I’ve been too long away from my atheist friend, Professor Richard Dawkins. In TGD Richard Dawkins ridicules the idea that an individual can have a personal experience with God. Picked up by Wikipedia, Dawkins uses the illustration of the Manx Shearwater to show how religious belief arises from superstition. In his younger days one of his undergrad colleagues went on a trip to Scotland with his girlfriend, heard an awful shrieking noise in the night, which they put down to the devil. From there they gave their hearts to God and it was one of the factors in the young man’s decision making that led to him being ordained. Relating this story to ornithologist friends in a pub in Oxford, the friends shrieked, ‘the Manx Shearwater!’ Apparently this shrieking (the bird not Dawkins’ friends), has earned the creature the title of ‘Devil Bird’. It was from this illustration shared in pub talk at the Rose and Crown Inn in Oxford, that all ideas of anyone having an experience with God is ridiculed.Now, whatever happens, there are concrete illustrations that show lives have been changed so dramatically for the better that only a supernatural explanation satisfies our questions. I have used a few illustrations on this blog. Pedro Martin Nunez stood out so much that even The Times printed his story. Then there is Stephen Neil, and Mark Rowan and Byron Garcia, and John Sala - just to give a few illustrations that show there is something more powerful and good going on in human experience when we talk about someone having an experience with God. And if this experience is still held to be superstition then I can only say, let’s have a lot more of it! What these characters have replaced their dysfunctional and disordered lives with we need to find a lot more of - a good way to empty our prisons to begin with! That should lower the tax burden on our country! I’m sure atheist Matthew Parris would now concede, that our own nation could do with the benefits of Christianity.
One can question of course if Dawkins’ story is authentic? But from the Christian point of view God is able to use any experience in life - even our superstitions - to bring us to get to know Him where we leave our superstitions behind. For the Christian, God meets us where we are in life - to bring us to where He wants us to be for our benefit.
One person I can think of that was caught in a superstitious moment changed the world of his day! And 500 years down the line we still live with his influence. Superstitious he may have been in his young days but he didn’t come from a dysfunctional family. His name was Martin Luther. To emphasise the profound impact on the Germany of his day, and the wider influence in countries beyond, Roland Bainton says, “If no Englishman occupies a similar place in the religious life of his people, it is because no Englishman had anything like Luther’s range. The Bible translation in England was the work of Tyndale, the prayer book of Cranmer, the catechism of the Westminster divines. The sermonic style stemmed from Latimer; the hymnbook came from Watts. Luther did the work of five men. And for sheer richness and exuberance of vocabulary and mastery of style he is to be compared only with Shakespeare.”
It was not just Germany, says, Bainton: “Luther’s influence extends far beyond his own land. Lutheranism took possession of Scandinavia and has an extensive following in the United States, and apart from that his movement gave the impetus which sometimes launched and sometimes helped to establish other varieties of Protestantism. They all stem in some measure from him.” More on him in the next post.
(Here I Stand, A Life Of Martin Luther‘, Classic Penguin, 2002, p. 384-5).
