [iv]). I sometimes still have these kinds of responses when I write online as well – it is to be expected in Australia, either in 2024 or 2025!
What is really interesting for these people, is how they conceive of meaningful human life without God. I have read atheists who give a ‘gentle’ version of “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we might die.” Their focus can be on striving to see the beautiful, or being honest and leaving a legacy, or helping those who cannot help themselves.
There are also those who give a harsher version of this way of looking at life. They do not say it, but beneath their explanations is a world without hope. In other places I have described how the former leader of the Greens in NSW Parliament admitted this when I was appearing at a Parliamentary Review Committee – his comment to me at one stage was “I gave up on hope [which is what I was promoting in my presentation] when I became an atheist at fifteen years of age.” The room went appropriately quiet at such a profound moment of self-disclosure. I sent Dr Kaye a copy of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. He wrote back (yes, we corresponded with hand-written letters), giving appreciation for the book. He unexpectedly died of cancer soon after this exchange. I think he was seeking something beyond his hopelessness, and pray that he found it (it was Jesus who said, “Those who seek shall find.” – Matthew 7:8 – I hope Dr Kaye was seeking Truth and found God)
Such ways of approaching life – either soft or hard materialism – remind me of the unanswered questions that the ‘nothing but’ crew avoid. These include (but are not limited to): If not God, then what of first physical causes? If not God, then how did dead matter lead to alive matter? If not God, then how did dead matter lead to complex organisms, like the first DNA (which requires information from somewhere even in its formation – and information cannot be formulated and communicated by dead matter [v]). If not God, then how did dead matter lead to consciousness, and then self-consciousness? [vi] If not God, then how do we know what is right, good and true? If not God, how do we know what is wrong, bad and a lie? If not God, how can we know what is beautiful, and what is ugly? If not God, how do we know if we are looking at a lie beautifully told, or a truth told in ugliness?
Given this vacuum of thought about who we are as humans, and what is meaningful for us, it is no wonder that we have leaders who cannot answer questions about ‘What is good research?’ (think climate alarmism). Neither can they even start to respond to enquiries ‘From where do our thoughts come?’, and its follow on question, “How can we know whether thinking is disordered, or not?’ (think critical identity theory) Response to these kinds of questions requires at least some consideration about the concepts of ‘What is real?’, and ‘How do we make sense of what is real?’
And all of that comes back to being honest to admit whether there are non-physical aspects to reality as well as physical aspects. Wouldn’t it be grand to have some of our leaders engage in such discussion?
That is unlikely in many quarters of Australia because currently our society increasingly demands that we are clever enough to be self-sufficient with our knowledge. We then pretend that such knowledge transfers into becoming wisdom which can give us moral clarity. This is nonsense, because as we have seen in the unanswered questions above, such belief makes ‘no sense’, despite protestations to the opposite.
It is why I never tire of reading the ‘Old Book’ – the Bible. As was suggested to me when I was a teen at university the first time – “Read everything they give you but read your Bible most. It makes most sense of life.”
To which I say, five decades later, Amen! And thank you, God.
Grace and peace,
Stephen
[i] See Peter Hitchens, Rage Against God: How Atheism Led me to Faith. Zondervan, 2010.
[ii] Antony Flew, There is a God: How the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind. Harper One, 2007
[iii] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/how-historian-niall-ferguson-became-a-religious-believer/news-story/584b057b0dde22570a248ea3b5d7f433
[iv] For those interested in such early Christian psychology writings, the references are: Mark P Cosgrove, Psychology Gone Awry: Four psychological world views, 1979, IVP; Paul C Vitz, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship, William B Eerdmans, 1977; John White, Putting the Soul Back in Psychology: When secular values ignore spiritual realities, IVP, 1987; Gart R Collins, The Rebuilding of Psychology: An integration of psychology and Christianity, Tyndale Publishers, 1977.
[v] For more on this, see Stephen Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe, Harper One, 2021
[vi] Most of these questions are admitted as a problem for materialistic philosophers by the ‘honest atheist’ Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Oxford University Press, 2012
