Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 29, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

My daughter Mary has a friend, a fellow I have known since Mary was in high school. I don’t see him often, but I did see him at my grandson Maddox’s birthday party last Sunday. Every time I see him he wants to argue theology with me. Like I can’t go to my grandson’s birthday party without having to work?! And it is rather strange that my daughter’s friend always wants to argue theology with me. You see, he claims to be an atheist. He can be a very assertive atheist. Yet every time I see him he’ll start a conversation by asking me some theological question.

He did it again last Sunday at Maddox’s birthday party. In that conversation it became clearer than it had been that a primary reason why he considers himself an atheist is that he has a very narrow understanding of the nature of truth. For him only facts are true. He insists that the only legitimate way to read scripture is as fact. It sounds like fact, or some of it does. So the Bible must be asserting facts. There’s nothing else for it to assert. For this fellow only facts are true. He shares this reductionist understanding of truth with several popular authors who have made a name—and, I assume, a lot of money—for themselves attacking religion. Authors like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchins savage religion, and it seems to me that they do so because, as they see it, the Bible asserts various supposedly factual things that are not in fact factual, especially the six days of creation of Genesis 1 and Noah and the flood. (I once had a barber who was cutting my hair tell me that you can’t be a Christian without believing the story of Noah and the flood literally. He had clippers in his hand, and a razor near by; so I didn’t argue with him.) My daughter’s friend and these popular authors actually share their reductionist understanding of truth as only factual with Christian Fundamentalists, who insist that the six days of creation story in Genesis must be factually true because they know of no other way for it to be true. For many people today because God cannot be established as a fact, and only facts are true, there is no God. For the Fundamentalists the things in the Bible that they see as fact must be true as fact or, for them as for the new atheists, there is no God. That’s why they cling so desperately to the Bible as factually true.

So for my daughter’s friend and the new atheists there is no God. Personally I can’t see how one can live without God, although I know that a lot of people manage to do it, at least for a time. Beyond that, something about my conversation with my daughter’s friend last Sunday reminded me a concern that I have had about atheism, or about secular humanism, which is the most common form of atheism among us, for a long time. I put this concern to Mary’s friend this way: In rationalism, what is there to stop atrocities like those of the Stalinist regime in Russia? Before he could try to answer that question Jane rescued me by taking me down to the Lake Washington beach in the park where the party was to watch Maddox and his little buddies playing in the water. So I don’t know how he would answer the question. My answer to the question of what there is in rationalism to stop atrocities like those of the Stalinist regime in Russia is: Nothing. And that has been my answer for a long time now.

In my youth I left the church. For quite a few years—or what seemed quite a few years at the time—I never gave God much thought. My journey back to faith began when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington studying Russian history. I have spoken here and written elsewhere of how my year in the Soviet Union doing dissertation research played a big role in my returning to faith, but that return actually began before that year in Russia with this concern: Without God, what is the basis for morality? Without God what ground do we have to stand on from which to assert that there is such a thing as right and wrong? I could find no answer to the question. In Stalinist Russia people were expendable. They were expendable in the name of a supposed higher good, the creation of the ideal society that Marx called Communism. People were of value only to the extent that they furthered that goal, or, more cynically, to the extent that they furthered the goal of maintaining the power of the Communist Party. If someone got in the way, kill them. Why not? Soviet Communism was militantly atheistic, and in that atheism human life had no intrinsic value. It only had utilitarian value. The result? At least twenty million people killed before the outbreak of World War II.

Now I grant you that Soviet Communism is an extreme example, but it is an example that sheds a lot of light on the nature of atheistic or humanistic systems generally. Maybe you’ve heard of John Stewart Mill and utilitarianism. A lot of Americans like John Stewart Mill and his utilitarian philosophy. It sounds so pragmatic, and Americans are nothing if not pragmatic. The measure of all things in that system is “the greatest good for the greatest number.” And there is nothing in that system to stop those in charge from simply eliminating those whom they decide are impeding the creation of what they consider to be the greatest good for the greatest number.

The dominant worldview in America today is secular humanism. In secular humanism humanity is the measure of all things. The human being is said to have intrinsic moral value, but where does that supposed value come from? In secular humanism it is simply a bald assertion hanging out there in midair not grounded in anything other than its own assertion. It is supposed to be a self-evident truth, but is it? I, and most thinkers today, don’t believe that there is such a thing as a self-evident truth, the American Declaration of Independence with its “we hold these truths to be self-evident” to the contrary notwithstanding. In secular humanism the assertion of the intrinsic moral value of the human has no more grounding than it did in Soviet Communism, and we all know where that led.

There is only one ground of the good. The only way that the moral can truly be established is to ground it in something transcendent, something beyond the human, indeed in something divine. The only ground of the good is God. I am convinced of that truth, and so were the authors of our two scripture passages this morning. In Psalm 14 those fools who say in their hearts that there is no God are corrupt and do abominable deeds. They “eat up my people as they eat bread,” that is, they oppress God’s people for their own personal benefit. Without God there is nothing to stop them from doing so. Sirach says that those who forsake the Lord suffer all kinds of calamities. Sooner or later they experience all manner of evil because without God there is nothing to stop humans from inflicting evil on each other. That is wisdom as old as the Psalms and as modern as contemporary theology.

Now, we have to be honest here. People who believe in God also commit atrocities, and they often do so in the very name of God. We are about to mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, just to cite one example. And we Christians can’t be too smug about it. Christianity’s record of committing atrocities against non-Christian people, and even against other Christians, is every bit as bad as any other religion’s and worse than most.

Yet at least within the religious traditions we have a place to stand from which to condemn those atrocities. With the religions no utilitarian explanation, no appeal to a supposed higher good, can truly justify actions that violate the moral guidance that the religions give us. All of the major religions give us basically the same moral guidance. They all value human life because it comes from God. They all preach peace and justice for all people, or at least they do in their purest form, before they get corrupted by worldly values. There are things about Christianity that are unique, but the moral guidance it gives isn’t one of them. Within a religious tradition the sanction for morality comes from a higher power. It comes from something beyond the merely human. It comes from something that utterly transcends the merely human and that can therefore speak to the human from a ground of authority that no merely human voice can have.

I don’t know how my daughter’s friend would answer my challenge about what there is in rationalism to stop the atrocities of Stalinist Russia. Other atheists more sophisticated than he have attempted to give an answer to questions like that one. They all come down basically to a bald assertion of the intrinsic value of human life, a value of which humans supposedly just have some innate inkling. Yet I remained convinced that when secular humanism asserts the intrinsic value of human life it is making a religious assertion that has had its religious foundation removed. And because its religious foundation has been removed, it is grounded in nothing. It can be blown away with ease by the winds of convenience or corruption. It is, to use a biblical image, a house built on sand. The good needs a ground, and the only possible ground of the good is God. This truth doesn’t prove the reality of God, but it should make us think long and hard about the consequences of a culture that denies the reality of God. Amen.