The Good Atheist (31 page)

I moved on. Another holographic display showed our solar system close up. The beautiful blue-and-white orb of earth. The pinkish-red deserts of Mars. Gas giants and blazing comets.

I passed through into the sanctum sanctorum. It was like a theatre, but small enough to be intimate with a vaulted arch ceiling. Rows of benches faced a stage. People were gathering and sitting down in the benches, so I decided to stay and took a seat on one of the benches. It had been a long time since Selene and I had been to Temple.

I looked around. Timelines around the walls depicted our evolutionary progress, from simple amoeba on up through the tree of life to apes and proto-humans to humans. More holographic imagery depicted scenes from our prehistoric past.

A statue of a woman stood in an alcove behind the stage, about twelve to fifteen feet high, wrapped in vines and leaves. Children and various creatures of the forest gathered around her feet, looking up at her expectantly. On her head was a crown of oak leaves, and in her right hand she held a globe of the earth with some stars. She solemnly stared back at me, as if ready to reprove me of my crimes against the earth. A few people knelt in front of the statue.

Engraved on the wall next to the statue was the reminder:

All of humanity comes from woman

And woman from Nature

And Nature from Cosmos

And Cosmos from itself

All praise Cosmos from which all creative power flows

The service was about to begin when a grimy little man sat down next to me. I smelled him before I saw him, and turned to look. He wore several layers of dark shirts and a pair of baggy grey pants. It was hard to tell what the original colors might have been. My olfactory perception confirmed my suspicion that he hadn’t had a bath or fresh change of clothes for a very long time.

He looked at me with a face overgrown with stiff whiskers and grinned a toothless grin. “Warm in here, aint it?” He rubbed his soiled hands together.

I regarded him with something close to horror but did my best to conceal it. “Yes, it is,” I said curtly. I didn’t want to be rude to a fellow genome factory, but I hoped not to encourage the conversation any further.

“Nice ta git in from the cold, eh?”

“Yes,” I said and nodded towards the front. A woman walked barefoot out onto the stage.

She was young, maybe twenty, and wore a long flowing dress of green leaves. She had on her head a crown of stars.

She turned to us and spread her arms. “Welcome, my fellow free-thinkers and rational beings.”

The crowd responded with the expected liturgical response. “We welcome all free-thinkers.”

“Today we are celebrating the power of nature. I would like to begin by reading a poem I’m sure you are all familiar with. It’s called the Magic of Nature.” She turned around, knelt before the statue, and began to sing. The words were displayed on a large screen on the wall to the right of the stage. Most of the people in the theater joined in. The street person next to me croaked along.

“All hail the Cosmic Womb,

From which all life comes.

We stand in awe of you.

Cosmos, the self-created one,

The one in whom all creative power resides.

The power to create life,

To create galaxies,

To create stars and planets,

The power to create all things.

Even itself.

All things exist within and issue from Cosmos.

To give birth to itself and all things.

All hail! We bow before you.”

The crowd responded: “All hail!” A few more people left their seats and knelt before the stage.

The woman stood up and turned to us. “I’m sure we all find this song an encouraging and refreshing reminder that we are the results of a wonderful process. Cast adrift on the sea of an uncaring, pitiless Cosmos, you are free to find your own meaning and purpose. Released from the tyranny of the gods of our prescientific past, you are free to define your own morality. Without a lawgiver, you make your own law. Any meaning beyond this is illusory. Be strong, for only the strong deserve survival. And now in this knowledge, be happy and fulfilled. Have a good day.”

The lights dimmed, and she walked off the stage through a small door set in the wall.

People began leaving, but some remained in their seats, eyes closed in apparent contemplation. I started to get up when the grimy little fellow on the bench addressed me.

“I ain’t had nothin’ ta eat. Ya wouldna ’appen ta have anythin’, would ya?”

I looked into his gaunt face. His cheeks were concave, the hunger all too apparent in his eyes. It seemed to me that he really did just want a meal, not a drink or a fix. I thought about the cash in my pocket. I still had some left from the roll of Euros Jorge had given me.

I knew the right thing to do was help alleviate his suffering, but I argued against that thought. What did I owe this person? Why should he be my problem?

But the more I argued, the more I felt gripped by the sense that helping this person was the right thing to do. I couldn’t look into the face of hunger and shut my heart.

“I’ve got some cash. What would you do with it if I gave it to you?”

He laughed a short, gruff bark. “Cash! Why, that ain’t no good. Can’t buy nothin’  with it.”

I shook my head. “This is hard currency. European. Almost as good as silver.”

His eyes lit up and he grabbed the cash. “Thanks, Mister. I know a place that’ll take that.” Then he got up and shuffled away, clutching the bills in his hand. I watched him go, wondering why I had done it. In purely evolutionary terms, it made no sense. Evolution was all about the strong using their superior abilities to benefit themselves at the expense of the weak, not help them. Survival of the fittest. In fact, in evolutionary terms, helping the less fortunate is a very bad idea. It just made better sense to get their inferior DNA removed from the gene pool as rapidly as possible. But deep down I knew I’d done the right thing. However weak or less fortunate or otherwise underserving he might be, it would have been wrong to ignore his plight.

Suddenly Paige and Dad’s words came back to me with force. God help me, I thought, but some things are really right and really wrong no matter what people think. I felt myself touching this knowledge within me. I couldn’t bring myself to accept that rape or murder or child abuse was just morally relative or culturally conditioned. Who could live in such a world? But what else is logically left without God?

Yet I knew instinctively that some things are just plain wrong, for all times and all cultures, no matter what anyone thinks. Burning babies will always be wrong, yet in times past some cultures accepted it as part of pagan religious practice. Oppressing women and minorities is plain wrong, regardless of what anyone might think, regardless of any social contract or culture or majority opinion. True morality isn’t just something we vote on or make up.

Burning babies is simply wrong.
I couldn’t argue against that knowledge without risking my sanity. There was real evil, real right from wrong, real moral duty.

But with no God above us, a black pit of moral relativity opens up below, and the only thing left is power and personal preference. Might becomes right and anything is allowed. And who was to argue? Without God, all we have left is evolution, and who’s to say my ideas of morality are objectively better? If the Nazis had won the war, in strictly evolutionary terms they would be right, because in evolutionary terms success – survival – is right.

And then the penny dropped. I felt my whole argument against God begin to crumble, and in a moment my neat little world lay in ruins around my feet.

I sat on the bench wondering where to turn. I couldn’t go back to atheism, and fearing to go forward, I found myself trembling on the edge of faith. I would either take the leap or fall headlong into the darkness.

I turned around and looked at the swirling, dazzling holograph of our galaxy at the back of the theater and thought about the likelihood of all this popping into existence by accident – so remote that you may as well call it impossible. The images of the universe only served to remind me of Dad’s description of its mathematical beauty and design. And in a blazing moment that felt like eternity I was able to grasp faith, however shaky and tentative.

There was a God.

And if he was personal then he’d be more than capable of hearing my prayer.

I bent my head and started talking to God. I wasn’t sure how to go about it, and my words were simple, but I did my best to ask him to help me to find him – to help my faith.

27

The air was warm and the sky bright when I left the Temple and started walking back to the penthouse.

Dad and Haddie were on their way out as I got in. They were running late, and we passed quickly in the hall with just a few words. I went straight to bed, exhausted from being up all night. I didn’t mention anything to them about my religious epiphany at the Atheist Temple.

I slept into the middle of the afternoon and rolled out of bed as soon as my eyes opened. I never was much for sleeping during the day. I rummaged through my travel bag, sniff-testing the clothes until I settled on a pair of jeans and cotton shirt that shouldn’t give too much offense to my hosts.

I wandered out into the living room. There was no sign of Dad or Haddie. I found a bag of Ethiopian dark roast in the little kitchenette and put on a pot of coffee. I was on my fourth cup when they walked in the front door.

Haddie gave me an appraising look. “What were you doing in those clothes this morning when you got home? You looked like you spent the night in a dumpster. Smelled like it as well.”

“I find it easier to make friends with bums and hobos dressed that way,” I said.

“Well, what you’re wearing right now isn’t much of an improvement.” She pointed towards the hall down which the bedrooms were. “Get out of them right now, and bring me all of your clothes. I’ll wash them.”

I dutifully obeyed orders and went into the bedroom and gathered up all my clothes. When I opened the door, I found a neat stack of clean clothes. A pair of blue jeans, socks and a sweatshirt. Dad was a bit shorter in the legs than I was, so the cuff of the jeans rode up my ankles, and the waist was a bit baggy. The shirt fit loose, but I’d be comfortable enough and would smell better.

I brought out my bundle of dirty clothes, and Haddie immediately relieved me of them and disappeared down the hall were they kept a small apartment-size washer and dryer.

Dad was in the kitchenette organizing a meal, and I went to give him a hand. I told him about my experience at the Temple. “But what I don’t understand,” I said, “is how you get from Creator of the universe to a personal God and Jesus Christ. I can see how God makes sense. I’ve got enough faith to go that far. But how do you get from there to Christianity, or any of the world’s religions for that matter?”

He turned on the oven to preheat. Then he opened the fridge and pulled out some pork chops, all without any comment from the appliances. It was a relief to be able to work in the kitchen without being interrupted with dietary advice from the fridge and stove. I made a mental note to find out what apps they used.

“Christianity is a revealed faith, as any religion worth its salt would have to be. We could never figure out Christianity on our own by studying the laws of the universe. That may bring convincing proof that there must be some kind of God, but it doesn’t tell you much about him. Just as looking at a building may tell you that it has been designed by an intelligent agent – namely an architect – but unless you are told the architect’s name and you are introduced to him, you’ll never know much about him.”

I poured water into a pan for the veggies. “Exactly. So how do you know Christianity is the correct one?”

“Well, it took me a while. Once I began to believe that some kind of super-intelligence had to have rigged the universe for life, it wasn’t too difficult to conclude he was personal, I guess mostly because we’re personal and are subject to a moral code. That indicated to me that whoever this God is, he was personal and concerned with how we lived. And that being the case, it’s likely he’d have revealed himself to us in some fashion, so I started studying the world’s religions, trying to see if I could figure out which was the right one. It just makes sense that one of the world’s religions would be right. Unless God was completely distant, uninvolved and uncaring, then he had to have revealed himself to us and made a way for us to know who he is. And I believe he did.

“It wasn’t too difficult to eliminate several religions. Buddha never claimed to be God, just an enlightened man. Fair enough, and he had a lot of good things to say, but I was looking for God, not just a philosophy. So he’s out. Confucius too, for the same reason. And you can quickly discount Hinduism and all the pagan religions. Their gods are as much a part of creation as we are. The universe preexisted them. They arose from out of creation and formed the world out of preexisting matter. What we know scientifically about the beginning and order of the universe discounts all religions except Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- the three monotheistic traditions. In fact, one of the major reasons many scientists initially refused to believe in Einstein’s theory is that it stated the universe had a clear beginning. And they didn’t like the religious implications of that. Up until then the intellectual fashion had been that the universe was eternal.”

He took down a small bag of flour and handed it to me. Then he got milk and eggs out of the fridge. “The God I needed, the only God that science is compatible with, is an all-powerful supernatural deity who exists outside of time and the material universe. He’s not a part of it, but caused it to come into existence. So that left me with the three great monotheistic religions.”

I started mixing flour, milk, and eggs in a bowl. “I’ll bet it wasn’t trivial sorting that out.”

Dad got a baking dish out of the cupboard. “It took some time and I did a lot of reading. I read the Koran, the Torah, and the New Testament. Both Moses and Mohammed were just prophets who claimed to point towards God. But only Jesus claimed to be, not only the way to God, but God himself.”