Unbelief Under Threat

Shout Loudly

We live in an era when Unbelief is vehemently opposed to the Christian faith.  Yet never have the claims of Unbelief (secularist, rationalist, materialist, evolutionist) been so vacuous, so self-defeating, so stupid.  This is more than a state of being "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  It is a fury borne out of the frustration of a vacuous soul. 

Modern Unbelief is premised upon an angry prejudice against the Living God.  In the early centuries of the Enlightenment there was a characteristic smugness,  hubris, and disdain of religion in general, but of Christianity in particular.  Christians were nothing more than ignorant, superstitious dolts.  As Unbelief went along its not-so-merry way its foundations began to crumble.
  But Unbelief is itself a perverse form of religious prejudice.  Consequently, it not just doubled down on its folly, it also became militant and vehement, like a spoilt child stamping its foot.

As early as mid last century this was painfully and embarrassingly evident.  In 1943 Professor D. S. M. Watson delivered an address to fellow biologists at Cape Town in which he admitted the truth:

Evolution has been accepted by scientists, not because it has been observed to occur or proved by logical coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly unacceptable. [Cited by C. E. M. Joad, The Recovery of Belief (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1952), p.21.  Emphasis, author's.] 

Here is a frank admission that evolutionism is definitely not scientific.  Anyone who puts the words "evolution" and "science" in the same phrase is either self-deceived or themselves a malicious deceiver.  It is hatred of God which has led evolution to its splenetic vehemence.  But the same frustration has emerged amongst more genuine scientists in other fields.

Take, for example, the discrediting of the "God of the gaps" slur.  In its triumphal heyday naturalistic science asserted that the "need" for God was disappearing as natural causality and explanations for just about everything that exists were rapidly exploding.  God was shrinking from existence since He was less and less needed as the explanation for the way things are.  For some strange, ignorant reason  these protagonists had absolutely no understanding of the doctrine of creation, nor of the long established Christian truth of the necessary existence of second causes due to God's special creation.  In a nutshell this truth propounds that God created and sustains second causes: therefore, the explosion of understanding of natural causality did not "shrink" God; it made Him all the more glorious in the minds of Christians.

Hume was right of course.  If you are an Unbeliever there can be no logical nor rational evidence, let alone proof of cause and effect, or of causality in general.  There are only appearances in time.  The whole doctrine of naturalistic causality disappears in a puff of smoke.  But it is impolite to speak about Hume at the soirees and parties, so Unbelief hastily wheeled him into a cupboard, locked the door and lost the key.  The "God of the gaps" jibe has always been a stupid inanity.  But when Unbelief is confronted with its own vacuity through rationalists like Hume, straws will be clutched at--desperately.

But even here, Unbelief has had its vaunting pride crushed.  The twentieth century, whilst exponentially growing in the understanding of how the material world works, was also growing in its understand of just how mysterious and unknowable it is.  The hardest of the hard sciences, nuclear physics, has led this charge.  Naturalistic causality has lost its lustre.

Not so long ago Unbelief touted that naturalistic explanations would eventually count for everything--literally.  T. H. Huxley lectured the British Association for the Advancement of Science (with approval) thusly: "the thoughts to which I am now giving utterance and your thoughts regarding them are expressions of the molecular changes in the matter of life."  Amen, and amen murmured his august audience.  But, sadly, it has not turned out that way.  As Joad (writing in 1952) argued:

. . . we (now) know too much about the universe to think that we know anything for certain.  We have, indeed, entered upon a third phase in which mystery has returned with a vengeance and the physical universe shows itself to be not only queerer than we understand but, it may be, queerer than we can understand.  Each fresh advance in human knowledge reveals a greater unknown.  Nor, on reflection, is this surprising.  If you think of knowledge as a little glowing patch, a circle of light, set in an area of environing darkness, the darkness of the unknown, then the more you enlarge the circle of the known, the more you also enlarge is area of contact with the unknown.  (Ibid., p. 34)

Or as the ancient poet, Job put it, when contemplating the vastness of God's work and power, "Behold, these are the fringes of His ways."

Unbelief now is about as confused as someone blind, deaf, and dumb in a bedlam corridor.  But this has not humbled Unbelief.  It has made its arrogance all the more frenetic and febrile.  More militant.  More scathing.  More hateful.

A verger was once cleaning a church.  Coming to the pulpit, he noticed that the preacher had left last Sunday's preaching notes on the rostrum.  He noticed a scrawl in the margin:  "weak point; shout loudly".  It sums up modern Unbelief in a nutshell.