The End of Hope

My husband was listening to some church chants the other day and one line in the chant struck me, "Our God alone is great." Recent materialist atheists have tried to insist that God is Not Great, which makes you wonder, with a title like that, why they're atheists at all.

Anyway, along with Christopher Hitchens' book, there is also Sam Harris and his presumptuous book title, The End of Faith. Now although Sam Harris likes to pretend he's a materialistic scientist, his book is actually quite full of superstition and Buddhism. The last chapter, in fact, argues that Buddhism is somehow a true materialist religion (if that were possible). Now I have known some real materialistic scientists in my day, and their reasoning is marginally more logical than Harris'. One professor I had actually believed that all scientists should be agnostics; as if the scientific method should govern your whole life if you are a scientist (scary the implications that might have for childraising)! However, if the material world is all we see, and there is no God, or possibly no great one, than why continue to function as human beings at all? The end of faith inevitably leads to the end of hope.

Hope is only possible in a universe with a good God. It is not possible in a universe with no god, and it is not possible in a universe with an evil or capricious god. To trust that any action we do could possibly be of any value to any other human somewhere, is to function on the principle that God is Great. When this is seen through the light of the Incarnation, God's goodness and greatness are staggering. Words fail me, but a friend of mine wrote this when reflecting on an insignificant colony of ants:

We could say He cares nothing for our pain. We could say He is not good. We could say we don't understand why the sky isn't all rainbows and why the common cold exists. But we would be fools. And somehow, He would still like us.

How much do I care for these ants? I think I care. I'll stop to watch their wars. I'll buy my children documentaries--insect tributes. I won't crush them when I can help it.

But, if given the chance, would I be willing to become one of them? Would I be willing for them to drag me to the place of execution, taunt me, mock me, ridicule the gift I offered, a gift entirely beyond their comprehension? Would I be willing for the earwig, executed beside me, to add his insults to those of the ants? Would I be willing to die?

Hell no. Never. I have more self-regard than God does. I have less love for the characters beneath me.

--N.D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl


Happy Advent.