A Return to Human Nature

A Return to Human Nature

1985 4 April 5-7 A Return to Human Nature (1084) On April 8, 1966, Time magazine asked on its cover: “Is God dead?” It was difficult to imagine such a revival of religious interests 20 years ago. Today God is not pronounced dead easily. Science and religion are not regarded as incompatible.

Campuses in the U.S.A. have seen a tremendous resurgence of religious interest. Students are seen wearing crosses; going to the Church is no more unfashionable. Not just students, but the academic community in general, is giving religion a second look “There is no doubt about it,” says Harvey R., Cox, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, “there is a tremendous resurgence of religious interests here.”

Significantly, Cox’s best selling 1965 book, The Secular City, suggested that people had lost interest in the sacred. His new Book, Religion in the Secular City, describes the current revival in religious concern.

People from all classes are flocking back to houses of worship and becoming true believers. What those intellectuals share is a revived interest in traditional religion and the question it raises and seeks to answer. A century that has seen the Gulag, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the spread of nuclear arms has caused some who used to champion nationalism and science to humble themselves. Since their secular gods have failed, they are beginning to view more traditional gods with a now curiosity.

There is also evidence of a new interest in religion among the American population at large. Although Church membership dropped dramatically between 1958 and 1975, it has since leveled off and even begun to rise slightly. It is among the young and among intellectuals – two group traditionally considered the most resistant to organized religion – that the change is most pronounced.

Among Jews, the change is even more pronounced. “There is a markedly different attitude toward religion now than there was when I came here 25 years ago.” Says Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, director of the Harward Radcliffe Hillel. “Religion in general was on the defensive. But people lost confidence in progress, in the social engineering they thought would usher in the Golden Age. This punctured the self confidence of the academy’s priests.” Participation in weekly Hillel Services has increased sixfold during the last decade.

When I first started teaching here in 1966, the study of religion was viewed as intellectually sort of kooky,” says Professor Cox. “Now there are very few people who would make a serious case that the teaching of religion does not belong at Harvard.”

The 19th century view of religion as superstition makes little sense today,” says Daniel Bell, Henry Ford 2nd Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard. “Science and religion are in two separate realms. There is no rational way of proving or disproving God’s existence.”

Our intellectual predecessors at the end of the 18th and upto the middle of the 19th century expected religion to disappear in the 20th century. The belief was based on the power of reason. The theory was that man could use his mind to overcome his problems, and religion would wither away. But that has hardly been the case. “We have gained enormous power over nature via technology,” Bell said in an interview. “And yet, the 20th century is probably the most dreadful period in human history.

For intellectuals, according to Bell, there have always been secular alternatives to religious faith: rationalism and the belief in science; aestheticism and the belief in art; existentialism as expressed in the works of Kierkegaard and the early Sartre, and politics – the cults of Stalin, Lenin and Mao. Yet, one by one, those alternatives, particularly the political ones, have exhausted their power to move individuals.

And yet, certain advances in science today make scientist more, not less, interested in the question of religion. In 1981, the cosmologist Fred Hoyle wrote, “A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology – there are no blind forces in nature.”

It’s ironic that my generation should be the one coming back to religion,” says Alan Dershowitz, 45, professor of law at Harvard Law School. “We were the generation that had all the freedom and all the choice.” And yet, it is the rootlessness of much of that freedom that has brought so many intellectuals back to religion.

The exhaustion of modernism, the aridity of communist life, the tedium of unrestrained self – all indicate that a long era is coming to a close,” writes Bell. What will replace it, he and other suggest, will inevitably have something to do with the sacred.

“I cannot say to you I believe in God,” says Coles, who might be described as a spiritual wanderer rather than as a believer in any particular faith. “There are moments when I do stop and pray to God. But if you ask me who that God is or what kind of image He has, my mind boggles. I’m confused, perplexed, confounded. But I refuse to let that confusion be the dominant force in my life.”

We often come across features in western journals which deal with religion, whose revival marks a new phase in the modern world. Man had discarded religion in the 19th century by arguing that the human mind coupled with science was well-equipped to build up their lives.

After a long experiment, however, man’s misplaced assumptions and unfulfilled expectations proved rather to be one of his great misconceptions. The human mind leads him nowhere but to scepticism. Science, at its peak, showed him the way to atomic annihilation.

The return to religion, by its very nature, signifies a return to human nature. It is indeed a healthy sign. The real matter of concern, however, is that this return at present amounts to a return to the distorted versions of revealed religion. Religion is essentially the voice of human nature. All revealed religions were initially capable of answering the call. But subsequent adulteration and interpolation over the ages have distorted their teachings altogether, It is Islam which is now the only true and authentic version of the divine religion. In order to save man from yet another frustration, it is our bounden duty to make the scales fall from his eyes and to show him that the religion he has been seeking all along is actually Islam, the only true representation of religion. The most pressing task before us today is not only to acquaint modern man with Islam but to bring it to him in its original form.