Death of the spirit

Two things I read this morning reminded me of my theme of aliveness from the other day. The first was a review of Christopher Hitchens' book "God is not Great," by another well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins. There is quite a crew of these evangelistic atheists trying to whip up a bit of religious bigotry among the anti Christian crowd. The other item is in today's First Things blog, a posting by Peter Leithart called "The Pagan West." The arguments of Hitchens and Dawkins are old and tiresome. But Leithart has noticed something interesting.
It's a well known fact that in Europe and countries of European extraction, the force of traditional Christian faith is moribund. This is especially true of the mainstream protestant denominations, as well as the 'progressive' wing of the Catholic Church where the core doctrines of Christanity have been largely abandoned. Not coincidentally, as the 'progressive' clergy abandons the core beliefs, the congregations abandon the churches. Away from Europe and the American 'blue states,'- what Dawkins calls the cerebral cortex of America, as opposed to the reptilian brain of southern and middle America- notably in Africa, Christianity is vibrant, growing, and alive.
Leithart informs us that Christianity is growing fastest in those parts of Africa where traditional African religion is still strong and suggests that this is not mere accident. "Like primal African religion, Christianity displays a strong sense of human finitude and sin, believes in a spiritual world that interacts with the human world, teaches the reality of life after death, and cultivates the sacramental sense that physical objects are carriers of spiritual power. Christianity catches on there because it gives names to the realities they already know and experience."
In other words Africans are attuned to the aliveness of existence and so the idea that a creator god animates this aliveness is only common sense. Unlike Dawkins whose seething hatred of everything religious blinds him to the beauties of both religious tradition and the aliveness of the world. This can't be too good for science, either.
Sometimes I wonder if this deadness of spirit is a product of urban living. The traditional Paganism of the Greeks and Romans lost credence among the educated as their civilization matured and was only retained as a set of rituals used to cement loyalty to the city. Our educated class has even lost this remnant of belief, and maybe this is why patriotism in Europe is pretty much a thing of the past, and only survives as a hatred of America. It's as if all the ecclesiastical architecture that crowds the European landscape is occupied by twittering mice- as the shades of the dead were imagined in Homeric Greece.

My favourite atheist

The always worth reading Theodore Dalrymple's article in the always worth reading New English review this month is entitled, "There is no God but Politics." Dalrymple is my favourite atheist, perhaps because I know in his heart he has a longing to believe. As a young man he "picked up books of metaphysics with an excitement that I cannot now recapture, and which completely mystifies me..." He is right to be skeptical of belief systems whether of the religious or the materialistic variety because like any intelligent observer he has seen the kind of carnage wrong belief can lead to. While the USSR loomed in the east he had to learn about Marxism and when it collapsed he was very happy that he could dispose of all that "ideological nonsense."
Unfortunately an old ideology, once thought moribund, has arisen to take Marx' place in this turbulent world of humanity and he has to immerse himself in more nonsense. Reading a book by Sayyim Qutb, one of the original modern Islamist writers, Dalrymple notes the many similarities between Marxism and Qutb's Orthodoxy.
I won't bother with the details here but I want to mention that since what people believe is of immense importance to our well being it is very important to distinguish between wrong belief and right belief. Many atheists want to skip out on this question by saying that all belief is wrong and foolish. The word for Christian belief is 'faith.' The scientistic variety of atheist points out that god, the afterlife and so on can't be verified through standard criteria of proof and so must be false.
This ignores the fact that all scientific measurements are really just finely tuned, amplified aids to our normal sensory apparatus...vision, touch, sound, chemical, and so on. They also fail to note that the application of mathematics is a purely abstract kind of logic that is an extension and amplification of our reasoning faculty and has nothing whatsoever to do with material facts. As Plato realized 2500 years ago perfect circles, triangles and other geometric figures exist only in our imaginations. This is why he invented a theory of forms existing in an ideal state in a higher sphere of existence of which our own imperfect being was only a kind of reflection or echo.
Modern science is a dialectical process that sets abstract mathematical reasoning against sensory perception. One is used to verify the other in a circular argument. It's been a very powerful way of looking at things. For instance it is obvious to the senses that the sun goes around the earth. It took the application of abstract geometric reasoning to show that this perception is illusory.
I think the Church fathers must have seen that something was missing in the Greek rationalism paradigm and so they proposed faith. I don't want to get any further into early church teachings here...I don't have that kind of expertise anyway. I just want to say that we have knowledge of things other than through our senses and our capacity for reason. Faith is in a class of knowledge that shares attributes of both. Other species in this taxonomy are poetry, music, art, and an innate sense of ethics and justice...and above all, love. Plato had given this matter some thought and came to the conclusion that poetry was a subversive lie. This is more or less the same argument most scientific atheists use against religion. His idea of love was a little weird.
The trouble with all these psychic animals is that there is no objective way of measuring the value of a poem or even saying whether a given piece of writing is a poem or not. I would argue that Bukowski is not a poet and that Shakespeare was. But how can I prove it? Are there any criteria anybody can use even if they don't like poetry? No. Criteria can be devised that work fairly well but when a true genius comes along he seldom pays attention to those criteria. And conversely it is pretty obvious that if you try to write according to some set of criteria the result will usually be dismal. All this can be said about the other species of art and about faith. We take in the various arts through our senses but they help to illuminate things that are beyond our senses. They help us find our way to a greater reality than that of our senses. Unlike science art deal with things that come from the inside. When we make art or music we bring things into the world that didn't previously exist. The material varies but the source is the same.
My own faith is a bit weak. My religious belief comes more through cognitive reasoning than from an inwelling sureness of belief...except when it comes to music. Often music and faith are joined. As in the singing of Mahalia Jackson. I envy her the joy her faith gave her. The next time Mr. Dalrymple wants to know faith is like when it's pure and beautiful my advice is to listen to the music of Mahalia Jackson and chuck Qutb in the pathology section of his library along with Marx.