The hand of God? (From Gazette & Herald)

The hand of God?

IT has to be acknowledged that religion is now, and has been for centuries, a frequent cause of human conflict.

One thinks in dismay of the implacable hatred between the two communities in Northern Ireland, now thankfully showing signs of betterment, but still smouldering.

In other lands, Buddhists and Muslims are in conflict in India and Thailand, Muslims against Christians in Chechnya, Muslims against Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims at war with Christians in Nigeria and with Christians in Sudan (a civil war now in its 21st year) and even Muslims against themselves in Iraq (Sunni v Shi'ites), to say nothing about the endless hostility between Palestinian and Jew. And this is by no means a definitive list of the religious and ethnic wars disfiguring our world at the present time.

It is very tempting to think the world would be a safer and better place without religion.

I recall a correspondence in The Times many years ago on 'What is wrong with the world and who is to blame?' - a familiar theme. It was answered by G K Chesterton in the briefest letter ever published in the paper's history:

'Sir,

I am

Yours truly,

G K Chesterton.'

This, of course, was a clear acceptance that we must all look into our own hearts for evidence of bigotry, intolerance and hatred. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), in a similar vein, said: 'We have just enough religion to make us hate each other but not enough to make us love each other.' And Alexander Isayervich Solzhenitsyn (b1918) wrote in 1962 that 'The dividing line between good and evil runs straight through the human heart'.

In short, we can all contribute to conflict. The temptation in this land at this time is Islamophobia. Very understandable after the London bombings in July. But, in the long run, this reaction is dangerous. If all the great religions of the world cannot accommodate each other with mutual respect and tolerance, the outlook will be grim indeed.

I recall reading many years ago one of Freya Stark's travel stories about her journeys through Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Her conclusion from her extensive travels and meetings with people both learned and simple from every ethnic and religious divide was that for the vast majority of people, nothing was more important to them than their religion, which took precedence over love and loyalty to family or state. We see the evidence of this all too painfully in our own day and in our own land.

Is religion 'hardwired' into us because we are all searching for the meaning of life? The great St Augustine of Hippo (b354) thought along these lines. In a phrase which has run like a thread of gold through the tapestry of western civilisation, he wrote: 'Thou has made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.'

I believe that confronted with our existence on this small blue jewel of a planet, which bears every evidence of being specifically constructed to foster and maintain life, it is hardly surprising that from the dawn of history, man has asked 'How do we come to be here?' And 'What is the purpose of life?' Indeed, 'Does it have a purpose?'

The theory that creation is accidental, casual, random and unplanned, or, in the words of a character in Joseph Heller's novel Catch 22, 'a trash bag of random coincidences blown open by the wind', is not one that has recommended itself to most thinking men and women down the long years.

Sir Fred Hoyle, previous Astronomer Royal and developer of the steady-state theory of the universe, wrote: 'The idea that life was put together by a random shuffling of constituent molecules can be shown as ridiculous and impossible as the proposition that a tornado blowing through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.'

The argument is between those who believe that after the 'Big Bang' (cause unknown), the universe held within its own physical laws and constituent elements everything necessary to fix the stars and planets in their spheres, and, on our own little spaceship earth, the emergence of life (cause unknown); and those who believe the universe was created, ordered and directed by a force of unlimited power and intelligence.

I say 'intelligence' because every leaf on every tree and every blade of grass, to say nothing of conscious intelligent life, bear all the authentic characteristics of intelligent design.

Two centuries ago, Victor Hugo wrote: 'Je ne puis pas regarder une feuille d'arbre sans etre ecrasi par l'universe' (I cannot look at a leaf on a tree without being bowled over by the universe). I remember the same stunning experience when I was a medical student looking at life moving in a specimen of plant through a high-powered lens of a microscope. I was, if you will allow the expression, both gobsmacked and God-smacked.

It seems to me that the 'Big Bang' theory for the start of the universe is quite meaningless unless the further question 'what caused it?' is asked. Nothing can come from nothing. That is a logical certainty. The existence of a single grain of sand to the whole universe demands an explanation simply because it is.

In response to the claim that religion breeds conflict, The Sunday Times recently carried an article by Chris Woodhead entitled 'Let's banish God from the classroom'. And Salman Rushdie very recently on Radio 4 gave it as his opinion that all 'faith schools' should be abolished.

But the facts are that an increasing number of people in our troubled society are opting to send their children to 'faith schools' where they believe an informed and committed teacher can be a powerful influence toward the tolerance and understanding on which our secure future depends.

Of course, there are huge questions to be taken on board and honestly addressed by the believer. How is it possible to believe in a good creator God (the theologians say that God, by definition, must be good) in a world of life-threatening disasters like tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and droughts, to mention a few of the horrors that plague us not caused by man? This dilemma has troubled the heart and mind of man since he first began to question the enigma of existence. I hope to return to it at another time. In the meantime, I would like to conclude this short exploration with two quotations. The first is from the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). He wrote:

'Among all my patients in the second half of life, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that everyone of them fell ill because they had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them had been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.'

And the second quotation is from the autobiography of Sir William Rees Mogg, called An Humbler Heaven. He wrote: 'I have come to believe in these propositions, that man is by nature a religious animal; that the ground of all religion is love; that the most highly defined and highest truth is Christian; that human society can never be perfect; that without religion human society must degenerate.'

DR FRANK S RICKARDS

Updated: 14:21 Wednesday, October 05, 2005