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http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/10/24/is-it-another-great-awakening/

Is It Another Great Awakening?

By Donald
Devine

October 24, 2014

Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge shocked the secular West in 2009 by announcing that
God Is Backstarting with China, of all places. Here were two epitomes of British reasonableness explaining that
Europe was the modern exception in viewing God as dead, an irrational shadow of the past, with its Continent
declining in population and power, and the rest of the world resembling America in having religion as a part of their
cultural dynamism.
Chinas atheistic communist government conceded that its Christian population had doubled to 21 million over the
past decade, worshiping in 55,000 official Protestant and 4,600 Catholic churches. The underground church, its
widely known, was much largerby foreign estimates perhaps 77 million, which means larger than the Communist
Party. A Pew Global Attitudes study found only 11 percent of Chinese saying religion was not important in their lives,
compared to 31 percent saying it was very or somewhat important. Indeed, everywhere the authors looked outside
their European homeland, religion was booming in the early 21st century world.
Six in 10 Americans today tell Pew pollsters that religion plays a very important role in their lives. Over 80 percent
believe in God or some higher power, with only four percent choosing agnosticism and merely two percent atheism.
Only eight percent said they did not pray, as against 73 percent who said they prayed at least weekly, while 83 percent
said God answered prayers. Sixty-three percent said they belonged to a church. The most recent Pew poll reflected
some changes, with a plurality agreeing that gays had a right to marry, but a majority also thinking that homosexuality
was sinful. Seventy-two percent agreed religion was losing influence in America but 56 percent of these thought that
this was a bad thing.
What is often overlooked is international data. WIN-Gallup International statistics show that 59 percent of the world
population says it is religious and only 13 percent is atheistic, almost all of the latter in China, Japan, the Czech

Republic and France. The people of Africa, Latin America, India and Asia, and the Muslim world almost all consider
themselves religious. Tempering the Micklethwait/Wooldridge thesis somewhat, even many in Europe say they
believe in God (with Sweden registering the lowest polling number, apparently we ought to call it Secularism Central)
and many Europeans also say they pray.
The Science Times section of the New York Times became part of this reawakening in the person of Nicholas Wade,
one of its former editors and earlier editor of the prestigious journals Nature and Science. He issued a book the same
year titled The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures. Religion is merely an evolved instinct, Wade
argued, but it was essential to the evolution of human beings from frail animal to master of the world.
Wades jumping-off point was chimpanzees, asking why humanitys closest living cousins have not evolved much
since their species split some five million years ago even as humans have changed dramatically merely in the last
50,000 years. His explanation is culture, which evolutionists have only recently taken seriously. Theyve learned that
culture can feed back into the genome, accounting at least in some part of the vast differences between people and
chimpanzees. Moreover, evolved humans are vastly preferablekinder, more prosperous, less warlike, less
profligate of the environment and more knowledgeable. With the hunter-gatherers of prehistoric times, war deaths
reached 15 percent of population, compared to war deaths of one percent even in a horrible century (the 20th).
Such substantial and fairly steady progress cannot have been directed by evolution, a blind and largely random
process with not a flicker of interest in human welfare, writes Wade. Surely the only possible origin of progress is
human choice. Early humans in small groups needed rules to restrain individual self-interest for group survival as an
instrument of individual survival. These rules likely have a genetic root, which accounts for morality at its core
being very similar in every society but their development and significant differences are based on culture. The
similarities are rules against murder, theft, and incest and a general belief in Do as you are done by. Even Darwin
found the latter principle the foundation of morality.
Hunter-gatherer religion developed to provide more effective restraints than force, since even the strongest leader
was easily overwhelmed by several offended men. The fear of gods and spirits effectively restrained attitudes that
were hostile to group survival and solidified the in-group against outsiders, who often were not viewed even as
human. Religion provided the primal glue that unified these groups and prepared them to survive. Roman emperors
even took the title pontifex maximus, meaning chief priest as well as emperor, and all bureaucracies probably started
in temples. As the late Samuel Huntington reminded us, religion still defines the line between the major civilizations.
God is making such a comeback that a professor of political science at the University of Texas can write a book
provocatively titled, What We Cannot Not Know. Jay Budziszewski argues therein that what we cannot not know is
moral rules and even God. These are obvious to any thinking person, he claims. Everyone has a sense of a moral law
written in his conscience. Only sloth, self-deception, or apathy can lead to denial. To argue that everyone believes in
God and morality, in the face of the nonstop proclamations we hear from various people that they do not believe in
them, has always seemed rather arrogant if not irrational. But one must admit Budziszewski makes a powerful case.
Budziszewski in some ways models Wade in arguing that there is a universal common sense of the human race
about morality. Budziszewski calls this natural law that, at some level, is known to all. He does not find this
exclusively biological but neither does Wade with his concept of culture. Budziszewski claims these are also right for
all and even Wade has his sense of preferable human development that implies some sense of right.
Budziszewski goes on to say that it makes a difference that moral rules are right for all; otherwise there would be
nothing for moral reasoning and persuasion to be about. It makes a difference that they are known to all; otherwise
even though moral reasoning and persuasion would be about something, they could never get started discussing,
much less agreeing upon, basic moral behavior or the immorality of the act of murder.
How could we argue something was moral or immoral without some reference point somewhere? Budziszewski says
it is naturally in us all. Wade finds it based in genes and then developed further by culture to promote survival. Neither

expects we know these principles unfailingly, with Budziszewski arguing that we refer to these principles even when
we break them, to justify breaking them. To Wades short list of universals, Budziszewski adds: caring for ones
children, and being against maiming, slander, and most adultery. Wade would probably accept these and perhaps
even the popular belief in some type of universal spirit or God, as opposed to Budziszewskis belief in its reality.
Budziszewski slips a bit quickly into treating as universal the Decalogue and its authorship by a designing, caring,
forgiving Godclearly neither is universalbut he on the other hand insists that one cannot speak about moral rules
in general, only how they are elaborated by tradition. In this he is similar to Wade on culture. We otherwise only know
natural law inarticulately, with Budziszewski even admitting that the monotheistic traditions and pre-Noahide
covenant pretty much define modern natural law, which has the benefit that these different traditions can understand
each other at least to some degree.
The problem is speaking to people with no tradition, or rather to the modern intellectual tradition that explicitly rejects
the common tradition in favor of one pragmatically defined by its experts as new conditions arise. To those who argue
that the modern is superior because it is based on reason rather than belief, Budziszewski counters that the great
atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel admitted his atheism is partially based on the hope there is no God. I dont want
there to be a God; I dont want the universe to be like that.
Still, if the natural law is written on all hearts, and is even enforced by a conscience, how can some deny it? Even in
the face of conscience and the possibility of negative consequences, humans desperately want to be thought good,
even to themselves. They resist consciences demands but they can escape through remorse, blurted confession,
reflexive atonement, desired reconciliation or need for justification, for each of which Budziszewski presents pertinent
examples. Some people can avoid these manifestations especially when taught to ignore them, but often at a psychic
cost. The furies can be fought but there is a price to pay. Feelings can be manipulated even to accept a magazines
image of a nude woman being fed into a meat grinder and emerging as hamburger; but Treblinka required psychiatric
conditioning of its executioners to allow them to carry out their instructions. No matter how repressed, somehow the
flotsam of natural lawall those corks of truth cannot all be kept down at once.
Moderns cannot but find Budziszewski impertinent to insist that we all must believe in God and the natural law when
many of us have thought them safely buried. Still, what is one to make of it when, for example, a professed agnostic
such as Charles Krauthammer says, I dont believe in God but I fear him greatly? George Will, criticizing the
agnosticism of Krauthammer, said that he believed his friend is actually an amiable low-voltage atheist like himself
but flinches from saying it. Listen to Will explaining himself:

The basic question in life is not, Is there a God, but Why does anything exist? St. Thomas Aquinas
said that there must be a first cause for everything, and we call the first cause God. Fine, but it just has
no hold on me.

Fearing something one doubts exists? Fine about accepting a first cause called God but it just has no hold on
me? What, we may wonder, is going on here? The books under review here might just be on to something.