Q. More and more people I know seem to be questioning God’s existence. There even seems to be a growth in the number of people who don’t even believe in God. Can you help me understand this and how I can respond?
This is an important question, as it addresses a real cultural trend, so we began to address it this summer and will conclude this month.
As mentioned previously, over the past 20 years, we’ve seen the development of a cultural trend called The New Atheism (TNA). This month, we’ll look at some of the other things New Atheists take for granted, yet these things owe their existence to Catholic Christianity.
In every culture and civilization, there are certain ideas that act as fundamental principles to how people in that culture think, live and interact. These ideas are more “caught than taught,” meaning there isn’t a class in every kindergarten that explains these ideas to children, but rather they are simply “assumptions” most people operate by without really thinking about them.
In our culture (i.e. “the West”), most of these “operating assumptions” owe their origins to Catholicism. Among the most important of these is the notion of fundamental, inalienable human dignity, the idea that each and every human being has intrinsic and inherent worth, apart from whatever qualities or abilities they may or may not possess. This concept is absolutely essential to things we take for granted, but it was completely absent from the pagan world and made its appearance in world history only with the birth of Christianity. Why?
Because it was Christianity that emphasized that all of us are made in the image and likeness of God, irrespective of race, creed, sex or social standing. It was Christianity that introduced to the world the idea that each and every human being has unparalleled dignity and worth, and hence has value beyond measure.
Consider the fact that in pagan Rome, it was commonplace to abandon unwanted infants to the elements, and in fact, killing handicapped infants was obligatory. Or consider the standing of slaves, women and foreigners in pagan society: the idea that human beings were unequal was commonplace and seen as obvious prior to Christianity.
In fact, the very concept of a “person” as a being of innate and intrinsic dignity was born out of the theological disputes of the early Church. It was in the early debates over Jesus’ divinity and over the Trinity that Christianity gave the term “person” its modern meaning.
Interestingly, today we are seeing the decline of Christianity’s influence and with it the decline of the idea that each and every human person is of inherent value. Denying the dignity of the embryonic human being is an obvious example, but it isn’t the only one. Numerous “ethicists” now propose that newborns have less dignity than some primates, and hence that killing them would be ethical. Twenty years ago the scholar Peter Singer became famous (or “infamous”) for attacking what he calls “speciesism,” which denies that human beings are qualitatively different from other species and have inherent dignity unlike any other species.
These and similar developments in our culture reflect the crumbling of another aspect of Christianity’s legacy: the rational basis for morality. Atheists assert that you needn’t be religious in order to do good, and they are right. Nonetheless, it remains true that without God, there is no rational basis for morality. That is, without God—and specifically the Judeo-Christian understanding of God—there is ultimately no reason for morality, no argument that provides its ultimate foundations. And some atheists acknowledge this: William Provine was a professor at Cornell who said there is neither meaning, nor free will, nor an ultimate foundation for ethics in the universe.
And if his premise—God does not exist—is correct, then all of this follows. It’s not that as a Christian I do good simply because I’m afraid God will punish me if I don’t: it’s that without God, “good” and “evil,” “right” and “wrong” are ultimately meaningless terms. The Christian account for morality is that “good behavior” is what we are meant to do; it’s part of what it means to be human, and it’s part of our purpose for existence.
The truth is, without God there is no inherent purpose, and without purpose there is no rational foundation for morality. We are living off of intellectual capital that Christianity has bestowed upon us, but once our culture exhausts that capital, what will happen?
