A friend of mine recently admitted to being an agnostic. “That means,” he says, “I can’t say there is a God or there are no gods, nor can I say there are not. … What matters to me … is attempting to lead a way of life that Jesus taught his disciples to lead, and for that I do not need to have recourse to any deity.” This has provoked me to articulate why I am NOT an atheist and NOT an agnostic, why “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” and the rest of the creeds, right down to “The resurrection of the body/of the dead, and the life everlasting/of the world to come.” It is, so to speak, a challenge!
At the very personal level, going back a good seventy of my nearly eighty-five years, I feel inclined to quote Jerome Kern/Otto Harbach’s lyrics, “Smoke gets in your eyes”:
They asked me how I knew
My true love was true
I, of course, replied
“Something deep inside
Cannot be denied”
But to justify this rationally to others, I would argue that a Godless universe is a loveless universe, because love can only exist where there are persons, and only persons can have purposes. Persons, entities with self-consciousness and the ability to make choices, have only existed in the universe a miniscule amount of recent time, and there is no guarantee that they will continue to exist for more than an equally small proprtion of the universe’s existence. Evolution is about adapting in order to survive, and given humanity’s self-destructive impulses, it is not clear that “intelligence” is favourable to survival in the long term. A person may, for love, prioritise this or that other person over their own self-interst (even to the point of dying for them), but there seems no reason why (on utilitarian grounds) they should prioritise anyone or everyone indiscriminately. Nor does this imply the worthiness of the person loved – Eva Braun might have been prepared to die for Hitler.
If the physical universe is all there is, and if this physical universe can be reduced to the interactions of subatomic particles, then there can be only facts, not values – or rather, values become the subjective choice of individual persons, not absolute and universal realities. As Voldemort said, “Threre is no right and wrong, only power.”
To take Jesus of Nazareth as an inspiration and moral example is odd, if one discards the basic framework of his teaching, that we are all children of one loving Father, who is personally concerned with our moral choices. Jesus claimed (at the minimum) to have a unique relationship with that Father, whose representative he was. The records of his teaching are inextricably bound up with the record of his “mighty works”, and above all with his resurrection. The cross was not a tragic curtailment of his life, but its climax.
The earliest Christian writings – the letters of St Paul – are not primarily concerned with setting out moral principles, but with proclaiming Jesus as “Christ”, the Anointed King of the world, manifested as such by his bodily resurrection from death. The Gospels which come a little later recount Jesus’s earthly ministry and teaching, but again the climax is the resurrection. Without that, the story has no point, and there is no reason to privilege Jesus over any other moral teacher. We talk about “the Kingdom”, but there is no kingdom without a King, and I believe that it only “comes” insofar as Christ is acknowledged as our own personal Lord and King, and the director of our lives.
The more I read the Bible as Christ-directed and Christ-centred, the more it makes sense of the whole human predicament. That is why, with Betjeman, I believe “That God was Man in Palestine, and lives today in bread and wine.”
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