A recent Church of England report revealed that regular church attendance presently stands at 1.8% of the population. It went on to project that this would fall over the next decade to about 1%. The decline, it appears is inexorable.
No doubt secularists greeted this news as confirmation that religion has all but been vanquished, that we all now live in the Kingdom of Godlessness. Of course, it means nothing of the sort. What it does reflect is a diversity of views and an unwillingness to be martialled into any particular camp.
There can be no presumption that the corollary of the report’s findings is that 98.2% of the population are atheists or agnostics. Apart from members of other denominations and faiths, perhaps the majority of people rarely even give the matter much thought.
When they do it seems many profess a vague, inchoate sense that “there is something” or the order they see in the world around them can’t be the result of mere chance. Nothing more definite than that. A recognition they are part of something far greater than themselves, only there’s no need to go into some designated building every Sunday to sing about it.
Atheism has a fundamental problem most atheists seem to solve by denying it. That is, in a random, purposeless universe the only rational position is that of the nihilist. An assertion that Godless humans can find their own purpose, through existentialism or whatever, is to accept, at the very least, purposefulness does exist in creation.
After all, people are a part of that creation and are expressions of purpose. It is a similar realisation that the universe is self-aware: it must be, because we humans are aware of the universe, at the very least we are the universe’s self-consciousness.
Although atheism presents itself as a modern way of thinking, it is actually as ancient as religious belief. The per-Socratic philosophers were intellectually wrestling with the implications of materialism even as the chosen people of Israel were developing the early foundations of what have become the three Abrahamic faiths.
Deism is a dialectical product all the contending factors around belief and disbelief, informed by science. Like all religions it is man-made and, as such, has its own imperfections and contradictions. It does not claim to offer prefect answers, because they don’t exist.
Indeed, it may not even be a religion but a philosophy. It has no dogma or creed demanding obedience, rather the opposite, imposing on the individual the burden of drawing his or her own conclusions.
Deists cannot even say what God, or Deus, is. Not only is there no settled agreement amongst deists, there is a shared recognition that God must be, and remain, beyond human comprehension. Otherwise, God is little more than an idealised, but limited, human being at best, such as the God of the Abrahamic faiths.
Maybe the word God will eventually fall into disuse and some other arise to denote a less anthropomorphic designation. If so, it seems unlikely it will require the filling of pews on a Sunday.
deismuk 