"If God is dead, so is reason."

Philosopher and prolific writer Michael Novak, author of No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers, considers the relationship of science and religion over on the First Things blog:

Of course, many today hold that all this talk about God, Creator, Prime Intelligence, and the Act of Existence is gibberish. Yet even they must admit that it was to their good fortune that, in a small family of cultures, a decisive number of inquirers, scholars, and copyists of ancient manuscripts did learn to expect pervasive intelligibility in the universe because of their faith in an ordering Intelligence. That is why they were willing to invest most of the hours of their humble lives in preparing the way for modern science.

In other words, the belief shared by (at first) a few million of the Earth’s inhabitants that a light emanates from the Creator of the world, and suffuses all things, gave them a strong motivation for devoting their lives to scientific efforts. They wanted to learn more about God by studying the world He made. (The great scientist Johannes Kepler held that two books teach us about God: the Book of Nature and the Book that reveals what we otherwise could not learn about God.) Down the centuries, Westerners enjoyed the sheer pleasure that they found in inquiring, gaining insights, and making well-founded judgments. Judaism and Christianity taught them to think of these acts as participations in God’s own inner life. Why?

At its root, the notion of one single Creator who knew what He was doing “before time was,” and then chose to do it at the time and in the way of His choosing, enabled some humans to know by anticipation that human inquiry is good. Human inquiry is noble, and just, and with high probability will be rewarded by trustworthy knowledge. If God is good (and the Torah taught us that He is), then it is good to labor diligently to deepen our knowledge of His entire created world, and all things in it.

The proposition that all things have been made by one Creator has a corollary. The Creator transcends the world. He is not identical with the world, nor with any creature in it. He actively sustains all things, but is not the sum of all things. This transcendence teaches us that no creature, no earthly thing is divine. No idol within space or time is to be put in His place.

This idea of a transcendent Creator assures us that in examining and experimenting with nature, we are violating no taboo, and not defiling God. It is through experimentation that we come to understand and to appreciate the work of His creative genius. By contrast, those peoples who identified their God with some creature within creation—the serpent, the jaguar, the rain—were afraid, lest by inquiry or experiment they might arouse His anger. It is by experiment that, today, many who do not believe in an intelligent Creator encounter the intelligibility that suffuses all things. Even unbelievers, by their actions if not their words, show their confidence in the unified intelligibility of all things. This confidence is the cultural patrimony bequeathed them by generations of believers.

Read the entire post. Along similar lines, Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson has written a short essay, "The Problem With Monotheism," in which he states:

Authors who condemn monotheism seem oblivious to how much their own comfortable, free lives owe to the historical impact of monotheism. The pre-monotheistic worldview was pagan. Paganism exalted nature above all, and taught human subjection to nature. Paganism was fatalistic; it inculcated resignation to a static social order. To the pagans, individual lives were unimportant, cheap. The welfare of the collective, which in practice was the welfare of the ruling elite, was supreme. There was no theory of individual rights opposed to this arrangement. If you were born a drone, you lived the life of a drone, and if the rulers decided that your life should be forfeited to the sun god or in some military campaign to obtain booty for the rulers, then your fate was sealed.

The Judeo-Christian tradition’s greatest contribution to the human race has been to liberate the human race from the stifling and deadly paganism that preceded it—and that is trying to defeat it today. Monotheism impelled the search for scientific knowledge to tame the natural world. Judeo-Christian teachings gradually imbued human thought with ethical values that spawned the doctrines that all men are created equal, that they have inalienable rights, and that rulers are not above the law. The free market—based on that premise of God-given rights—has lifted masses of people out of poverty for the first time in human history. All three monotheistic faiths teach their followers to be charitable to those in need. In fact, the widespread calls we hear today about helping the less fortunate, even when made by unbelievers, are cultural echoes of our monotheistic traditions. It is hard to imagine how much poorer and less free we would be today if not for the leavening influence of monotheistic teachings.

Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Excerpts:

• Dawkins' Delusions | An interview with Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P., author of God Is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins
• Atheism and Fatherlessness | A Review of Paul Vitz's Faith of the Fatherless | Father Brian Van Hove, S.J.
• AtheismForChildren.com | Website for Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children's Fantasy, by Sandra Miesel and Pete Vere
• The Obfuscation of the New Atheism | Dr. Jose Maria Yulo
• Professor Dawkins and the Origins of Religion | Thomas Crean, O.P.
• Are Truth, Faith, and Tolerance Compatible? | Joseph Ratzinger
• Atheism and the Purely "Human" Ethic | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Is Religion Evil? Secularism's Pride and Irrational Prejudice | Carl E. Olson
• A Short Introduction to Atheism | Carl E. Olson
• C.S. Lewis’s Case for Christianity | An Interview with Richard Purtill
• Paganism and the Conversion of C.S. Lewis | Clotilde Morhan
• Designed Beauty and Evolutionary Theory | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
• The Universe is Meaning-full | An interview with Dr. Benjamin Wiker
• The Mythological Conflict Between Christianity and Science | An interview with Dr. Stephen Barr
• The Source of Certitude | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
• Deadly Architects | An Interview with Donald De Marco & Benjamin Wiker
• The Mystery of Human Origins | Mark Brumley

Comments

[Mark Goodson]

I think you should consider listing this hard hitting article on atheism in your article list as it is very thorough and has a lot of sources and information that you will not find elsewhere.

[Ed Peters]

I don't have near the breadth of reading here that Olson and Brumley have, but, fwiw, I find that the atheists I do read seem far more interested in justifying themselves to themselves, than in getting readers to agree with them. It's as if readers are just some sort of evesdroppers in the atheist's thinking-out-loud exercises. I can't point to a specific passage that puts it that way, but it's the sense I get. Maybe I'm guilty of eisegesis here.

[Michael]

There's some truth to that, Ed. The common tone I've noticed with many atheists, though, is that they tend not to be interested in finding first principles or comprehensive systems. They have an adolescent need to catch others out by pouncing on what they perceive to be contradictions, but they don't care to learn enough about what they criticize to see that the apparent contradictions aren't really so.

[TerryC]

Isn't it interesting that the Hendrickson's description of Paganism could also be applied to modern atheistic environmentalism?
Environmentalism teaches that nature should be exalted above all and humans subjection to nature which is the most important thing.
Modernism also teaches that individual lives are unimportant, hence the people killed in abortion are unimportant. And killing unborn children to "save the planet" is not only preferable but a high ideal.
The drones (us) should just listen to the elites and give up our aspirations of large families and practical transportation so that the elites can garner booty by taxing it out of us and limiting our carbon footprint(while they use their economic advantage to purchase carbon offsets to heat and cool their mansions.)