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Dear Sir,

Some thoughts about religion...

Religion has always been — and still is — an important and disturbing part of my life. Important because I was brought up in a Church of England family and throughout my life have sought to follow its teachings and practices. Disturbing because despite my efforts to achieve a relationship with the God on whom my religion is based I was never successful.

I was told Christianity had never been found wanting — only difficult and abandoned. I read the Bible and Book of Common Prayer and have been much influenced by writers such as Richard Hooker, John Bunyan, Henry Drummond, Henry Newman, C. S. Lewis and many others. I have been impressed by the permanence of the Roman Church but am put off by its doctrines concerning contraception and infallibility.

I studied the history of religion which has been a powerful force in all societies since the evolution of homo sapiens over ten thousand years ago and also the teachings and sacred writings of other world religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and Mohammedanism. In none of them did I find a concept of God that appealed as much is the one I had been taught in the Anglican Church.

The three highest values anyone knows are expressed in the words truth and goodness and beauty. I have learned to associate each with the three persons of the Christian concept of God being a Trinity — truth being the omnipotent God the Father — goodness being the compassionate God the Son — beauty being the inspiration of God the Holy Spirit. Pursuing God has been a matter of seeking truth and doing well towards one’s fellow beings and preferring beauty to ugliness.

It is only in the Western world in the last five hundred years — a tiny section of the world’s population and a tiny part of mankind’s history — that the search for truth has freed man’s reasoning powers to achieve changes which have resulted in levels of civilization and happiness for mankind not hitherto dreamed of. The main obstacle which has always opposed this progress has been religion. This caused me to wonder in particular what is the nature of the God on which all religion is based.

My earliest teachings said that God is the creator of the universe in which we live. This is to say that the natural world is the creation of a supernatural being. But does this take us any further? Surely this is to solve a mystery by substituting another mystery. Who created the creator? The natural world could have come into existence on its own without the need of something supernatural. When the late Charles Darwin gave a lecture on the origin of the species he was asked how God fitted in and he said, “I have no need for that hypothesis.”

All religions teach that God has an interest in each human being and cares how each person behaves. God is either pleased or displeased depending on how each individual behaves and will reward or punish accordingly. There is no evidence that such a supernatural being exists and it is unreasonable to hold such a belief. Most religions also teach that there is a life after death partly playing on the universal fear of death but also giving hope that the injustices of this life will be put right in the hereafter. Such a belief is also unreasonable.

There is no supernatural

I have come to believe that nothing exists other than the natural world, which we perceive with our senses and investigate with our reason. There is nothing supernatural. The traditional religious conception of God is nothing other than an imagined extension by man of the aspirations he has for himself — attributing to the concept omnipotence and omniscience and eternal life. Rather than man having been created by God in His image, religions have created an imagined God as an extension of what man would like to be.

Does this rejection of many of the traditional beliefs concerning the nature of God necessarily result in one being an atheist? I think not. I still treasure and try to follow the values that I learned as a member of the Anglican Communion. I also believe that man’s mind is not capable of either understanding or controlling the natural world. This leaves the problem of how best to live life and this can be solved by having a concept of a God that does not involve either invoking the supernatural or conflicting with reason.

William M. Cox

Hamilton

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