THE OLD STUPID atheist joke that may have come from Bertrand Russell (I know he said it but never bothered to see if he was merely mouthing some earlier atheist) that Christians are atheists about the gods of classical paganism and they just go them one step farther is quite stupid, in so far as the classical gods are not the same sort of "thing"* that God is and if they were familiar with the Bible and classical religion they might know that. It is one of the intellectual shortcomings of the atheist tradition that it so often substitutes ridicule for argumentation and disproof.
Well, in saying that I believe time is progressive, that we are supposed to be part of, participate in and experience going from before till after until we leave the realm of time that modern physics has tied to the material universe, existing in the change from past to future and that the future will, in turn, become past and move on. I'm rejecting "conservatism" as much as I am "modernism" all "isms" as ideological constructs founded on a past that doesn't even keep up with the present and soon get old and, found to be inadequate, are surpassed.
The modernism of Descartes and his contemporaries fell way to later 17th and 18th century modern thinkers, who, while they may have admired the progress in the establishment of science that Descartes and his predecessors and contemporaries invented weren't willing to let things rest there.
In turn the "enlightenment" era thinkers, as their thinking was found inadequate gave way to 19th century thought, especially the "romanticism" that started in the 18th century and was, itself left behind in a more self-consciously self-named "modernism" which, builidng, ironically enough on some of the more pathological decadence of all of those already mentioned, now finds itself to be considered inadequate.
"Post-modernism" may have already outdone those in the ephemeral character of its shelf-life, if there really ever was such a "thing" as "post-modernism". It has seemed to me to have fallen aside even as the last adherents of mid-20th century "modernism" are not going gently into that dark night which their nihilism should have prepared them for as the fate of their own ideology as they are content to consider all other things and even entire populations of human beings.
That's the thing about modernists, scientistic-atheist-materialists, they require that you stop your criticism just short of their own ideology, of applying the same tools of critical destruction that they demanded as necessitating the destruction of their rivals and predecessors. That they need to do that points out one of the most dishonest aspects of their ideology, they do not want a no-holds-barred, "objective" (there is no such thing as objectivity, it is a delusion), etc. intellectual inquiry. As Richard Lewontin once pointed out to Carl Sagan, if you want that kind of thing you should go watch the action at a New York Orthodox study hall.
If you are upset that I reject modernism because you believe that must necessitate that I want to return to some past you aren't understanding what I said at all. A. "conservatism" is an aspect of modernism, one that may, at times, be as ill informed as other modernist thinkers as its character because they are thoroughly modern. Especially those who allege themselves to be "classical liberals" by which they appeal to the libertarian atrocity that stole the name from a more actually enlightened liberalism based on the Mosaic commandments to do justice and economic justice to the poor and despised. B. I have never rejected liberalism if by that you mean what someone like Marilynne Robinson asserts was the original English language meaning of that tied into the supply of ample charity to those who need it by those who can afford to give it or even by those who can't spare it (there are no economics more radical than that taught by Jesus, not even the one taught by Moses), C. I believe any "ism" human beings are capable of formulating by intention or by accident is imperfect and will, with time, dissolve into the lost past, any attempts to continue them into the future more likely to risk distorting that future for the worse than in moving things in a better direction. D. I believe that, similarly, no human articulation of religion is perfect enough to begin to be adequate and should never be conceived of as durable and unchanging. Christians certainly have no right to claim such a status for their religion as the Gospel builds on that guarantee in Isaiah that I started this with of a new heaven and a new earth quite unlike any that human beings have managed to create with their ever new and improved ideologies and denominational declarations.
* I think it's one of the defects of human language that we are forced to talk about God who is not a thing as a thing, an object susceptible to understanding and treatment like other things. The same defect, certainly in English, leads us to talk about people and animals as if sentient creatures were the same sort of things that non-sentient objects are from which perhaps comes the habit of regarding people as objects of utility or uselessness that the entire Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition can well be seen as dissenting from, any part of those that accommodates itself to the objectification of people as a deviation or betrayal of the central aspect of the Abrahamic or at least Mosaic religion.
Update: Well, there are different possibilities as to why God would have created the universe. Maybe your question as to what was in it for God is assuming that God did it for selfish reasons - how human - when it's possible existence was a gift God gave to we, God's creatures who God called into existence. I believe that, in so far as modern cosmology seems to expect there to be an end of the universe, that it's possible that all of existence, those things which now exist, are yet to exist, have existed and ended will all be reconciled "saved" as it were. Of course if modern cosmology made convincing arguments that the last hundred fifteen years or so got it wrong and the universe is eternal other explanations will be possible. The atheist claim that it would put a nail in the coffin of God is as ridiculous as the claim that the current cosmology does. I am a lot less confident that current cosmology is the last word than I am in the idea that the universe has purpose and that the long arc of history bends in the direction of justice. I mean, atheists are always arguing things out of what believing things get you. The idea that the universe has a life friendly purpose gets you a hell of a lot more than the atheist-materialist-scientistic nihilistic one which gets you depravity and meaninglessness and a freedom that is less than being the ruler of hell, which the purposeless Darwinian struggle and bloodshed get you. That's a neo-Nazi desideratum because that's the kind of thing that benefits from it, in the end.
If you don't ask "who benefits" from these ideological claims being widely bought you are a chump. That's what all ideological activity is based in, the reason that people choose to believe what they believe. I wouldn't trust a materialist completely, not even those I have deep affection for.
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