Faith in the Shadows by Austin Fischer

Author:Austin Fischer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: doubt;faith;skepticism;skeptic;apologetics;fundamentalism;problem of evil;science;hell;questions about Christianity;Christian faith;questions of faith;atheist;agnostic;doubter;doubt god;questions about god;questions about jesus
ISBN: 9780830874026
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2018-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Is God Dead?

“Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts them together to see what they mean.”

When dealing with something as complex as the relationship between faith (or religion) and science, a stark, simplified frame can give things some needed perspective, and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s punchy explanation does just that. Certainly, there is more to be said and many qualifications to be made, but on the whole, I think Sacks is right: faith and science look at the world from different angles, asking primarily different questions, and when this difference is forgotten, reality’s depth collapses into something flat, manageable, and banal. And when reality gets flat, manageable, and banal, it is no longer reality. Or to say this another way, people of faith and no faith often end up chasing each other in circles because both have forgotten that God does not “exist.”

In April of 1966, Time magazine published a cover at least a couple hundred years in the making. The background is black, the letters are red, and the question is brass: Is God dead? Many people think so. Here’s the story they tell.

Long ago primitive people invented religion to explain events they could not understand. A Neanderthal sees a lightning bolt flash down from the heavens, and because he doesn’t understand the atmospheric sciences, he (simple Neanderthal that he is) mistakenly assumes there must be some man up in the clouds, hurling down said lightning bolts. What else could it be? This story of the man in the clouds is passed down through generations until it becomes the story of the god in the heavens—a god like Zeus. And, allegedly, all gods and religions were more or less created this way: unexplainable events, attributed to the gods.

And the gods have a good run. For thousands of years they rule the earth, and the peoples bow to them in reverent submission, but then along comes science, explaining all these previously unexplainable events, leaving deicide in its wake. No god in the heavens hurls down lightning bolts—there are just water droplets and ice crystals rubbing against each other to produce static electricity. So if Zeus was only good for causing an unexplainable physical event, and science can now explain that event, there’s really no need for Zeus anymore. Zeus is simply an antiquated scientific explanation. Zeus is dead, and science has killed him. So it goes with all the gods and religions. The venerable Nietzsche says it best: “God is dead . . . and we have killed him.”

Needless to say, the story of gods and religions is a bit more complicated than that, seeing as how ancient religions, while certainly including ancient science, were more concerned with axiological explanations than scientific ones. That is, they were primarily concerned with pointing to things of worth, value, and meaning. That’s another story for another day, but the thing to mention here is the irony that while scientifically inclined atheists and scientifically antagonistic believers disagree about whether or not

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