Functional Atheism

Psalm 14; Luke 15:1-10; Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28

I always find the opening to Psalm 14 abrupt. It certainly is to the point: “Fools say in their hearts, There is no God.” It has a near twin, Psalm 53 which may have come through a remembered source originating in Northern Kingdom, while Psalm 14 may have been edited in Judah.

Although this psalm is rooted in a particular time, attributed to David, it is a timeless psalm. So many psalms are personal, about the one who sang or prayed them, about situations in the singer’s life. This psalm speaks corporately, about the nation. That adds to its timeless quality.

The first part of Psalm 14 is a deep-sighed lament for the total corruption of human beings.: “Fools say in their hearts, there is no God.” This verse has been used often to define atheism. Don McKim writes that in the Old Testament, the fool is not only one with no sense, but also the one who resolutely rejects the highest “wisdom” of all, which is the fear and obedience of God. The fool is the one who disregards God, convinced that God does not matter in life. Fools have closed their minds to God and all of God’s instructions.(1) They do not define God as nonexistent. They shut God out from their life. The fool, nabal in Hebrew, is not the simpleton or a gullible fool. Rather, the fool may be too smart for his or her own good. The fool’s mind is hardened to God and not open to instruction.

Isaiah contrasts righteous rulers with fools in chapter 32. “See here: A king rules to promote righteousness; rulers govern to promote justice, each like a shelter from the wind and a refuge from a storm. ... Fools speak folly; their minds devise wickedness, acting irreverently, speaking falsely of the Lord” (Isaiah 32:1-2, 6).

The fool is the one who says “there is no God” in order to justify their own existence and their own hand in it. If they could figure out how to be self-generated, without benefit of parents or parental rearing, they would be inwardly delighted. Because fools are self-made and responsible to no one other than themselves, they always have the answers, always know how to fix what is wrong in everyone else. They are full of negatives for everyone else, because the only positive is themselves.

The negative is used twice in the opening verse of the psalm: “There is no God,” and “not one of them does anything good.”  In verse 2, “No one does good — not even one person!” the psalmist puts the exclamation point on his assertion. Fools don’t waste time debating whether God exists. They dismiss the possibility that God might have any relevance to the present or future. If God did exist, then God is the watchmaker God who started everything off and then left creation to its own devices.

Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, in their book, America’s Four Gods, note that nearly 40 percent of all American’s believe in a disengaged God.(2) Two-fifths of those believe that while God may not be actively involved with the world, God will still zap people for not getting life right. The remaining three-fifths believe that God is not only not involved, but also doesn’t care.

There appear to be two options for the people who believe in a disengaged God. People may live with impunity – it doesn’t matter what they do, they can get away with anything because God won’t judge them. Or people may be so sensitive to the lack of what they perceive as a caring God, that they attempt, not in so many words, to become the missing God and do everything that is needful and right for the world. This is perhaps because they think that God will judge them or perhaps because of some innate, non-divinely planted, sense of right and wrong. Both approaches are utter foolishness because both approaches dismiss God’s relevance.

For the last two decades physicist Richard Dawkins has been the champion of intellectual atheism. The psalmist is not decrying a cognitive approach to atheism. The psalmist is addressing the soul. The comments about fools and their behavior is a moral assessment, not an intellectual one. Psalm 14 addresses “practical atheism” rather than “philosophical atheism.”(3)

The psalmist rails against the behaviors of the fools. “They are corrupt and do evil things; ... all these evildoers, devouring my people like they are eating bread but never calling on the Lord. ... [They] humiliate the plans of those who suffer” (vv. 1, 4, 6).

The folly of fools, according to the psalmist is that they deny God’s concern for those whom they exploit. They believe and act with impunity because “there is no God” to hold them accountable for their corruption or to defend the interests of the oppressed. There is no place for intellectual debates about the existence of God. The psalmist’s concern is real-life questions of oppression and resistance. The chief theological question in the psalmist’s poem is “justice, not belief, the chief error is oppression not secularism.” The folly which the psalm attacks is “the folly of the social injustice that cuts the oppressor off from God.”(4)

This folly denies the God-image in the person who is the fool. This folly denies any God-given worth in the other person. Think about the way the pompous rich man ignored poor Lazarus at his gate until death exchanged the circumstances of each (Luke 16:19-31). Folly is thinking that no one has any responsibility for anyone except him- or herself.

Think about the rich man who grew so many crops that he had to tear down his too-small barns and build bigger ones. Only he didn’t live to see the benefit (Luke 12:16-21). Perhaps some of his storage problem could have been solved by sharing the grain with those not as fortunate as he was.

Think about all the well-to-do people strutting by the Temple collection box dropping in huge amounts of spare change while a poor woman quietly puts in two of the smallest coins of the realm (Luke 21:1-4). The rich expect to be thanked and lauded. The poor woman just gratefully wants to do her part.

All this folly is often cloaked in the garb of religion. These people worship the rites and rituals but not the righteous God. They claim God for themselves and only do lip service to God for others, unless it is on their own terms. This is functional atheism. It passes for faith but is a hollow shell.

Fools did not pass out of existence after the psalmist’s scathing rebuke of them. Like the proverbial poor, fools are always with us. They are the people who would deny supplement nutrition assistance to one group of neighbors while subsidizing agribusiness. Fools are the people who jack up the price of health care so that only the insured can afford to be healthy.

Dwight Eisenhower was a man of very quiet, personal faith. He spoke against foolishness nearly 60 years ago when he said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

Yet in the midst of “corrupt” men and women who disregard God, the “righteous” pray for deliverance and restoration. “God is with the righteous generation.” Salvation will “come out of Zion,” from God. Hope is fixed on God. The relentless, recurring theme of scripture is that salvation comes from God, comes as a gift to the people and causes the people to rejoice. Even in the midst of fools who disavow God in action if not in words, God will deliver the righteous. God delivered Christ from the foolishness of Pharisees, Sadducees, Romans, and others. God delivered him along with sinners and tax collectors, Samaritans and Gentiles, those who were lost or left out, and those who were dismissed by the fools as unworthy of God’s love and grace.

Our hope is grounded in God’s work, so that the pervasive presence of God will cause all foolishness to cease and divine and human joy to unite to the glory of God.

(1) Donald K. McKim, “Psalm 14 - Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 4, ed. David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 56.
(2) Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God  — and What That Says about Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Kindle Locations 462-468, 476-479.
(3) J. Clinton McCann Jr., “The Book of Psalms” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 4, ed. Leander Keck (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 729.
(4) J. David Pleins, The Psalms: Songs of Tragedy, Hope, and Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 173.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.