Wishing God Away

Huh.  Excerpts follow:

In his brilliant book on natural law, What We Can’t Not Know, J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas at Austin cites two highly intelligent men who deny the natural law but also perceive exactly why they do so. They are representative of a huge class of less percipient (or perhaps less honest or simply more discreet) persons.

I will quote all of what Budziszewski quotes, despite the length, because these examples are telling. The first is Harvard population biologist Richard Lewontin, a self-proclaimed atheist, writing in the New York Review of Books (“Billions and Billions of Demons”) in January 1997:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.

The second example is the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his book The Last Word, published by Oxford University Press in 1996, commenting on his own fear of religion:

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe be like that…. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world.

The same thing shows up in C. S. Lewis's Surprised By Joy--the western atheists, living in relative prosperity, success, and peace, just want to be left alone to enjoy it, untroubled by cosmic warfare, God and angels versus the demons of hell with humans as the prize, infinite bliss awaiting if we only say yes...

The problem, as I think Lewis said, is not that we want too much from life, but that we're satisfied with so absurdly little.