This House Believes Religion Has No Place in the 21st Century

The title was the proposition debated yesterday at the Cambridge Union Society debate which included former archbishop Rowan Williams and current archatheist Richard Dawkins. The audience, perhaps contrary to expectations, overwhelming rejected the proposition (324-138). Most of the headlines in the aftermath have triumphantly declare that Williams beat Dawkins in the debate, with the not so subtle implication that Christianity has triumphed over atheism. There is a sense in which that is true, but before Christians become too jubilant over what would be a largely symbolic victory anyway, it is important to remember exactly what has won the approbation of the student audience:

Some students voiced that Dawkins was in fact "the least intriguing speaker" at the debate. One second year student told TCS: "He did not address the motion. His points focused only on debating whether religion is true, and ignored the question of whether it has a place in modern society."

The student, in critiquing Dawkins, drove right to the heart of why this victory should be, if anything, disappointing for Christians. This was not a debate about the truth claims of any particular religion, least of all Christianity. Consigned to the too often unread body of the text are the humanist, the philosopher, the neo-con, and the Muslim who also weighed in on the proposition. The issue, as the profession of one of the objectors will demonstrate, was not whether or not Christianity is true or even more simply whether or not God exists but whether or not religion, in the abstract, can function for social cohesion. Christianity is no longer the subject of debate. Neither God in heaven nor Christ incarnate are propositions worth debating. Faith has been dissolved into social utility, and in that respect Christians who are delighted by the Cambridge verdict are rejoicing in their own obsolescence.

Williams won and Dawkins lost because the latter didn't realize that the question he cared so deeply about was no longer a topic of any interest. Had the proposition been "This House Believes in a Deity," statistics suggest the vote would have been very much the same, roughly three quarters voting against. In other words, Dawkins lost because he didn't realize he had already won.

The Wisdom of Rowan Williams

A recent discussion in the comments lead me to an article by Rowan Williams responding to John Shelby Spong. Amidst a wealth of delightful wisdom, Williams offers this compelling thought on the Resurrection:

For the record: I have never quite managed to see how we can make sense of the sacramental life of the Church without a theology of the risen body; and I have never managed to see how to put together such a theology without belief in the empty tomb. If a corpse clearly marked ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ turned up, I should save myself a lot of trouble and become a Quaker.

This struck me specifically, in addition to Williams' good humor, because of the number of times I have heard people, or heard of people, who have declared apparently uncritically, that if they turned up Jesus body today it wouldn't affect their faith at all. Williams is a better man than I. If that body turned up, I would probably fall from faith entirely.

Taking a break from the absurd...sort of.

We interrupt this series on Christianity and the Absurd to bring you the response of Archbiship Rowan Williams, functional head of the Church of England, to the riots that recently took place in England. Specifially, I found this quote about education reform and its impact on society interesting:

Over the last two decades, our educational philosophy at every level has been more and more dominated by an instrumentalist model; less and less concerned with a building of virtue, character and citizenship – 'civic excellence' as we might say. And a good educational system in a healthy society is one that builds character, that builds virtue.

I find myself compelled to object that character formation is not the province of public schools but of homes. I submit that if we allow public institutions to teach our children virtue, we will find ourselves with children who only have institutional virtues. As a Christian, I consider "civic excellence" to be a secondary virtue to be understood in a radically different context than the government would. I certainly do not want to hand over the task of training up a virtuous society to world governments who have shown themselves incapable even of training up virtuous governments.

No thank you archbishop. Of all the things public education is doing wrong, I can assure you that it is not inappropriatley neglecting character formation.