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by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

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DAY ONE - IN DEFENCE OF RELIGION: MPHUTHUMI NTABENI makes the case that there is reason in faith.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

East London, SOUTH AFRICA - I've always maintained that secular democracy is far more ideal for religion than, say, theocracy. All of us, despite our beliefs, should be prepared to have our preconceptions questioned, questioned vigorously, which is why I appreciate the likes of Richard Dawkins who keeps most of us religious folks on our toes.

I know that in debating circles, especially religious ones, Dawkins is frequently dismissed as a conceited bully but, when he is sensible, he does come up with interesting questions. What he tries to do most of the time is to put theological doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that any scientific theory must withstand.

But in debating issues, for consistency and clarity of argument, I prefer the likes of Frank Furedi, the author of Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right and a university lecturer in England. In his recent essay, Putting the Human Back into Humanism, Furedi says:

Atheism does not constitute a worldview; it simply expresses the rejection of God. It is an attitude towards one specific issue, rather than representing a broader effort to understand the world. Humanism does not only reject belief in God but in all dogma != whether secular or religious.

I bet that's news to the likes of Dawkins who have a tendency of regarding atheism as a superior kind of enlightenment.

In his book, The God Delusion, Dawkins tells of his exasperation with some of his colleagues who try to play both sides of the street. He accuses them of looking to science for justification of their religious convictions while evading the most difficult implications, such as that of the existence of a prime mover sophisticated enough to create and run the universe, "to say nothing of mind reading millions of humans simultaneously." To Dawkins such an entity would have to be extremely complex, raising the question of how it came into existence, how it communicates and where it resides.

I'm sure you don't need to be a believer to see how silly the above argument is. Surely, if God exists and is the ultimate Creator, a simple look at creation testifies to God's complexity and incomprehensibility from the point of view of God's creatures.

Once you try, like Dawkins, to extend reason beyond the empirical phenomena of the world, to grasp the so-called supersensible reality that underlies things, you're already in the sphere of metaphysical speculation. Indeed, the study of man in depth entails, mutatis mutandis, an opening up of the transcendental dimension.

It stands to reason that if God is perfect then God could not create anything better than that perfection. Any creature God, the only perfect Being, created could only find its perfection in God - even the self-willed reasoning creature which has a nature that blends matter and spirit (human). Any thorough analysis of human experience eventually pushes the boundariess to reach what Karl Jasper called Grenzsituation, the 'limit-situation' where faith must neessarily arise. (By faith here I mean a form of imagination that's not necessarily imaginary. Faith, whether scientific or religious, is a language of commitment, trust and meaning that is shaped by our imagination.)

The late cardinal Newman, that espouser of reconciliation between religion and science, was correct in saying the real battles of life take place in human imagination. Kant, too, knew this in saying metaphysics is 'a natural disposition of reason.'

What the likes of Dawkins do not realise is that existence is not an objectifiable empirical phenomena. "Thought" is not competent to grasp concrete realities of existence, let alone fit them into a comprehensive rational system. The existence or non-existence of God is not and can never be a scientific hypothesis that's open to rational demonstration. And no matter how much you hate Christians, this, at least, is not something they invented; our nature just does not have the capability of comprehending God.

John Edward Taylor, Professor of English Literature at Manchester University, whose alias is Terry Eagleton, says in his review of The God Delusion at the London Review of Books:

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.

God is, if I may use devotional language, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God is the incomprehensible foundation of being and the silence of Self-giving and surrendering love.

Furedi says:

The importance of humanism lies not in what it rejects, but in what it upholds: the importance of human experience as the foundation for knowledge.

In his rejection of dogma, Furedi too makes an error of limiting the movement of Humanism to only non-believers, forgetting that it goes further back to St Augustine who said:

Make humanity your way and you shall arrive at God.

To raise the question of man is to raise the problem of meaning and origin of being, that is the ultimate reality. Inter-mixed in all that is the trembling anxiety of the mortality issue.

Probably the most important challenge facing humanism today is the growing culture of misanthropy: the powerful mood of disenchantment with humanity and its potential for playing a positive and creative role. And the sources for this sentiment are mostly secular, not religious.

I'm glad that it is a non-believer like Furedi who says these things, because were it a believer he / she would have been accused of all sort of things. It has been my growing realisation that the major problem of our century are fundamentalists, both secular and religious. I believe that the task of humanists is to fight against distorting abstractions to defend human dignity beyond the question of belief or non-belief.

A lot has been said, rightly so, against the religious distortions and culpability of political ideology like the totalitarian nature of communist states. But very little has been said about the fiction of corporate individual absolutism.

Most Western intellectuals are blind to the fact that the promotion of individual fulfillment - at all costs - does interrupt the cohesion of social structure. As an African, especially, this disturbs me because my worldview is largely communal. I believe in Ubuntu, a notion that one exists because of others. I admire and share Furedi's trust in the human potential for good. But I also know that man has an ability not to achieve his/her potential. Man has an ability to live a lifetime of inauthentic lives, and is capable of indescrible cruelty.

When Furedi says: Humanists are continually forced to rework their ideas in line with new problems and insights thrown up by history. I take it to mean learning from experience, which is well and good. I'm one of those believers who believe that religion, to avoid stultifying into irrelevancy and idolatry, needs to do this as well. The danger we have to guard against here is irresolution. You have to change from something to another to follow a natural progression. A pupa must be a pupa before it can dream of being a butterfly.

Geisteswissenschat (human studies) has to lead to what Heidegger saw as eternity within time, which is a moment in which your past, present, and future gather into the unity of a resolute self; otherwise you risk the tranquility of the absurd, as seen in the likes of Albert Camus and best represented in Frederich Nietzsche.

There has to be meaning that takes something beyond our individual authority (since no individual conscience ever speaks in absolute purity) and even collective selves, as a guarantor of what we've achieved. Humanism, for me, is too feeble and fickle for that task. History has taught me too much.

Personally I don't see doubt, uncertainty, syncretism, agnosticism and even atheism as enemies of faith; just another authentic searches for meaning.

Certainty breeds idolatry, and doubt sometimes nourishes faith. Faced with the infinite vastness of the universe and anxiety that comes from loss of faith that humanity is going on a positive direction, all of us, agnostics, atheists, secularists and believers must absorb the experience of the twentieth century and the issues of the twenty-first. We must face today's concerns about forces beyond our control and our own responsibility, shape a satisfying way of living in relation to what we can know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality even while, especially in the United States, religion is being trumpeted as essential to living ethically, formulate new ways of coming to terms with death, and explore what hope can mean after the collapse of Enlightenment anticipations.

Reactive reaction tends to attract more public attention, which is where the likes of Dawkins derive their popularity - certainly not from the substance of their debate. It is unfortunate that he seem to have met only fundamentalist believers in his life to make him think that all religious faith is blind. I assure him there's a lot of believers out there who strive to base their faith on an honest search for meaning. We are those who consider the point of view of some non-believers to enrich and sharpen their angle of search.

This is Terry Eagleton again:

Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it's just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

After reading Dawkins' books it is impossible not to agree with Eagleton. I've no problem with someone who rejects something after making a reasonable attempt to understand it. But to reject, even demonise, something on a specious argument is a fault of pride.

Most reasonable believing people are aware of current scientific findings that make it clear that human growth is fueled by a hidden mystery, what seems like a dynamic interplay of chance, necessity, and random process, which, to the human mind, seems chaotic.

But, at certain imperceptible levels, it exhibits harmonies and consistencies that defy human logic. We believe that the creative evolutionary force (Spirit) that is part of God's life resides within forms in our universe throughout the ages. We believe the Spirit evokes experiences of good in all created things and employs them as the theatre of creation.

We've come to understand that we belong to the evolutionary co-creative process. That our uniqueness in evolutionary terms is our capacity to co-create within this creative process of evolution itself, and to serve that process in becoming conscious of itself.

Owen Gingerich, in his book, God's Universe, says:

"One can believe that some of the evolutionary pathways are so intricate and so complex as to be hopelessly improbable by the rules of random chance, but if you do not believe in divine action, then you will simply have to say that random chance was extremely lucky, because the outcome is there to see. Either way, the scientist with theistic metaphysics will approach laboratory problems in much the same way as his atheistic colleague across the hall."

What science has revealed is that out of the primordial silence, there erupted a massive, explosive burst of energy, which is now called the Big Bang. Where it came from remains, and probably always will remain, the eternal enigma, mystery. Some of us chose to call this enigma God, partly because of revelation, and partly because we find it improbable and a failure of imagination that a quality of nothingness should contain the raw potential for the elegance and creativity we see around us.

Hence we say the Spirit is a quality of presence that underpins and pre-dates all forms of activity. It is the creative power of God that does not stand outside evolution as a ethical norm, but is in the unfolding and self-realisation of the process of evolution. This is the way we reinterpret the inherited wisdom of Judeo-Christian religion per requirements of human development demanded by Furedi. This way this tradition lives on in our hearts, our spiritual and artistic imagination, together with depth of intuition we call the (Holy) Spirit that moves us.

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