ATHEISM AND TRANSCENDENCE THEOLOGY: I

I’ve been reading “Atheism” blogs, several of which reported on blogger visits to churches, Bible studies, and prayer meetings. I, too, find most of these unrewarding and sometimes just plain aggravating even though I’m a Christian. This snarkiness has been a part of my mentality long before the term “snark” existed, a trait easy for a research scientist to develop when testing all kinds of ideas and “facts.”
I’m a retired Professor, of Biology no less. During my decades of professing, I wrestled with the dichotomy that hit my fundamentalist upbringing when I studied under Indiana University’s and University of Chicago’s evolution-oriented biology faculties. I did not, however, elect to make the choice most students did – and still do – to toss out one and start championing the other. What the blogger laments focused on is that they always found about the same ideas and beliefs – which they disdained – coming from narrow-minded people, the kind who currently dominate Christendom, what some religious scholars call theism believers. I’m an “a-theism” Christian. That makes for big-time differences from between theism and atheism and has numerous far-reaching implications.
Transcendence Theology was the key in my decision to merge evolution and religion.
This transcendence idea has been around for a very long time, but it’s been almost totally ignored in Christendom during the last several centuries. Succinctly put, this concept includes the idea that God stands apart from – transcends – natural processes which then run on autopilot – on the inherent features programmed into their DNA, RNA, and proteins, speaking from a molecular-biology viewpoint.
Such thinking is in stark contrast to the “God-controls everything and everybody all the time and doesn’t delegate much if any responsibility. This simplicity appeals to a lot of people who find great relief in the “comfort, control, and certainty” of all that. Tele-evangelists are incredibly adept at promoting this, so good in fact that their send-money pitches are wildly successful. This theology retards the development that ought to be taking place in every life, largely ignores the intellectual progress taking place in the world, and is a retreat into the ancient fundamental beliefs of long-past centuries.
It’s important to realize that all concepts of God are human constructs – despite claims that they are “revealed truth” straight from God – and that they all fall short of being adequate. Although these visit-around atheists wrote largely about encountering this one dominating construct, there have been and currently are others.
SO, SPEAKING TO ATHEISTS, I ASK YOU TO CONSIDER WHICH CONSTRUCT IT IS THAT YOU DISBELIEVE?
The merger construct I referred to above is diagrammatically shown in the Venn diagram I posted August 14. It is a dualistic, bipolar, paradoxical construct. “Immanence Theology” is the form of theism now so dominant, in contrast to the belief in “The Transcendent” that has been so important for me to consider as “opposite” to immanence.
I’m looking forward to hearing your comments and questions, the snarkier, the better.