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Associated PressThe age-old conflict between atheism and faith is aired anew in two books by theologians whose personal embrace of both beliefs led to vastly different conclusions.
Where God is concerned, two blue-blood theology professors floated in opposite directions and passed each other in midair.
The one thinker is Harvard Divinity School's Gordon D. Kaufman, who was raised in the devoutly evangelical Mennonite faith. His father served as president of the Mennonites' oldest U.S. school, Bethel College in Kansas.
After theological study and ordination, Kaufman gradually adopted radical agnosticism and has long since rejected the supernatural, all-powerful and personal God of the Bible.
Oxford University's Alister McGrath moved in the opposite direction. As a youth in Northern Ireland, he enthusiastically embraced atheism and Marxism, figuring that believers were "very stupid people."
But advanced study in biochemistry and mature reflection caused McGrath to reconsider. Today he's not just a believer but a leading figure in the conservative wing of the Church of England and world Anglicanism.
Kaufman's latest book, In the Beginning . . . Creativity, denies God as a capital-C Creator. He thinks that a lowercase and impersonal "creativity," defined as "the coming into being" of all that's new in the cosmos, is "the only proper object of worship, devotion and faith."
To Kaufman, religious concepts are mere "creations of the human imagination," though some might retain the noun "God" to symbolize the mysterious creativity.
Notably, his manifesto against the biblical God wasn't issued by a secular publisher but by Fortress Press of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a slowly declining mainline Protestant denomination.
McGrath has a new book out, too, and it's something else, a bold broadside aptly summarized in the title: The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (Doubleday).
Sounds like wishful thinking, considering the widespread disbelief in Britain and continental Europe, and in influential U.S. academic and media circles.
McGrath doesn't so much prove the near-demise of atheism as claim that, in principle, the props that made it credible and attractive have been rudely knocked aside.
His basic theme is that in past centuries, Western faith squandered its moral stature when Christians ran around killing each other and oppressing dissenters. Back then, atheism seemed to promise human liberation.
Today, of course, churches abhor any hint of coerced faith and have long since embraced full freedom of conscience.
Meanwhile, when atheistic Communists or neo-pagan Nazis gained political power in the 20th century, McGrath comments, they proved to be even more bloodthirsty than their misguided Christian predecessors and produced "just as many frauds, psychopaths and careerists."
The conclusion: "It is not of the essence of atheism to be a liberator, nor of religion to be an oppressor."
He brackets the "golden age" of atheism between 1789, the start of France's bitterly anti-clerical revolution, and 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall announced the death of atheism as a European political force.
Though Kaufman decided that science had dethroned the God of old, McGrath concluded from studying the history and philosophy of science that matters aren't that simple. He realized that the great atheists (Marx, Freud) presupposed atheism rather than proving it.
Thus, "the belief that there is no God is just as much a matter of faith as the belief that there is a God." Impasse. "The grand idea that atheism is the only option for a thinking person has long since passed away."
Moreover, McGrath argues, atheism failed in matters of "imagination" and created mere "organizations" instead of the sort of "community" that humans crave and religion fosters. Apart from Western Europe, faith is booming.
Still, McGrath maintains a certain respect for his youthful credo. Atheism's past successes showed that "when religion is seen as a threat to the people, it will fail; when it is seen as their friend, it will flourish."