The Spectrum of Unbelief

A number of us were having lunch.  One, Paul, had been a Catholic priest for over 10 years and a monk for a decade before that.  Paul was asked why he was no longer a priest.  He answered, casually and straight forwardly, that he no longer believed in God.  We were not particularly shocked, though we were curious.  A discussion then ensued that was both enlightening and rewarding.  The conversation centered on, not so much whether or not God exists but rather, on how did each of us understand our unbelief.  After  about a half hour a woman at the next table came over to our table and said that she had found the conversation so unusual that she wondered if it would be OK if she joined us.  And so she did and we continued on for another hour. 

 I’m sure the waitress hoped that we would leave but our new friend couldn’t get enough of it.

In asking the question “Do you believe in God?” there is an initial problem.  Is one speaking about Yahweh or Jesus, Shiva or Athena, Baal or Hecate, Buddha or The Great Spirit?  Religions always seem to give or have given a name to something that it understands to be God or a god.  Throughout history it has been difficult to out and out not believe in any God at all.  

 James Turner in his book “Without God, Without Creed” writes:

. . . there is no clear evidence that any permanent state of unbelief, genuine atheism, or agnosticism, ever actually existed in the Middle Ages.

Indeed, it is a difficult question whether unbelief could have existed.  . . .

as late as the sixteenth century, disbelief in God was literally a cultural impossibility...  

Even to reject Christianity was difficult in a culture permeated by it – difficult, but not impossible, for other living religious traditions implicitly challenged Christianity.  But all serious alternatives assumed some sort of God.  Little, if anything, existed to support real doubt about God Himself. 

So interwoven was God with daily life and with the workings of nature that virtual extraction from one’s surroundings would have been necessary to make unbelief plausible.

 Even here, today, in the United States of America, unbelief seems to be, if not impossible, not exactly respectable.  Most of the Republican presidential candidates last fall, probably agree with him since most claimed that they, not only believed in a personal God, but believed in “Intelligent Design”, and that they took the Bible literally. Just so you don’t accuse me of being politically partisan, I must also relate that both Hillary and Barack insist that they pray regularly.  Would it be possible, today, for someone who confessed to being an Atheist or an Agnostic to successfully run for President?  Probably not.

 George H. W. Bush once said: “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic.  This is one nation under God.” Yet John Quincy Adams wrote of Thomas Jefferson in 1831 that “If not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence.”  And Thomas Paine, a primary resource for much of the thought that led to the American Revolution, wrote:  “The
study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion.”

 Recently a letter written by Abraham Lincoln was discovered and is to be auctioned by Sotheby’s for as much as $5 million.  Lincoln wrote it to Mary Tyler Peabody Mann in 1864.   Mary was the wife of Unitarian Horace Mann and one of the prominent Unitarian sisters of whom a book, “The Peabody Sisters”, was recently published.   Her older sister, Elizabeth, a bookseller was the publisher of the sermons of the founder of American Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing.  Mary’s younger sister, Sophia, was a fine artist and married Nathanial Hawthorn, Unitarian author of the “The House of the Seven Gables”.   Mary was a teacher like her husband.  After Horace Mann died in 1859, Mary founded a school in Concord, Mass.  As the Civil War was winding down, in 1864, 195 of her students signed a petition requesting that Lincoln free slave children. Lincoln responded:

 “Please tell these little people I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy, and that, while I have not that power to grant all they ask, I trust that they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it.”

 Lincoln believed in a God who acted through people but this was not the traditional Christian God.  At another time he wrote:  “The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma.”

 In the previous century there had been two new opposing perspectives concerning God.  New advances in science, or what was then called Natural Philosophy, produced discoveries that had resulted in, literally, the new world of the Americas as well as new theories in astronomy and physics, chemical processes and mechanical inventions that meant that the traditional understanding of the universe as unchanging and stagnant was coming to a close.  While much of what Natural Philosophy discovered could not be denied, churchman of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been able to reinterpret scripture as well as doctrine to accommodate it.  God gradually moved from a being somewhere outside of the universe, constantly looking over every detail, to occupying a place intrinsically inside.  God came to be understood as occupying a parallel spiritual realm that was inaccessible to the scientists who concerned themselves with the material world. 

 After centuries of attempts to understand God it now became clear for many Evangelicals that God was “unknowable” and “spiritual”.  He could affect the physical world but only his products could be examined. On the other hand, informed by science and the Enlightenment, some of the most influential people in England and the American colonies came to understand God as impersonal.  The God of those who came to be called Deists was modeled on Aristotle’s “Prime Mover” who, after starting the universe in motion, at best, might tinker with the mechanism from time to time.

 This Deistic God had become, for many, particularly Unitarians, the most plausible understanding of God by the middle of the eighteenth century.  Notice that Jesus is not referred to in the founding documents of America.   It is the God of the Deists that the word in the documents refers to.

  A person cannot choose what he or she believes.  We believe something about God and religion because our life experience has convinced us that this is the way the world is. From our home environment as children, to our school environment, to college and work, to our exploration of the world as young adults, everything that we learn becomes part of who we are.  Every book that we read, everyone that we speak with, every experience that we have makes us who we are.  That this is so and that our experiences may lead us to question what we have been taught by out parents is so clear to Evangelicals that they try to protect their children from exploring and discovering what the outside world has to teach, even as we UUs encourage it.   Home schooling has become a major industry and a primary way that Evangelical parents have to protect their children from the outside world.

 There are many paths that one can take to understand the world either without a God or, with a definition of God that is quite different from what most assume.  I did not grow up in a household that held any definition of God to be viable.  Both my father and my mother were comfortable with their clear cut Atheism.  The word and the concept of God had no value for them.  

 I first confronted the issue of trying to understand what others really meant by the word “God” in college.  We were required to read and discuss many ancient and medieval authors: Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Virgil, as well as the Bible, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the medieval Christian scholastics.  Several of these medieval theologians sought to provide their own, often quite convoluted and obscure attempts to prove the existence of God.  None convinced me.  One, however, intrigued me.

 St. Anselm, an eleventh century Christian monk, attempted to prove that God exists by asserting that God was:  “That than which nothing greater can be conceived.”  He continued: “And assuredly, that than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot exist in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality, which is greater.  Therefore, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. “

 This is called the “ontological” proof of the existence of God, that is, that the existence of the concept of God entails the existence of God. You might call it circular reasoning but it was this concept that served me well, several years later, when I attended seminary.  I found St. Anselm’s “proof” compelling, not because it proved anything but because it was then that I  understood that the word “God” can mean different things to different people.  God can be understood anthropomorphically, that is with human characteristics – even to be or have been, in some way human like Jesus. 

Whether one understands God anthropomorphically or not, God can be understood to be Personal, that is a being that is aware of and responds to each individual human being.  God can be understood to be an impersonal objective such as a force of nature, part of nature, even nature itself. God can be understood as a concept like Plato’s Forms.  Like the difference between a particular chair made of wood and the concept “chair” that has not physical existence but is very real.  It was this kind of God that, for me, St. Anselm was proving.  And it was this kind of God that enabled me to make it through seminary.  When I went to seminary I discovered that, to my surprise, everything and I mean everything that was presented both in written form and orally required from me a way to translate them so that they would make any sense to me.  If it were possible I would have rebelled and only read and spoken with those who could talk about religion and ministry without recourse to those words.  But, like the other words, “Church”, “pulpit”, “communion”, “sanctuary”, “pastoral”, etc, etc. I was stuck with “God”.  St. Anselm’s God enabled me to use the word God honestly but it is far from what most would find acceptable. 

 Since that time I have come to discover another way of understanding the word “God”.  Not as an anthropomorphic Judeo-Christian God, not as an objective Deistic God, not as St. Anselm’s conceptual God, but, rather, as a subjective God, a God that exists inside of me, not outside of me.  This God, like St. Anselm’s God calls me to a sense of idealism and relationship with and compassion for others and connects me with the universe as a part of nature but with a responsibility to care for and be a good steward of the environment.   My unbelief is with a personal God. At that lunch that I opened this sermon with, it turned out, there was a spectrum of unbelief.

 Jim works for NIH and is all science.  He will tell you, in fact, that his religion is science – period.  He will not admit to being an agnostic or an atheist.  He might be classified as either a Skeptic or a Secularist.  If a thing cannot be proven empirically he is not interested in talking about it.  He does not attend any church and, at least as an adult, never has.  He thinks that my being a minister is a joke – but I like him anyway.

 Roberta is a self-described Agnostic.  She neither believes nor disbelieves.  She can be convinced either way – for a moment – then she will revert to her chosen faith –Agnosticism.

 Paul, the former priest is a hard wired Atheist.  He had just “Had It”.  Although he likes to talk about religion he simply has no interest in any definition of God.  I was able to get him and his wife to attend some Independent Films at the church and he will join us for a political or a social action speaker but he has no interest in joining a church – even a UU church.

 Paul’s wife, Julia is now retired but was a Social Worker and is one of the gentlest women I know.  She loves nature and is sure that God must be up there somewhere tending the flowers but she has no interest in a personal, prayer hearing God.

 The last member of our lunch bunch was Louise – she won’t let me speak for her so you’ll have to ask her what she believes.

 I do not think of myself as an atheist or an agnostic.  Those terms seem to me to be more negative than positive and simply a reaction to the societal perspective.  I prefer to call myself a Religious Humanist because I understand religion to be a human development which reminds us of our need for humility before a magnificent universe that we are a part of and yet are able to appreciate and participate in as patrons.  I call myself a “Religious Humanist” to distinguish myself from those who refer to themselves as, or are labeled as, “Secular Humanists”, those who have no need or desire to participate in any kind of religion. 

I find wisdom in the words of the Rev. Bill Murray, for many years the minister of the River Road UU Church and then a former President of Meadville/Lombard UU Seminary, who calls himself a Naturalist Humanist.  He writes:

 “Religious naturalism not only insists that the natural universe is ultimate. It also finds religious meaning in nature. For many people, myself included, nature evokes some of the same feelings a supernatural deity evokes in the adherents of traditional religion. The unimaginable vastness of the universe and the incredible complexity of life evoke awe and reverence greater than anything I experienced as a theist. As a religious naturalist, I feel wonder and amazement at nature's majesty, beauty, complexity, and power; I feel joy and comfort among its trees or by its waters and refreshed and rejuvenated from working in its soil or walking in its woods;

 I feel reverence when I ponder the incomprehensible vastness of the universe and the equally mind-boggling smallness of the sub-microscopic world. For religious naturalists living in a natural environment is a spiritual experience, or, as the naturalist philosopher Santayana notes, an object of piety. Why should we not look upon the universe with piety? Is it not our substance? Are we made of other clay? All our possibilities lie from eternity hidden in its bosom. It is the dispenser of all our joys....  Since it is the source of all our energies, the home of all our happiness, shall we not cling to it and praise it?Freed from supernaturalism, the religious naturalist can be devoted to a nature that nurtures and sustains. It is not incidental that people speak of "mother earth" or "our mother, the earth." Our ties to nature are deep and intimate.

 The spectrum of unbelief is broad and colorful.  Historically it has included Freethinkers and Skeptics and Secularists.  It ranges from the fiery crimson certainty of the Atheist who adamantly denies any existence of God, to the mellow saffron of the Agnostic who is comfortable in his lack of certainty, to the verdant greens and velvety violets of the Naturalist Humanist whose devotion to nature enables a softer, gentler perspective.

 Those participating in this spectrum of unbelief will not be embraced by any who insist that God is not to be questioned and that it is “their way or the highway” but, they have no axe to grind themselves. They all have a place in the spectrum of unbelief.  Evangelical Christians might rail against them all, declaring unbelief the one evil most responsible for the erosion of our modern society, yet for all of these “heretics” the important question is, not one’s relationship with a personal or anthropomorphic or objective or conceptual or subjective God, but, rather, ones understanding of what can enable us to transform our world into one of peace, freedom and economic justice for all human kind.

 The Buddha taught:

Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it . . . or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it.pan style="mso-spacerun:yes">   Do not what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.

--- The Dhammapada  ---