Diversity of the ideas and the quests

The progress of faith obviously cannot be measured by statistics alone. C. S. Lewis said that if the rebirth of Christianity has really begun it will develop slowly, quietly, in very small groups of people. And this imperceptible renewal is actually happening everywhere, even where it might be least expected.

It does not follow, however, that we should ignore those facts that do come to the surface. After everything that has befallen religion in the period of secularization, nearly 90% of the world's population consider themselves to be believers nowadays. True, the Communist writer quoting this figure adds the rider that among the formal adherents of religion are quite a number of people who are indifferent; but then among those who subscribe to atheism there are many who are secretly believers or who are close to faith.

There are grounds for saying that in the twentieth century, contrary to the forecasts of sceptics, religion has begun to play a role in some ways greater than in past centuries. Evidence for this can be found in the most various cultural spheres. For example, whereas two or three hundred years back many artists who depicted Gospel themes looked on them in the main as formal subjects for a picture, nowadays we find a genuine mystical feeling in the work of prominent artists such as Marc Chagall, Nikolai Roerich, Georges Rouault and Salvador Dali. Religious and mystical problems engage writers today in a way that they did not a hundred years ago, with the exception though of Russia.18

Prominent in the defence of spiritual values are Charles Péguy, Leon Ploy, Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Julian Green and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in France; G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene in England; Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Heinrich Böll in Germany; Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Russia; J. D. Salinger, Ray Bradbury and John Updike in America; and Giovanni Papini in Italy. The drama of spiritual searchings and crises is forcefully portrayed in the writings of Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke. And many writers, even when criticizing the religious life of their contemporaries, aimed to purify faith and renew it. Such was also the intention of the denunciations by the prophets of old and the Church Fathers, who condemned any deviations from the true religion.

In the past, the overwhelming majority of scientists saw no contradiction between religion and natural science. We have only to think of Kepler, Newton, and Pasteur. Among scholars of our time, talk is about a synthesis of faith and knowledge. Charles Townes, Nobel Laureate, inventor of the laser, has commented on this. He said:

"The aim of science is to discover order in the universe and through this to understand the essence of things we see around us, to understand the life of man. The aim of religion, it seems to me, may be defined as comprehending (and consequently understanding) the purpose and the meaning of the universe and also the manner in which we are related to it. This higher ultimate force we call God."

The words quoted are not a random or isolated opinion. This view is shared by those who are forming the modern picture of the world. Albert Einstein speaks of the meaning of faith for the scholar. Max Planck, Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger speak about the connection between science and religion. Arthur Eddington, James Jeans and Pascual Jordan thought that knowledge of the world was the way to knowledge of God.

Leading twentieth-century scholars in many branches of science have adopted an anti-materialistic stance. In physics we think of Werner Heisenberg; in mathematics, of Georg Cantor; in biology, Theodor Schwann; in neuro-physiology, Sir John Eccles; in anthropology, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; in palaeontology, the Abbé Breuil; in ethnography, P. W. Schmidt; in history, Arnold Toynbee; in psychology, Carl Jung.

The position in philosophy is indicative too. The greatest thinkers of our century, whether the intuitionist Henri Bergson, the Thomist Jacques Maritain, the 'organicist' Alfred North Whitehead, the existentialist Karl Jaspers, or 'the champion of freedoom' Nicolas Berdyaev, all proclaimed the supreme spiritual value of religion.

There is a flowering of new theology: Orthodoxy being represented by such figures as Sergi Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, and Vladimir Lossky; Catholicism by Romano Guardini, Yves Congar, and Karl Rahner; Protestantism by Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr. There is new religious thinking in Judaism (Martin Buber) and in Hinduism (Aurobindo Ghose).

Western interest in mystical teachings, in yoga and Zen, is on the increase. New movements are starting not only in Christianicy, but in Islam, in Buddhism and even in paganism. Some of the social and political leaders of this century, for example Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, have been prompted to action by their religious principles.

It is not to decry these significant new developments to say that at times there is much that is immature and contradictory in them. The very diversity of the ideas and the quests (from the extreme left to extreme orthodoxy) shows how full to overflowing is the river of religion.

from a longer excerpt: http://home.earthlink.net/~amenpage/faith_and_enemies.htm
Eric James Alexander Men on Atheism