Is there a God, or What?

For Betty's article

By John Taylor; 2008 Jan 11, 12 Sharaf, 164 BE

I promised Betty, our local media representative, to give this report the highlights of Wednesday night's public meeting in the Garfield Disher Room to her. These are just outlines and notes for her to flesh into an article that she does regularly for our monthly Baha'i lecture series.

Is there a God, or What?

The idea of an almighty Being, an infinite and supreme God is perhaps the most pervasive in the history of ideas. One of the best qualified thinkers to judge how pervasive an idea is was the Aristotelian philosopher Mortimer Adler. In the early 1950's Adler edited the Encyclopedia Britannica's "Great Books" series, and wrote a two volume introduction, "The Great Ideas, A Syntopicon." This was a survey of the main thoughts of the fruits of the greatest minds of Western science and philosophy. Just after completing this arduous compendium of the impact and nature of every major idea in the history of ideas, declared that the God was the one concept that he had run into the most often. He said,

"... the idea of a Supreme Being is itself supreme among `The Great Ideas.' In the Syntopicon where we were working on the 102 Great Ideas of Western thought we found this out as we went through all of the 102 ideas, we found that the idea of God was the idea to which there were more references in the literature of western writings, poetry, philosophy, theology and science and references by more diverse authors, different kinds of authors than occurred in the case of any other idea; both in the extent of the references and the variety of the references, the discussion of God is the largest single discussion that has gone on in the intellectual tradition of the West." (The Great Idea of God, by Mortimer J. Adler, http://radicalacademy.com/adlerongod.htm)

As science has progressed over the past few centuries the belief in God has been challenged and in many circles even expunged. However, on a world-wide level, belief in God is by far the most frequently held conviction. One of the first planet-wide Gallop polls found that well over 90 percent of human beings accept some kind of Supreme Being. The speakers handed around a pie chart based on recent (2005) statistics showing the number of declared believers in the world. The "non-religious" section, which included atheists, agnostics, polytheists and so forth, was slightly under one fifth of the total.

The story is different, however, if you focus on the elite and count the number of believers in wealthy, developed nations. By some estimates if atheism and agnosticism were a single religion, it would clock in as the third or fourth largest in the United States. Some polls have found that 92 percent of Americans accept a God. However when a Harris poll asked if Americans ever doubt God, or if they are less than absolutely certain, the numbers are growing, from 34 percent to 42 percent a few years later.

<http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=061031235233.s0l4o4wy&show_article=1>

In the past decade a spate of books by atheists have climbed the bestseller lists, spawning an entire industry of responses from defenders of theism. Again, a look at the statistics explains why there is a market of avid readers on this question. The belief in God definitely seems to be in decline, both in quality and quantity.

Indeed while current religious leaders have successfully cast doubt in the minds of most Americans about one of science's most incontrovertible findings in the past two centuries, evolution -- astonishingly, over half of all Americans reject Darwin's theory --these leaders are failing to keep what is presumably their core conviction, the acceptance that a God exists at all, from setting into rapid decline.

Baha'u'llah, the Founder of the Baha'i Faith, left no doubt about who is responsible for this increase of atheism in modern times.

"Leaders of religion, in every age, have hindered their people from attaining the shores of eternal salvation, inasmuch as they held the reins of authority in their mighty grasp. Some for the lust of leadership, others through want of knowledge and understanding, have been the cause of the deprivation of the people." (Baha'u'llah, The Kitab-i-Iqan, 15)

He did not, however, let off the hook the non-experts, the vast majority of the world's population who are believers in God and express this by becoming members of the world's religions. All of us have a grave responsibility to investigate this question.

"And the people also, utterly ignoring God and taking them for their masters, have placed themselves unreservedly under the authority of these pompous and hypocritical leaders, for they have no sight, no hearing, no heart, of their own to distinguish truth from falsehood." (Baha'u'llah, Kitab-i-Iqan, 164)

The book in which Baha'u'llah leveled these accusations, the Kitab-i-Iqan or Book of Certitude, also offers a positive response to many of the most damaging criticisms leveled by atheists upon current ideas and institutions of religion. Prime among these is that religion is reactionary, anti-modernist and refuses to change in response to modern realities. The Book of Certitude offers instead an evolutionary, relativist view of religion, where religion is no longer understood to be contradictory, static or final. The various major faiths are not mutually exclusive but part of a single narrative. This concept Baha'is call progressive revelation.

Later the son of Baha'u'llah, Abdu'l-Baha traveled in Europe and America and, interpreting His Father's teachings, offered what could be called the "principle proofs" of the existence of God. He set out about a dozen principles, each of which was and still remains unique to the Baha'i Faith among the major world religious systems. Here are a few of the principles, explained as proofs of deity.

Search for truth, each individual has a sacred duty to seek the truth for herself. This is the first principle of the Baha'i Faith, and it begins with search for God. Even though God is unknowable in any direct sense, He gives us reflected or virtual knowledge, through His Manifestations, as a sign of grace. Our universal striving to know is itself a proof that God exists. Atheist's accusations that religion is inherently obscurantist, that is, that it actively seeks to discourage truth seeking, are thus nullified in this new Faith.

The oneness of humanity is the principle of God's love and kindness towards all. He created us and sustains us, and we have a duty to do the same for one another. When we seek truth, this is the first thing we discover, that we all are one, we find His Face in each other. We thus prove that God exists when we act upon a world level to help and nurture one another; we deny God when we neglect that.

Many atheists consider discrimination against women to be inherent to religious institutions, but the equality of the sexes is a basic Baha'i principle. Same thing with prejudices and ignorance, there are separate principles addressing both of these, the elimination of prejudice and the promotion of education. Again, disputes between religions and the teaching of evolution dominate the headlines, but the harmony between science and religion are fundamental principles.

After these general points were made, a general discussion was held where participants shared their own reasons for believing in God.