Men Have Forgotten God

David Klinghoffer at Evolution News has posted a piece based on a famous speech by Soviet writer and dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn.

Klinghoffer writes:

Forty years ago this month, Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn accepted the Templeton Prize, but immediately turned about and delivered a blistering, prophetic speech that you should take some time now to read. It’s fearless — he even goes so far as to denounce the year’s previous winner for appeasing Communism. That cannot have pleased his hosts.

His theme, on May 10, 1983, was that the East and the West had in their different ways surrendered disastrously to atheism.

Klinghoffer goes on to explain that Solzhenitsyn's speech provided the theme for a talk by philosopher Stephen Meyer who recalled the Russian's speech in his recent presentation at the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith.

He quotes Meyer's opening:

I think all of us have a sense that our culture is in some serious trouble and that, in many, many ways, the wheels are coming off.

And it happens that this year is the 40th anniversary of a very significant speech that was given by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident. And this was his famous “Men have forgotten God” speech.

And in this speech he told the story of the words spreading across the Soviet Union, across Russia, Mother Russia, at the time of the Bolshevik takeover. And that the old people were telling him repeatedly, “These things are happening, these great disasters have befallen Russia, because men have forgotten God.”

And this is a passage from his speech. “While I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen “Russia, men have forgotten God. That’s why this is happening.”

Now, we have many disasters befalling America, if we’re clear-eyed and honest with ourselves. We have a near epidemic level of teen suicide. We have an anxiety epidemic. We have mass shootings. We have family breakdown, out of wedlock births. We have a confusion about gender identity, even a fluidity idea that is resulting in medical mutilation of young people. Promiscuity, illegitimacy, abortion. It’s getting kind of depressing, I realize.

But I could go on, and the crime waves, the fentanyl deaths. There are disasters befalling America. And the question I want to ask tonight is if these disasters, any of them, all of them, some of them, have something to do with our having forgotten God?

Yet Meyer, the author of Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, has encouragement to share, writes Klinghoffer:

The history of science since Darwin has done much to corrode traditional faith, leaving us vulnerable to the hopelessness that plays out in numerous ways across our culture. But while the media keep the fact well hidden, the scientific basis for atheism has suffered major reversals.

Meyer explains why he's hopeful:

There is a tremendous change taking place in science and philosophy, and it’s taking place at the highest levels of scientific and philosophical discourse. It’s still controversial, it’s still contentious, but what’s driving it are major changes in philosophical thinking and also major discoveries that have been made in science.

I just want to tick off three with a brief description of each to get our conference going.

The material universe had a beginning, the universe has been fine-tuned for life from the very beginning, and there is evidence of design in life, in particular the big infusions of digital information that have been infused into our biosphere since the beginning of the universe.

One great historian of science says that the idea that God created the universe is a more respectable hypothesis today than any time in the last 100 years. In my book (Return of the God Hypothesis), I go a little further than that and say that the postulation of a transcendent, intelligent, and active creator, the kind of creator we find in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, provides the best overall explanation for biological and cosmological origins, where everything came from.

Our world is steeped in evil because our world thinks that the idea of God is superfluous or risible. It's a mistake that is having horrific consequences. Here's Solzhenitsyn:

Dostoevsky warned that “great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.” That is precisely what has happened. And he predicted that “the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.”

Whether it really will be saved we shall have to wait and see: this will depend on our conscience, on our spiritual lucidity, on our individual and combined efforts in the face of catastrophic circumstances. But it has already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth.

We are witnesses to the devastation of the world, be it imposed or voluntarily undergone. The entire 20th century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction.

This plunge into the abyss has aspects that are unquestionably global, dependent neither on political systems, nor on levels of economic and cultural development, nor yet on national peculiarities.

And contemporary Europe, seemingly so unlike the Russia of 1913, is today on the verge of the same collapse, for all that it has been reached by a different route. Different parts of the world have followed different paths, but today they are all approaching the threshold of a common ruin.

There's more at the link. Solzhenitsyn's acceptance speech can be read here and Meyer's 30 minute address to the conference is below.