Yesterday's post left off with this question: If the evidence for the existence of God is stronger today than ever before why is theism, i.e. the belief that there is a personal creator of the universe, declining, especially among the young?
Here are a few possible reasons:
1. Bad experience with one's father.
As Freud observed the relationship one has with one's father often affects the relationship one has with other father figures like God. A disastrous father/child relationship often makes it very difficult for the child to ever see God as a loving, forgiving father.
Bitterness and resentment toward a biological father can stifle any desire on the part of the child, once grown, to embrace anything suggesting a father, and there's probably never been a time in our history when young people, people under 40, have been more estranged from their fathers.
2. Bad experience with a church, or
3. The doctrine of Christian exclusivism.
These two, although they may be offered as reasons for one's atheism are, in fact, not very good reasons to reject theism. They may partially account for one's disbelief in Christian theism, but they're very weak reasons for rejecting even that. A bad experience with a church is self-explanatory.
Christian exclusivism refers to the doctrine held by many Christians (although far from all) that only Christians will be granted eternal life. Some find this doctrine intolerably narrow and chauvinistic and conclude that therefore there is no God.
4. The belief that science disproves God's existence.
This one is ironic since of the fifty or so men who initiated the scientific revolution from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries almost all of them were theists. It also reflects a misunderstanding of what science is.
There's no conflict between science and theism. There is indeed a conflict between theism and naturalism, the belief that only nature exists and that there is no supernature, but this is a metaphysical belief, not an essential part of science.
Naturalism may be the preferred metaphysics of a majority of scientists, especially in the biological sciences, but metaphysics is a branch of philosophy, not science.
5. The fact of human suffering.
Many people find it difficult to reconcile the existence of God with the horrific suffering that exists in the lives of so many people. I offer a series of three posts explaining this problem and why I don't think it works as a logical argument against theism. The interested reader can find them here, here and here.
6. God's "hiddenness."
Some non-believers doubt that there could be a good God who chooses not to reveal Himself in a fashion that would remove all question about His existence. Why, they ask, does God remain silent if He cares about the chaos, terror and pain in the world? This is an objection to theism similar in some ways to #5. Here's a post offering a response to it.
7. The deep desire that theism not be true.
In my opinion this is the main reason why most people who disdain theism do so, but it's not just my opinion. Consider these quotes from some famous atheists:
Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote in his book The Last Word: "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.
Friedrich Nietzsche says in The Gay Science: "What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons."
Aldous Huxley, in his book Ends and Means, admits that: “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know."
It's interesting that none of the great atheistic thinkers of the 19th or 20th centuries ever offered a compelling argument for the non-existence of God. Neither Freud, nor Marx nor Sartre ever put together a logical rationale for their unbelief. They simply assumed that theism was no longer a viable hypothesis.
In other words, most people who don't believe in God don't do so because of argument or evidence but for emotional reasons.
Unbelief is, in many cases at least, an act of Freudian wish fulfillment.
