Believers Need Not Apply

All right already! What’s the big deal? It’s only God after all!

We have a God fetish. Since 1700, western intellectual institutions have focused on one thing above all else: the Death of God, or more accurately, the death of the concept of God.

Though a theist, Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica became the blueprint for Laplace’s mechanical determinism 100 years later. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species provided a viable framework for a theory of evolution that did not require the divine agency. Quantum mechanics ‘fuzzed-up’ concepts like position and momentum, making ‘divine determinism’ almost as indefensible as ‘mechanical determinism.’ (Yes, Professor Einstein, it turns out God does play dice and to the extent that dice perform as dice are supposed to perform, no model of determinism, mechanical or divine, can account for anything more than probabilities.)

We’ve constructed a super-elaborate cosmology to explain how ‘it is’ arose spontaneously from ‘it is not.’ (If that doesn’t make any sense to you, trust me, it doesn’t make sense to me either.) How did the universe come to be? It just did! How did the ratios of the masses of subatomic particles get so finely tuned? They just did!

Long suffering Job would not have accepted such an answer. (For more regarding Job’s insistence on tangible, first hand experience, check out The Riddle of Job in issue #1 of AT Magazine.) Job was willing to trade everything, literally anything, for knowledge…and he did. How many of us would make the same trade?

Anyhow, today the first test for any proposed cosmology is that it NOT include a role for God, and if you want to disqualify an applicant under consideration for a college teaching post, just send the selection committee irrefutable evidence that the applicant believes in God and doesn’t hide it. (It’s ok to be Peter at the Portico, but it is not ok to be John at the foot of the cross.)

But take heart, aspiring professors, in 1950, almost all of the professors at European universities were avowed Marxists. As one of them was reputed to have said, “Of course I’m a Marxist. What else is there?” I wonder how many self-proclaimed Marxists there are today on European faculties. Things can change! Here’s hoping we’ll all live to see that change.

Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. To never miss a single Thought, subscribe to Aletheia Today. (Subscribe opt-in below.)