How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [22]
TIME AND GOD
To the star-children of the 1960s it appeared as if God had died, as Time magazine suggested He had—if only by daring to pose the question in the first place. Even for some theologians this appeared to be the case. Noted Time:
Is God dead? It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no.
Is God dead? The three words represent a summons to reflect on the meaning of existence. No longer is the question the taunting jest of skeptics for whom unbelief is the test of wisdom and for whom Nietzsche is the prophet who gave the right answer a century ago. Even within Christianity. now confidently renewing itself in spirit as well as form, a small band of radical theologians has seriously argued that the churches must accept the fact of God’s death, and get along without him.
Drawing on the results of more than 300 interviews conducted over the course of a year by thirty-two Time correspondents around the world, Elson revealed the existence of a new breed of radical theologians known as “Christian atheists” (an oxymoron if there ever was one), to be contrasted with straightforward Nietzschean atheists: “Nietzsche’s thesis was that striving, self-centered man had killed God, and that settled that. The current death-of-God group believes that God is indeed absolutely dead, but proposers to carry on and write a theology without theos. without God.” In addition to these Christian atheists were the existentialist atheists, mostly literary types such as Simone de Beauvoir. who suggested: “It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.” Yet another brand were the “distracted atheists,” or “people who are just ‘too damn busy’ to worry about God at all.” “Practical atheists” rounded out the field—the folks who fill the pews on Sunday but in reality are “disguised nonbelievers who behave during the rest of the week as if God did not exist.” Philosopher Michael Novak was quoted to represent the general spiritual dolor that was sweeping America: “I do not understand God, nor the way in which he works. If, occasionally, I raise my heart in prayer, it is to no God I can see, or hear, or feel. It is to a God in as cold and obscure a polar night as any nonbeliever has known.”
The reasons Time gave for God’s death are telling for the age. An obituary for God published in the Methodist student magazine Motive, for example, was chosen as an emblem of this new throwaway theology: “ATLANTA, Ga., Nov. 9—God, creator of the universe, principal deity of the world’s Jews, ultimate reality of Christians, and most eminent of all divinities, died late yesterday during major surgery undertaken to correct a massive diminishing influence.” The cause of this declining impact was attributed to “secularization, science, urbanization—all have made it comparatively easy for the modern man to ask where God is, and hard for the man of faith to give a convincing answer, even to himself.” Particularly with the rise of modern science, “slowly but surely, it dawned on men that they did not need God to explain, govern or justify certain areas of life.” Even the old standby threat of eternal punishment in hell was impotent. “Unlike in earlier centuries, there is no way for churches to threaten or compel men to face that leap; after Dachau’s mass sadism and Hiroshima’s instant death, there were all too many real possibilities of hell on earth.”
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