Wherein I quote GKC

I haven't posted on here in a long while... anyhow, I'll start things off again by posting something that rather amused me.

In Newsweek (yeah, I get it -- apparently they offered my mom one of those "get a free subscription for a friend" things, so she signed me up) today I saw a short article on a new book. Written by "a journalist who specializes in evolutionary psychology" (I'm still trying to wrap my head around how this is any sort of qualification), it has the title The Evolution of God. Those of you who have read Chesterton's The Everlasting Man should know why this was so amusing to me. From Chapter 1 of Chesterton's book:

"[...] concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it was blasphemous, which naturally amused me not a little. For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how this nonsensical notion that there is a God grew up among men.' "

The Newsweek article implies that the forthcoming book is not quite so uncharitable as that. But the point remains that people seem to think that this kind of approach to religion somehow does it more justice than the acerbic treatment of the 'new atheists'. Yes, the history of religion has its place (though in this and similar cases I am skeptical about how much of the 'history' is history and how much is simply speculation), but its place is not where people want to put it. If you don't care that Christianity is making claims about what sort of universe we live in, I don't care how sanguine you are about it: you aren't taking it seriously. Musings on the potential evolutionary adaptivity (etc.) of religion are not relevant to the problem. Yes, the 'faith debate' (poor description from the Newsweek article) can be pretty nasty and unproductive, even actively destructive, with vocal people on either 'side' calling each other deluded fools. But it's not any more productive to just ignore the fact that people are actually making truth claims when they claim a religious creed, no matter how many warm fuzzies you provide about how maybe it's not so bad to believe in God after all.


I'm actually quite often struck by how many of the conventional thought patterns Chesterton attacks in the society of his day are still (or maybe it's again?) present now. I wonder, where is our 21st century GKC?