I Corinthians 2:10b-14

William F. Schnell

February 10, 2008

Tomorrow Hiram College will host a two-day lecture series open to the public for free.  The guest lecturer is Philip Clayton, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Claremont School of Theology.  The title of his lecture series is "Why the ‘New Atheism; Isn’t New."  What is new, as learned in last Sunday’s sermon, is the popularity of a recent spate of books on Atheism that have reached the New York Times Bestseller list over the past year or so.

The best selling book of them all is The God Delusion, By Richard Dawkins, which remained on the Bestseller List for 32 weeks in a row.   Indeed, the first lecture in Professor Clayton’s series is entitled: "Dawkins' God Delusion' and Other Things that Science Doesn't Prove," which happens to start at the same time as our Church Board Meeting. Is that a sniffle I feel?  Heaven forbid that I should take ill at the last moment and miss the Board Meeting.

This sermon, entitled: "Why There Will Always Be Religion," is my response to "The New Atheism" in general and Richard Dawkins in particular.  We will begin with Professor Dawkins.  No, I am not going to demonize the man now or anywhere in this message.  That would constitute a fallacy ad hominem, which is appealing to personal considerations rather than reason.  In other words, it would be using personal attacks to distract attention away from not being able to respond to his arguments.

Besides I personally find Professor Dawkins to be an absolutely hilarious, insightful, and articulate man—just the kind of fellow I would enjoy spending an evening with over a meal (even though he singles out for special condemnation religiously tolerant people like me because we are unwitting enablers of religious extremists).  Beyond this, Professor Dawkins is smart—much smarter than me.  And one might wonder why I would presume to instruct anyone smarter than me.

Just because some are generally smarter than others does not mean that that they are smarter in all ways.  I would like to think that I am generally smarter than a mule, which is a good deal smarter than a horse.  But if I get lost on the range while riding a horse as the sun goes down, all I have to do to get back home is drop the reins.  That horse is smarter than me when it comes to finding its way back home.  And so it is that I believe I see something very clearly that Richard Dawkins does not, and I would like to share it with him as he has shared with me.

I am not being sarcastic here.  I feel compelled to join the dialogue begun by Professor Dawkins since it has sparked such public interest.  I value Professor Dawkins clear thinking.  We agree on many things.  He debunks many things about religion in general and Christianity in particular that need to be debunked.  Beyond all this, he admits to being religious himself in what he calls the Einsteinian sense (page 19, his book).  So much of religious debate is about semantics anyway.  For example from most any religious extremist view I am an infidel at best and an atheist at worst, and so are you.  So let’s get away from name-calling and labels and consider some facts.

Not all the facts, by the way.  I cannot, in a 20 minute sermon, address every point in a well-documented book of over 400 pages.  Again, I agree with much of it.  Do adherents twist religion to justify their own ends?  All the time.  Is religion used to fuel ungodly hatred among human beings?  Think 9/11.  Does religion sometimes sacrifice reason on the altar of faith?  Ask Galileo.  Is it wastefully extravagant and not particularly efficient in the good it seeks to accomplish?  Much of the time.  For example, this sanctuary will be heated for 7 days and used only the barest portion of one of them.  I have no argument with any of that.

One must wonder why we should not bag religion altogether if it is subject to such abuse by its adherents, which is precisely the point of Professor Dawkin’s and the "New Atheists."  But according to that reasoning we should quit eating food, which is also subject to abuse, and a whole host of other needful things.  Is religion a needful thing?  That is the question.  I am going to argue that it is, and I am going to do so in strictly secular terms because appealing to scriptural authority—saying the Bible tells me so--does not work with atheists.  Having said that, I will later offer what I consider to be religious equivalents of the same ideas and terms since you, as well as atheists, are the targeted audience for this message.

As a Darwinian, Professor Dawkins believes in evolution by natural selection.  Some people of faith have trouble with Darwin’s theory of evolution.  I am not one of them so I can begin on that common ground with Professor Hawkins.  In this connection I have quoted him at the top of our bulletin: "Knowing that we are products of Darwinian evolution, we should ask what pressure or pressures exerted by natural selection originally favoured the impulse to religion."

Religion is ubiquitous, which is to say that it is a feature of virtually every civilization of every place and every time.  Indeed, the precursors of religion predate civilization according to anthropologists.  A Darwinian has to ask "why."  We know why all human beings of all places and times have lungs.  Why do we have religion?  Why have we evolved that way?  What purpose does religion serve in terms of our survival?  That is the question Professor Dawkins asks and seeks to answer in a chapter of his book entitled: "The Roots of Religion."

It is here that the amazingly lucid and articulate Dawkins bogs down and becomes pedantic (and if you do not know what pedantic means, I am sort of being pedantic by using it).  In short he stretches and strains for an answer that is never quite forthcoming.  And it is here that this old horse feels more intelligent than the rider.  Indeed, none of the atheist authors of late seem to grasp what religion fundamentally is or does.  Neither do any of the religious respondents I have read, which means what is to follow is either originally brilliant or outrageously whacky.

Again, using strictly secular terms for now, religion provides regular contexts for subconscious content to rise to conscious awareness.  There is a conscious mind, upon that we can all agree.  But there is also a subconscious mind, and of that there can be no scientific doubt.  The subconscious mind is where, for example, our dreams arise when we are sleeping.  We do not consciously script our dreams before we fall asleep.  The subconscious mind does that work . It does not think in linear, rational terms like the conscious mind, but it does think in its own imaginative way.

Sometimes subconscious content breaks into conscious awareness such as when we remember a vivid dream that imaginatively speaks to a situation in our lives.  It can also happen when we are awake, such as when we have a daydream reverie such as one by a scientist who "discovered" the complex ring structure of the benzene molecule.  While daydreaming about such an unlikely image as a snake grasping its tail, he had an "ah ha" moment and realized he had the solution of a longstanding and thorny scientific riddle.

Have you ever been in a setting where the hair on the back of your neck rose for some seemingly inexplicable reason?  Self-protection experts say to pay attention to such subconscious alerts.  The subconscious mind has picked up something the conscious mind has missed--a menacing glance perhaps, or something like that.  The subconscious mind is a vast source of intelligence whose depths no one has plumbed.  We can easily imagine a person without a conscious mind.  Think advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

Why would we want to live without what may be the better part of our mind’s potential?  Indeed a case could be made that life is not possible apart from the subconscious, which is why we dream every time we fall asleep (to the level of REM).  Deprive someone of sleep and they will be dead well before two weeks transpire.  We have evolved with a subconscious mind.  We submerge into it every day, sometimes a couple times a day, every time we sleep.  That is not to say that subconscious content always makes it to conscious awareness in the form of intelligible and useful guidance for the living of our lives, which is our problem.

For example, very few of us realize we dream when we sleep.  However according to scientists we dream every time we reach REM sleep (where rapid eye movement takes place).  The reason we do not remember our dreams is because we do not assign much intelligible value to them as compared with, say, biblical cultures.  In the Bible dreams and their interpretations are everywhere describe.  The Old Testament Joseph, son of Jacob, was an interpreter of dreams for Pharaoh and others, as was the New Testament Joseph, father of Jesus, who encountered angels in dreams several times (recall that angel means messenger).

In short, the biblical view of dreams is that they are an agency through which we receive messages from God.  And not only dreams while asleep, but visions while awake (daydreams if you will, or reveries).  St. Paul made significant decisions based upon dreams and visions where such subconscious prompts often overrode more conscious, rational thinking.  Listen to this description of how he established an itinerary.

Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia.  When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to.  So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas.  During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, "Come over to Macedonia and help us."  After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them (Acts 16:6-10).

Did you notice the connection in this text between dreams/visions and the Holy Spirit, (also the Spirit of Jesus and God)?  Am I suggesting that the subconscious is to be equated with the Holy Spirit of God?  I am not saying it is and I am not saying it isn’t.  I am saying that both secular science and religious devotion have their own ways of speaking about this internal dimension of our lives that is beyond the realm of conscious thought.

More importantly I am saying that this is the fundamental role of religion--not social cohesion, setting moral standards or all the other things we typically assign to the role of religion.  Further, this is what religion does virtually all the time whether we are praying alone with a rosary or participating in a group scripture study or listening to a sermon.  What you hear and what I say are not always the same thing.  That is because the Holy Spirit, or whatever you want to call it, is a partner in the preaching event.  Take one of those elements out of the equation and you don’t have the same chemistry (which is why you won’t find books of sermons at Borders—that would be like cupcakes without sugar).

Aren’t there other contexts for this indispensable spiritual/subconscious content to break into conscious awareness?  I have heard more than one golfer say, "I can find God on the golf course." I heard one preacher respond, "I know you can and I also know that you don’t."  I believe that if you eliminated every religion, tore down every house of worship and burned every sacred text in the world, something would emerge to take its place that would look so amazingly like religion as to be functionally indistinguishable.

For example, I came across an article in the Christian Century last October (October 16, 2007 issue).  The heading is: "Religious Enigma: Greg Epstein works as a minister at Harvard University, yet he doesn’t believe in God, he preaches to atheists and agnostics, and he is attempting to form the equivalent of a church for nonbelievers" (he also does weddings, funerals and "baby namings").  "He is part of a larger trend of nonbelievers organizing themselves on campuses.  The number of groups associated with the Secular Student Alliance has increased by more than 50 percent in the past two years".