“Abram put his faith in the LORD, who reckoned it to him as righteousness, and said , ‘I am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldees to give you this land as your possession.” Genesis 15:6-7

This is the moment, according to the Bible, where everything begins. This is the moment when Yahweh makes contact with a human being on a human level. What follows is Yahweh’s promise to give Abram the promised land and descendants too numerous to count.

The amazing moment is the bit about his faith being “reckoned to him as righteousness”.

Abram was not a spotless person. He was not without sin. But in virtue of his “faith” he is treated as if he was without sin. There doesn’t seem to be anything about him that makes him special. There must have been thousands of wandering refugees of that time that had been displaced from the cities that had sprang up in Mesopotamia. The crops were failing. The good times were over between the Tigris and Euphrates. Time to find better pastures.

Even if Abram/Abraham is mythological, the context seems to have a ring of truth.

This passage is critical to Christian theology. This is the first expression of grace, after the fall. A substitution is taking place. Abram’s faith in this God is more important than his fidelity to law (this is before Moses, of course). Faith is the most important feature of the relationship between man and the deity. Faith in the power (which is not so hard), and faith in his goodness (which is more difficult).

From my atheist perspective, I see man seeking, desperately, for benevolence in the cosmos. We are mere humans. There is some greater power that oversees us. This is a moment where the real test is changed from one of absolute obedience to one of faith. The man is willing to risk everything, to be a fool, to suffer for the ultimate purpose that this other, greater, absolute power has in store.

I find this part of Genesis utterly believable. I can imagine this actually happening to an ancient Abram–even the strange part in verse 17. The Garden of Eden and Noah’s arc are obviously myths, but this is where the Bible gets serious and strikes me as compelling.

Sartwell in (Faith-Based Atheism) provides a better exposition of what I was getting at in my post Gloating over the Death of God. He points out, rightly, that the choice for atheism is not perfectly rational, and does not absolve its adherents from personal responsibility for that choice. As he says, “…the contest between science and faith, while it’s a real rivalry, is a contest between two faiths.” The arguments against the existence of God, or more correctly, the refutations of the arguments for the existence of God, are sound and convincing. But they do not have the status of logical necessity, as some atheists seem to believe.

The first real philosopher I ever read was Bertrand Russell. And I didn’t read him for his philosophy; I read his classic atheist treatise Why I am Not a Christian. I was still in high school, and a budding materialist. But something about the tone of his book didn’t sit right with me. I recently got another taste of it after reading Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great. There is so much ammunition at hand when one takes on religion, it seems to become irresistable to the religious antagonist not to pick up stones and start hurling them in every direction. It was true of Russell, whose philosophical writing was not considered polemical, and it is true of Hitchens.

Skepticism about God–regarding his existence, properties and so forth–is intellectually necessary, in my view. In the absence of direct revelation, I cannot understand faith, and yet it exists everywhere. But I cannot argue that just because so many believe it, it has to be true, since upon examining the details of such faith amongst a wide variety of individuals, first hand, over many many years, I have never detected any rational basis for faith even among the most intelligent adherents. At the base of it all is–I was going to say infantilism–but instead I will leave it at emotionalism.

I cannot rejoice over the inevitable end of meaning entailed by the lack of a god-perspective in the universe. We are end-oriented creatures, with a conscious awareness of time. Our teleological prejudice litters our language. It is inescapable. We cannot merely be, we must persistently strive toward. And what is the reward of all that striving? Merely being. It’s a joyous circle or a vortex of doom.

Religion is the ultimate world-creating activity. Its aim is to stitch all of the little threads that dangle off of us into one tidy tapestry of truth. Science cannot replace it, and though I respect my “Realist” and atheist brethren for their attachment to scientific truth (reality), I can’t be comforted by it. What difference does it make to me whether a rock is a billion years old or a hundred years old? Science must be admired, respected and encouraged. But constitutive answers are not exhaustive.

So I won’t be gloating over the death of God. Would the world be a better place without religion? Not with humans in it. It is impossible. We create worlds. That’s what we do. I don’t know why.

Has there ever been a religion that was rigorously materialist in its metaphysics? Probably. But none come to mind.

Children are not metaphysical materialists. It is not of our nature to limit our beliefs to that which can be seen, tasted, touched or measured. The mind of a child easily accepts magical thinking of all sorts. (Early religious education tends to exploit this to maximum advantage). But most children at some point begin to doubt their naïve beliefs.

Most people retain some version of immature belief throughout adulthood. Some–certainly a small percentage–subject their beliefs to rigorous scrutiny and yet emerge with beliefs intact and even stronger. Another small group goes through the same process and its members reject their childhood superstitions and become non-believers. The majority, however, retains a childish form of unexamined belief that can be the foundation of intense religious devotion on one extreme or a vanishing support for an endless variety of ill-informed superstition on the other. Members of the latter group may believe in ghosts, angels, demons, the Law of Return, positive thinking, karma, charms, vibrations–the list goes on ad nauseum.

Few truly make an effort to reject all superstitious beliefs. The few who do often are so dismayed and disgusted by the rest of their species that they become arrogant and hostile to all forms of belief. Atheist apologists cannot help but feel superior. They are like people in a dark room that have opened their eyes but are crushed by the crowd around them that is blind. The blind don’t know they’re blind. They feel their way through the room touching each other and leaning on each other for support. The man who sees does not want to be touched; he wants only to have some space that gives him room to see more. What really vexes the man with sight is the realization that the crowd is penned in together on a vast ocean liner and the pilot of the boat is blind too!

So we are sympathetic to our atheist apologists. Few understand the burning frustration of their situation.

The atheists are right about the evidence. Therefore we begin this project as metaphysical materialists.