Several years ago a student confided in me his unbelief in the Judeo-Christian God. He was writing a paper contrasting Christianity & Islam and was alarmed with similarities between the two faiths. The more he talked, the more clearly he was able to explain that he did not disbelieve in a god—he was just not certain which one it was. "Is that all?" I asked. My concern was short-lived. "Get back to class." And I never spoke to him about it again.
Whenever I encounter conversations about religion with a POMO, I do not try to evangelize him. The Modern parent faults me for this, but I think that he is mistaken. Religion concerns questions of ultimacy, and those questions span the total of reality. The quality of one's religion is illustrated by its ethics: its evaluation of right and wrong action. In other words, there are not only right and wrong ways to to pursue justice, to punish evil, to believe, to pray. There are also right and wrong ways to vault a fence, to ride a bike, to eat a bagel, to vault a fence, to read a book, to wash a window, to make pancakes. Narrowing religion to the artificial domain of “spirituality” makes it partial like the elevation of a holiday over the other days of the year. Religion does not just look like something. Religion looks like everything.
One fifth grade student spent an entire lunch period with me describing her grandmother’s atheism. How could it be that such a loving sage did not believe in God? "Oh, but she does believe in God," I told her. I first affirmed her grandmother’s position: she says that she does not believe God exists. I believe that to be her intellectual position. But she does not live as if God does not exist. I asked my student "Your grandmother loves you, right?" She agreed. ""Then that contradicts what your grandmother thinks." Her grandmother’s Atheism did not, nor could it, change the reality of what is. You can have one thousand atheists intelligently arguing against the Christian faith, and that will not add one thing to the reality of what is. Conversely, you can have one thousand Creation scientists intelligently arguing for intelligent design, and that will not add one thing to the reality of what is.
How can I say this? Because the nexus of man is not his brain. So the initial problem with man is not with his brain. So the answer is not man's brain. The Modern Christian feared that a growing consensus of unbelief would intrinsically change the truthfulness of what is. So it concentrated its efforts by its own increased amount of data in favor pro God to defeat all atheistic opposition. Surely you have heard the following statements (or similar statements) countless times: "The science of the human eye proves that God exists" or "Ancient extra-biblical texts prove the Bible to be true" or "Current political events prove the Coming of Christ to be imminent."
When the children with whom I work express unbelief of or a dislike for Christianity, they have never meant that they do not believe in God (or a god). They do not see unbelief in God as an inescapable Atheism. Maybe they see unbelief in God as a rejection of my explanation of God. The POMO lives in the ethereal, in the theoretical, in the plausible, so he is not an Atheist in the classic Modern sense as having categorically shut out any possibility of God or deity or spirit whatsoever. To think so is to wrongly represent this generation.
What I have found to be true about the evangelical efforts of "evidences" is that the pressure of evidences has funneled both Modern and current POMO generations into a generic monotheism: not Christian monotheism, per se. The emphasis of evidentialism has largely been to move someone from an intellectual position of unbelief to an intellectual position of admitting or at least entertaining that "a" God must exist. From that point on, gravity does the rest of the work: it is statistically arguable that a person will "become" a Christian. It is a science, and that science equates monotheistic persuasion to Christianity.
The Modern monotheist will tend to be persuaded of a monotheism of evidences on the basis of science. The POMO finds the same evangelistic strategy of evidences to be an uncomfortably sinister form of coersion. You might as well put your hands down his pants. You don't need to convince a POMO of God's existence! That is not his problem! You don't need to convince him that a little "i" intelligence or big "I" Intelligence has designed the world and has a destiny for him. Save your breath. That is already the baseline of every POMO, atheist or not.
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