C.S. Lewis once aptly observed that “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”
I searched earnestly for a coherent thesis in Professor Stephen Asma’s column “What Religion Gives Us (That Science Can’t)” that ran in The New York Times last Sunday. It’s basic premise, as best I can tell, is the following: religion is false, even laughably so, but it makes some people feel good in a way that science cannot. The author seems sincere and without malice, facts that are impressive only because he is an academic. His point is nevertheless condescending, and it is the natural olive branch extended by a philosophy certain of two things, namely, that they’re right and you’re a rube. But at least you’re a happy one, satisfied in your pitiable delusion.
First, Asma claims that “it’s a tough time to defend religion.” Perhaps it’s difficult for an avowed atheist to defend something he doesn’t believe, but religious believers were never asked for comment.
He cites “continued revelations of abuse by priests and clerics, jihad campaigns against ‘infidels’ and homegrown Christian hostility toward diversity and secular culture” as evidence of his assertion that religion is beyond defense. Molestation and suicide bombings are put in the same moral category as opposition to lax immigration laws (which is precisely what he means by ‘hostility toward diversity’) and abortion. Resist™ at all times, and if necessary impugn the motives of your theological and political opposites. Or something.
Next, he details an epiphany he had after a typical day’s work of “lecturing a class of undergraduates about the incoherence of monotheism.” A student came up to him after class and explained that after his brother’s tragic murder, his mother “would have been institutionalized if not for the fact that she expected to see her slain son again” in the sweet hereafter. His road-to-Damascus realization was not that religious people are not unilaterally irrational- “religion fails miserably at the bar of rational validity,” to use his words- but that faith’s “irrationality may even be the source of its power” to help those experiencing despair. In other words, the schizophrenic is satisfied in his psychosis, so we ought not treat him.
Religion, like any other philosophy or ideology, is only meaningful if it is true. Saint Paul says that if the specific historical claims of the Christian creed –that a Jesus of Nazareth made radical claims about His personal Divinity, was crucified under the auspices of Pontius Pilate and rose from the dead in vindication of His claims of divination, to borrow the formula from Dr. William Lane Craig– were untrue, then “we are of all men most miserable.” The schizophrenic gains nothing from the furtherance of his delusion, and so too do we who count ourselves as believers receive no recompense if our beliefs are foundationally untrue.
The author avoids entirely the possibility that he is wrong. This, it seems to me, is a malady with a particularly high incidence among atheist intellectuals. Dr. Asma excuses himself from examining the possibility that religion’s status as, in his words, “the most powerful cultural response to the universal emotional life,” is not granted solely because of its anesthetic capacity but instead because it’s actually true.
I’m open to the possibility that all religious people (myself included) are irrational rubes, but I simply don’t have enough faith to believe that. Evidently, Dr. Asma does, and his olive branch that we’re generally made better off by our irrational, pre-civilizational beliefs is of little solace if we’re destined to be worm food at the end of our days.