Atheism’s ‘golden age’ has ended, professor says

The golden age of atheism is over,” Oxford University professor Alister McGrath said in his lectures during the 2004 Wycliffe Hall Summer School on the famed campus in England.

A group from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS) attended the Wycliffe Hall Summer School in conjunction with a new initiative — the NOBTS Oxford Study Program.

McGrath, professor of historical theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, was the featured lecturer for the summer education program at Oxford University.

The author of “The Twilight of Atheism” defended his premise that atheism is not attractive in and of itself. Atheism was popular during certain periods of history due to the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of the day, he said.

Citing Winston Churchill’s statement in 1943 that the “empires of the future would be the empires of the mind,” McGrath argued that atheism has been a formidable empire, whose golden age can be marked by two events: the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

French peasants seized the Bastille prison seeking to overthrow an oppressive ruling class, McGrath said. At the time, everything status quo was subject to removal, including belief in God. Atheism appealed to those who viewed religion as oppressive and who valued human reason and freedom from authority.

The Enlightenment period nurtured the rise of atheism and the idea that society would be better and kinder without God, McGrath recounted, noting that with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the evil face of atheistic communism was exposed.

The archives of the Soviet bloc were opened and it was revealed that more had perished under Stalin’s regime than even under Nazism. Atheism had failed. “Karl Marx’s indictment of religion as the opium of the people has been inverted,” McGrath said.

The rigid doctrine of atheism denying God’s existence does not fare well with a postmodern generation’s renewed interest in spirituality, he said.

“Postmodernity makes atheism unattractive,” he noted.

“The postmodern values tolerance, and atheism is seen as intolerant.”   (BP)