My fellow friar
here at Holy Cross, Fr. John Ostdiek, 96 years old, is very disturbed by the
loss of so many young Catholics to the Church. He says 40% of young people
"raised Catholic" no longer consider themselves Catholic.
Then there is the
disillusionment caused by clergy abuse scandals. The Church seems to be falling
apart.
These realities
are in the back of my mind as I prayed the psalms this morning. A question
lurks back there: am I doing something that no longer makes sense? Am I just
soothing my spirit with illusions?
Then I recall a
remark of a professor during my brief stay at the Harvard Divinity School:
"Someone should do a study of atheism in Hindu culture." He was
commenting on the stereotype that millions of people in India are devout practitioners
of the Hindu religion, and speculating that the stereotype is not true.
These days I am
reading the prophet Jeremiah. He writes as though everyone in Israel is against
him. They are all happily marrying, giving in marriage, singing, dancing, and
not paying the slightest attention to God. In the words of one of the psalms,
"God does not care, he never sees."
"Proofs"
for the existence of God
There seems to be
a consensus that Thomas Aquinas's five proofs for the existence of God are no
longer convincing. I couldn't name the five anyway. Here is mine.
Science has
developed a consensus that the universe as we know it began with a "big
bang" 13.8 billion years ago. I know of no scientist who discusses what or
who caused that event. They argue that such a question is beyond the reach of
scientific investigation. That may be true, but science also refuses to accept
that events are without causes. Something or someone caused that bang. The
question is: what is that Something or Someone like?
Billions of people
down through history have created stories to answer that question, so we have
world religions. The sociologist asks: what is the cause of such a persistent
human behavior? Emile Durkheim said it is that people realize that there is
something beyond their individual realities, so they posit a god, without
realizing that the something they call a god is really just the group, the
society. Sigmund Freud said that people live yearning to return to the womb,
and religion satisfied that yearning--we should just grow up. Karl Marx said
that the dominant classes invented stories to keep the subordinate classes
under control, and religion is the most effective such story. Religion is an
opiate to keep suffering poor people from thinking.
Billions of people
down through history have lived as though there is no god, which has caused no
end of distress among religious people. We observe that people get religion
when everything else in their lives falls apart. What does that say? Dietrich
Bonhoeffer asked the question: what are we going to do when science and
technology solve all our human problems? We won't need God any more. Bonhoeffer
didn't know. But science and technology do not seem on the verge of doing what
he feared. His formulation of the problem seems naive.
And religion goes
on. Atheism goes on. Prophets arise and no one pays attention, just like in
Jeremiah's day. The Israelites paid no attention until Assyria and Babylon came
in and destroyed their world. Our prophets these days are saying that no one is
paying attention, and the things we have done and continue to do to our
environment are going to come back and bite us.
Meanwhile, some of
us continue to be convinced that the Someone who started the universe as we know
it loves, and is delighted when we love in return. We Christians have a story
of how that Someone intervened in our history, a story we accepted from the
Jewish people, and which we have taken in new directions. The story has
resulted in both good and evil down through history--one friend of mine thinks
religion has been the source of most of the evils in our world. I think he
overlooks the good that religious people do, but he has a point--our fellow
religionists have caused a lot of suffering.
Religion has been
for me a source of delight and a motive for living. I am not alone, but I may
be in the minority, perhaps a tiny minority. But there are people around me,
all over the world, in all kinds of cultures and languages and political
systems, who see the world the way I do, and that reinforces my way of seeing
the world. To use Peter Berger's metaphor, we create a "sacred
canopy," a structure of meaning that envelops our world. We create it, but
just because we create it does not mean it is an illusion. Maybe the Creator
snuck into our hearts the seeds of that canopy.
That's my
explanation for why I believe in the God I live by and for.
