Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
God
& Religion:
Atheism
Dr. Frederic Greeves, The Meaning of Sin:
"Many an 'atheist' is rejecting false conceptions of God which he assumes to be
Christian beliefs about Him."
Lesley Weatherhead, The Christian Agnostic:
"... the atheist, who declares that there is no God. The simplest reader of this book
will realize that no one can prove a negative like that. Robinson Crusoe could prove that
there was a man on his island. He could never have proved there was not. For a man might
have hidden behind the only trees he did not search, or dodged there when he was not
looking! To me it seems a strange mentality by which a man can lookup into the
starlit sky or even down into a humble flower or listen to a haunting tune or watch a
sunset, meditate on some deed of utter self-sacrifice or on the mystery of human love, and
say, 'I know that in this whole universe there cannot possibly be God.' Since I
have talked with many self-styled 'atheists,' I have come to believe that the true species
does not exist, and that atheism, so-called, is either an emotional deviation in the same
category as neurotic illness and with a similar causation, or else the denial of the
existence of a mythical figure who certainly does not exist. The latter type of 'atheist'
is welcome, for he helps us to find the true God and to exclude false ideas about
him."
- Dr. Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew:
"By the time I was in college, I had become a 'deist' without knowing it. 'Deism' was
a theological position that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an
accommodation between the Enlightenment worldview and supernatural theism. (It was
actually the view of many of our founding fathers, including Washington and Jefferson,
despite what the ideologues of the Christian right want us to believe.) I discovered that
I was a deist during a Sunday evening religious discussion group when I was a freshman. I
offered the opinion that one could reconcile belief in God with modern science by saying
that God created the universe in the beginning and that it had run in accord with natural
laws ever since. A philosophy professor commented that this was the view held by the
deists. I was surprised to learn that there was a name for the position I had articulated,
and a little deflated about being so easily pigeonholed. Without knowing it, I was
reliving the history of modern thought in my own experience. In my childhood, I
lived within a premodern worldview; in high school and college I lived through the
Enlightenment. I also find it interesting that deism (both historically and in my own
experience) was a halfway house on the way to atheism. There is little difference
between a distant and absent God and no God at all."
- Dr. Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew:
"... I also learned that the problems I had with supernatural theism were not unique
to me. Indeed, there were theologians who sharply challenged this notion as an obstacle to
being Christian. I recall the excitement with which I read the controversial best-seller Honest
to God by John Robinson, a bishop of the Church of England. Robinson argued that the
notion of a God 'up there' or 'out there' had become incredible in the modern world. He
spoke of 'the end of theism' (by which he meant the end of 'supernatural theism'). He also
argued for an alternative way of thinking about God, which he as a Christian and bishop
affirmed: rather than God being 'out there' in the heights, God is known in the depths of
personal experience. I also read Paul Tillich (commonly regarded as the other most
important Protestant theologian of the time, alongside Barth). Tillich attacked the God of
supernatural theism by arguing that God was not a being but 'Being-Itself' or 'the ground
of being.' He denied that God existed (and affirmed instead that 'God is') by
pointing out that 'to exist' means to stand out from the ground of existence as a separate
being. 'Things' (stones, stars, people, and so on) exist by being separate things. God
does not exist in that sense; rather, God is. Tillich attacked 'the God of
theological theism' (supernatural theism) as 'bad theology.' According to Tillich, this
point of view is wrong because it sees God as 'a being beside others and as such a part of
the whole of reality' But God is not a part of reality but is 'ultimate reality.' Indeed, Tillich
even argued that the natural and justifiable consequence of thinking of God as a separate
being is atheism. Thus, for Tillich, God is 'the God above God' -- the God who
remains when the God of supernatural theism disappears."
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