How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [21]
GOD IN THE 1960s
Reflecting Nietzsche’s pronouncement nearly a century later on its April 8, 1966, cover, Time magazine brazenly inquired of its readers in stark, red type on a black background: IS GOD DEAD? The cover story by John T. Elson (although oddly no byline was given in the article itself) was entitled “Theology: Toward a Hidden God,” but in hindsight it was really more of a mirror held up to what appeared at the time to be our godless culture. By 1966 the most turbulent decade in memory was in full rage as the baby-boomer generation flexed its moral (and immoral) muscles against the conservative establishment’s vision of America as a God-fearing nation. Political assassinations, campus rebellions, inner-city riots, mass demonstrations, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and especially the Vietnam War led many disillusioned Americans down a nihilistic path into existential angst.
Is God dead? Almost 100 years after Nietzsche’s famous assertion, Time magazine posed the question on its April 8, 1966, cover.
At the height of the cold war, most unsettling of all was perhaps the military/political strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. Reflecting the feeling of the day, Barry McGuire’s 1965 guttural rock song, “Eve of Destruction,” warned, “If the button is pushed, there’s no running away / There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave.” What happened to the savior of old? He died. In like manner, the characters in Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, On the Beach, struggle to find meaning in a world made meaningless after total nuclear war results in a slow but ineluctable end of life. If there is no next year, what will you do tomorrow? Oddly, the characters continue to work and love and live in the face of imminent death for a future that will not come. The American captain of the submarine Scorpion, observing Australia as the last outpost of survivors, discovers from one of them that she is taking shorthand, typing, and bookkeeping classes. “I’ll be able to get a good job next year,” she explains, knowing that there is not going to be a next year. “It’s the same at the university. There are many more enrollments now than there were a few months ago.” Why? What else is there to do but to pretend that the world has meaning? After all (and this was one of the deeper messages of the book), what Shute’s doomed survivors face is what all of us face; the only difference is that we do not know how or when our end will come, so the fiction of purpose is preserved. The epigraph from T. S. Eliot on the title page of Shute’s book expresses this poetically:
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river …
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Similar cultural images of God’s death bestudded the cultural landscape in this period. Five years after the Time article, John Lennon’s song “Imagine” asked us to project ourselves into a godless future in the hope that we might help bring it about. But this was only the exclamation mark on a statement Lennon made in the very same year as the Time cover story, when he prophesied God’s demise (and nearly caused the Beatles’): “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that, I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus Christ right now.” God may have died, but his fans outvoiced Lennon’s, resulting in mass bonfires of Beatles’ records and Lennon’s public apology.
Other examples from the era abound. Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, opens with ape-men being given the spark of humanity—not from God but from an advanced alien race. Moon-Watcher learns to kill with tools, a gift from the secular gods that would turn out to be more powerful than any they had known before: “Now he was master of the world, and he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.