The age of muscular evangelical Christianity has passed to be replaced by the age of muscular evangelical atheism. The Christopher Hitchens bandwagon was in town as part of Sydney's 'Festival of Dangerous Ideas'. On Saturday night the author of God is Not Great spoke on the topic of 'religion poisons everything'.
Religion, he claims, makes us serfs of God, an omnipresent father-figure who will not go away and let us all grow up. Time to cast off the shackles of belief and stand as adults without the fear of God looking over our shoulder.
Hitchens' presence caught my attention while driving home, as he was interviewed on ABC Radio by Richard Glover. I was struck by how quickly he spoke, presumably to cover up the gaps in the logic of his position. However the conversation moved on from God to Hitchens' support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; God once more disappeared from the public airways.
Listener response via SMS included some muddled defences of religion as well strident support for the author, but what caught my attention was one SMS that criticised Hitchens for his arrogance. It was impossible to claim to know that God does or does not exist, so it was arrogant for Hitchens to claim to know that God does not exist.
It seemed to me that this caller captured something of the 'spirit of the age'. For all intents and purposes God's existence, or non-existence, is viewed as beyond the scope of reason to settle. The existence of God is purely a matter of faith, not reason.
It is interesting to note how far we are from an earlier world view in Christianity where it was clear to everyone that it is possible to know God's existence through the use of reason, for example through Aquinas' 'five ways'. Indeed not so long ago Vatican I (1869–70) taught that it is possible to know the existence of God through reason. Vatican II repeated this teaching in the Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum.
The nature and causes of this shift have been exhaustively examined in the major work by Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. There are religious, philosophical and political forces at work in a process that took centuries to arrive at our current cultural assumption, that God's existence lies beyond the reach of reason.
And it is just that, an assumption. Who