Last time, I wrote about the false idea of religion and the suppression of innovation and truth, as exemplified by a reconsideration of the Galileo incident. Today, I want to consider another part of the atheistic meta-narrative that I find equally amusing and frustrating. The meta-narrative summarizes as, “nothing good ever came from religion,” and usually has a variant, “all wars came from religion.”
It’s difficult, in the extreme, to defend absolute statements such as these, especially when they involve interpretive elements. If it’s about winning the argument, I’m sure there are all kinds of websites out there that will give you all of the best, most defensible, responses to these. I want to address, instead, the statement behind the statement. Before that, I do want to give a reply to the second statement by suggesting that most (all) wars are usually related to land: control, ownership, and possession of land and the revenue that land generates. Certainly governments use religion as the rallying cry to motivate the masses to action, but when you boil it down it really comes down to land and resources.
In the end, wars happen because of money, or the love of it.
But to my point: the statement behind the statement of good and religion. I think the real question is a question of goodness. The atheist meta-narrative explicitly (and some would say rationally) denies the the concept of God and the necessity of God in connection to the concept of good. The implicit statement follows that we should discard the irrational God concept and embrace the rational concept of goodness.
Irrational = bad, rational = good.
Ironically, most atheists I know would espouse the goodness of medicine and education, putting these forth as examples of the pinnacle of rationality and enlightenment. I usually lean to my atheist associates and point out that both institutions came from religion. Seriously (there’s a reason why there are Baptist, Presbyterian, and/or Methodist hospitals in most North American cities). The western higher education system is based off of monastic education—to train priests—which in turn drew influence from the madrasa. Both birthed out of the (supposedly non-rational) callings put forth by religion inclinations and the (again, non-rational) pursuit of Godliness and (supposedly rational) goodness.
I think that the atheist meta-narrative question is really, “Is religion good?” My obligatory christian answer to that question is, “any man-made construct has inherent flaws because humanity is inherently flawed, but the object of religion is inherently good.” My real answer to that question is, “God is good, man is not.” Religions are systematic and rational, usually making a lot of sense and having a great deal of internal coherence. God, conceptually, is irrational and doesn’t work according to our categories. Actually, I reject the notion of God as a concept being irrational (I leave it to finer philosophical minds than mine to make the God argument but I hear William Lane Craig does a pretty good job), but I would agree that God as a concept fits outside of neat human construct.
Personally, I call that good.
Faith Amuses 