A Hollywood director says he's found the bones of Jesus; thousands flock to a debate on divinity. John Humphrys, whose acclaimed radio series and writings on faith elicited a huge response, examines a surprising religious renaissance.
I've chaired enough conferences and public meetings over the years to know how difficult it is to get a decent crowd for a debate. You can tell the difference between amateurs in the business of organising events and professionals. The amateurs always put out a few extra chairs - just in case the crowd is bigger than they'd expected. "It wouldn't do to force anyone to stand up, would it?" they ask you anxiously as you stand in the wings peering out at row after row of empty chairs, a few dozen lonely people hunkered down at the back so far from the stage you need semaphore to make contact. Professionals - especially political party organisers - do exactly the opposite. They put out fewer chairs in the hall than they think they will need. What matters is filling every seat - and if a few people are standing at the back that's even better. The pro knows that half the people who say they will turn up probably won't bother - especially if they haven't had to pay for their tickets. Admittedly it's different if you have a very, very big name on the stage. Bill Clinton perhaps. Or Jade Goody. But William Lane Craig? I'll bet most of you reading this haven't even heard of him. And yet, on a wet and windy winter's night a few days ago, he filled Methodist Central Hall in London. And it's a big hall: more than 2,000 seats. I'm being a little unkind to the other speaker in the debate: Lewis Wolpert. Prof Wolpert is well known for his attitude to God. |
You get the gist of it from the title of his latest book, Six Impossible Things, stolen from what the Queen told Alice in Through the Looking Glass. Wolpert has no trouble filling a lecture theatre at his university, but he's a modest man and would be the first to admit that he'd struggle to draw a crowd of well over 2,000.
No, it was William Lane Craig - with a little help from God. I can say that with confidence because I asked the audience to put up their hands if they believed in God and all but a handful - maybe five per cent - did so. They were there to hear Craig and Wolpert debate the existence of God, but Wolpert knew he was beaten before he got to his feet.
There's a lot of God in Britain these days. Only this week we have had the bizarre claim by the Hollywood director James Cameron that he has found the bones of Jesus. If that's true it means Jesus died just like anyone else and the Christian religion is based on a lie.
You will note I said if that's true. I wrote in these pages just before Christmas about the extraordinary response to a series of interviews I did for Radio Four (Humphrys in Search of God). I had thousands of replies and, four months after the broadcasts, they're still coming.
At the time, I put it down to the bizarre nature of the programmes: grumpy old sod best known for duffing up politicians (that's me) bares his soul and asks some of the world's leading religious figures to show him God. But I'm not so sure any longer. I've been researching a book I'm writing based on the interviews (In God We Doubt) and I'm convinced there is something interesting going on.
Could it be that all those letters were a symptom of something bigger and that religion, which has taken a bit of a hammering over the last few decades in this country, is staging a comeback?
Prospect - the intellectuals' favourite monthly magazine - seems to think so. It has an influence out of all proportion to its tiny circulation and a reputation for its rigorously highbrow approach and its front page recently carried the pretty unambiguous headline: "God returns to Europe".
Dr Eric Kaufmann of Birbeck College, who wrote the piece, based on largely demographic evidence, said there is a religious revival "that may be as profound as that which changed the course of the Roman empire in the 4th century". Heady stuff if you are one of the believers. Mildly worrying if you're not. Seriously worrying if you are scared that what has happened in the United States might possibly be happening here.
Admittedly, that seems unlikely. Until the last congressional elections almost half the senators and congressmen were claimed by the religious fundamentalists as their own. Even if the politicians had wanted to they could not disown the religious Right.
There were too many votes at stake. There are some small signs that church attendance in America has peaked, but it would take a very brave politician to adopt a stance directly at odds with the more militant wing of God's army.
Look at the way the would-be candidates for the presidential election next year are all rushing to reassure the voters that they'll scarcely pull on their socks (or tights) in the morning without seeking God's guidance as to which foot should go in first. And look at how the most liberal of them huff and puff when their views are sought on religious touchstone issues such as abortion and stem cell research.
In America it is the militant wing of the churches that is making the running on the big social issues of the day rather than the more gentle version of religion about which we were once (mildly) enthusiastic in this country. Church attendance here has been falling for decades.
The C of E has made a pretty half-hearted attempt to persuade us that it's not as bad as the empty pews on Sunday mornings might suggest, but the figures tell a different story. Except, that is, for the evangelical wing of the church - the charismatics and the happy-clappies.
They have been thriving for the past few decades and continue to do so. The phenomenally successful "Alpha Courses" were born at Holy Trinity Brompton, the sort of church where you may well be invited to "give God a clap". I went there once and hated it. They claim that more than eight million people have signed up for the courses.
But the militant Christians are not having it all their own way. Militant atheists are taking the battle to them. Witness the extraordinary sales of Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion and the battles on Britain's campuses for young hearts and minds. This is where William Lane Craig fits in.
I suggested to him that he is a sort of intellectual version of Billy Graham. He seemed happy enough with that description. He's actually an American evangelical academic who got one PhD from Birmingham University, another from Munich, is now Research Professor of Philosophy at a theological college in California and has built up a considerable reputation - hence that audience at Methodist Central - as a robust defender of his faith, desperate to take the battle to the atheistic enemy.
You may think I'm overdoing the military metaphors in this essay. But listen to what Craig says: "The average Christian does not realise there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and in the professional journals and scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as irrational or outmoded and millions of students, our future generations of leaders, have absorbed this viewpoint. This is a war which we cannot afford to lose."
Craig thinks the churches are filled with Christians who are "idling in intellectual neutral as Christians their minds are going to waste." If Christian laymen don't become intellectually engaged, he says, then "we are in serious danger of losing our children".
At first blush his approach is a million miles away from the evangelical rhetoric of hellfire and brimstone preachers, let alone the many millions of his fellow Americans who are proud to call themselves creationists. A tenth of all American religious colleges teach the literal truth of the book of Genesis.
God created the world 10,000 years ago and that's that. Dump Darwin in the bin along with all that stuff about fossils and fancy scientific techniques such as the dating of the ice core. Don't believe all that rubbish about dinosaurs roaming the planet 150 million years ago.
It's only 6,000 years since the divine creation of every kind of plant and creature so it follows that they could not have. My small son, who is one of the world's leading experts on dinosaurs, will be deeply disappointed, but the Bible is the literal word of God and that's that.
Well you don't get that sort of tosh from Professor Craig - though he is careful to draw a distinction between "young world creationists" (of whom he disapproves) and "creationists" of whom he is one. His approach, he insists, is based on reason and logic and not blind faith in a mysterious God. He even spends a great deal of time and effort explaining why the Big Bang is the only credible theory of how everything came into existence.
Given all this, you might assume that a debate between someone like Craig and someone like Wolpert - a Jew who lost his faith when he was 15 - would produce a riveting intellectual knockabout at least and a profound discussion of whether God is delusion or reality at best. Sadly it didn't work out like that. They might as well have been talking in different languages.
Here's the essence of Craig's case:
And here's the essence of Wolpert's rebuttal: it's all bunkum. Every bit of it.
Of course he had more to say than that and he said it with wit and growing weariness. But how can an atheist genuinely engage intellectually with a believer? If God created the universe, Wolpert wanted to know, what created God? An impossible and ridiculous question, says Craig, because nothing could have created God. God existed before time.
If you believe that, it seems to me, everything follows. If you don't, none of it does. What explanation does Wolpert have for the creation of the universe? He doesn't know and he's not the least ashamed to admit it. Craig insisted that it was incumbent on Wolpert to prove that God is an illusion. Wolpert insisted it was the other way around.
Yet here, facing Wolpert, was a great sea of mostly young faces. Bright young people, most of them at university and almost all of them more than happy to believe in God and everything Craig had to tell them. Doesn't that prove something?
Wolpert knew he had no chance of changing their minds. Nor, he suggested, did he particularly want to - because religion is not such a bad thing and it makes us feel better about ourselves. That's why we believe. And the propensity to believe is in our genes. None of it has anything to do with the existence of God.
I spent two hours on the morning of the debate talking to Craig (he's known as Bill) across my kitchen table. At times I felt like banging my head on it. We got to the stage, inevitably, of arguing about whether he knows there is a God or believes there is a God. I asked him if his arguments for the existence of God amount to proof.
He hesitated about that "because very often people associate proof with 100 per cent certainty or a mathematical certainty and I'm not claiming that. By proof what I would mean would be a cogent argument and a cogent argument philosophically would be an argument that is logically valid.
It has true premises and the premises are more plausible than their contradictories. And if you have those elements then I think there are good arguments for the existence of God." But if you style yourself, as he does, a "Christian philosopher who is an activist as a Christian" aren't you bound to believe that? Doesn't everything flow from your belief?
The most difficult question is: what created the universe? If the answer is God, then the second most difficult is: why? Craig's answer, when you've boiled everything else away, is that God did it for our benefit. That strikes me as strange for many reasons, not least because so many of us lead hellish lives. But apparently that's not the point. The point is that we are all going to experience the infinite love and mercy of God if we are prepared to accept him. Just as Craig has done.
And that's the nub of it, isn't it? At the end of the debate I asked him a hypothetical question. Assuming (big assumption I know) that Lewis Wolpert had been able to demolish his arguments, would that have destroyed his faith? His answer was no. That had to be his answer. If faith can be proved, then it's not faith. I know that bloody table exists; I don't believe it.
So how did he come by his faith in the first place? He found a girl. He'd "begun to ask the big questions in life" and didn't find any answers in his church. And then one day..."I sat behind this radiant, happy person. She was so happy all the time it just made me sick.
I asked her one day what she was so happy about and she said it's because I know Jesus Christ is my personal saviour." Then she told him: "He loves you, Bill" and he had "never heard that before and it just overwhelmed me."
So here is this man who can quote at length just about every philosopher you have ever heard of and (in my case) many you've never heard of. Who analyses their arguments in detail. Who talks about string theory and quantum mechanics with all the ease of an expert in the field.
Who seems genuinely to believe that his arguments prove the existence of God and who wants every Christian student in the land to get out there and deliver the message. And who came to it all because of a happy, smiling girl who sat in front of him in a German lesson 30 years ago.
No wonder Lewis Wolpert couldn't get a grip on him. You can't argue with the proof of a smiling girl.
That's fair enough. I suppose everyone comes to their faith in their own way. But it worries me when Craig says that without God life itself is absurd: "It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value or purpose."
The morning after the debate I read about a young woman called Josie Grove who had just died. She'd been a talented artist, a champion swimmer and, when she was 14, she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. They did what they could for her but eventually she refused any more treatment because she wanted to die in peace at home. She was, by all accounts, a wonderful and very brave young woman. Here's what she said shortly before her death:
"If I have given courage to others suffering from leukaemia, then my life has been as full as if I had lived to be a hundred. The main thing in life is to help other people and I don't need to live to be a hundred to do that."
One has to respect Prof Craig's belief. But as a statement of what life is about, I'd prefer Josie's.
reposted from: daily telegraph
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments
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