As always, Ron Ferguson pens an intelligent and thoughtful column. His general contention - that religion is a basic human need - will not go down well with the many secularists and materialists who are convinced that they, and they alone, have encapsulated the truth. These folk despise the rest of humanity as having an inferior, unscientific mindset. We are all deluded by superstition, reactionary medieval prejudices, and so on, ad nauseam.
In truth, dogmatic atheists have a poor understanding of human nature, and of the universal human need for a spiritual life. Nikita Kruschev once promised to show on Soviet national television the last living priest in Russia. This was after the greatest experiment in systematic atheist "education" in human history.
For more than 70 years, every single child in the Soviet Union was subjected to compulsory "diamat" (dialectical materialism) lessons in school. This indoctrination was accompanied by an relentless campaign of hostility to religion. More Christians died for their faith during this period than were martyred in all previous persecutions - including the bloody Roman persecutions of Nero, Decius, Diocletian, the Armenian and Greek massacres - added together.
Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed, what remained of this massive social experiment? Some 3% of the Russian population still claimed to believe in diamat.
The Orthodox Church is undergoing a massive programme of baptisms, church building, opening of new monasteries. I must ask our atheist friends: why? Are the Russians just congenitally superstitious and backward? Or might this not be a manifestation of a basic human need?
This hostility to religion is invariably accompanied by the charge that religion is unscientific and irrational, and its practitioners mere credulous dupes. In truth, this is a reversal of the facts. Looking for evidence is in the very best Christian tradition. As the saying goes: "Theologia mater scientiae" (Theology is the mother of science). With its profound regard for logic, it was Christian theology that gave birth to the sciences. The current cosmological model, the Big Bang theory, was formulated by Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest.
I commend to all the words of Albert Einstein: "The human mind is not capable of grasping the universe. It is like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues.
"The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."
So wise, indeed, was Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon when he wrote: "It is true that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."
Brian Quail, Glasgow.
